Spending time in Coque, a poor and violent community in Recife in North-Eastern Brazil was defining experience for us. We had taken for granted all the opportunities we had in life. Born in Atlanta and raised on Long Island, New York, provided us a context that was quite different what we experienced in the summer of 2019 at Coque, Brazil. We grew up loving music. We played piano, the upright bass, saxophone and other instruments. We learned to be kind, care about our neighbors, the less fortunate, but did not really understood what it all truly meant. To borrow from Sir Churchill again who attended Harrow School over a 125 years ago, which I (Neil) do now "With privilege comes a great responsibility to share and give back". Our goal now is to share our experiences with our friends and everyone else. We feel that it will help us all be a better person, a more empathetic global citizen especially in these times when we seem to be growing further and further apart.
Alongside the Ritzy beach communities and shopping Malls that rivaled the best I have ever visited, Recife has some the most impoverished communities. I got to spend a whole week with over a hundred children aged between 10 and 18 years from Coque, the poorest and most violent of such cities. We had a great time. We played games, I taught them English, I learnt Portuguese. But more importantly, I experienced their circumstances, which helped me to appreciate my own. Born in “favelas” with little or no resources, where sewage often flows along sidewalks, drugs and guns are commonplace, parents who are drug addicts or in the drug trade or in many instances in prisons, these children inhabit a universe distant from ours. I and my friends included, embody a belief system whereby we take our circumstances for granted and feel indebted to none. Often we are even given to the belief that the log cabin we were born in; we built with our own hands. But as a wise man once said "that just ain’t so".
None of what we take for granted, running hot water, a warm bed, good food, sanitation, bug free environment, personal space, vacations, travel, books, experiences, could be taken for for granted by these children. Even a simple thing as a Hershey’s was novelty that they relished. They were also naturally happy and joyful, in circumstances that would make any one of us inherently miserable.
The improbability of my circumstances dawned on me. Being born in America, which Warren Buffet has called the singularly most important factor in his success, to parents who taught me the values that I imbued, for Harrow (Neil) to have accepted and provided me the formative education that it has are uncommon circumstances. In course of our time spent I came out of my cocoon to appreciate how we co-inhabit this earth with hundreds and thousands of others like me and also unlike me in many ways.
