Heading Home

 January 21, 2026

We are in Brasília now, recovering from a long day of flying and a long night of eating huge amounts of meat. We went to a churrascararia that specializes in grilled meats and poultry (they have a huge salad bar, a sushi bar, and lots of other sides too, but who cares?) They have meat on huge skewers that they carve right onto your plate. You even have little tongs of your own that you use to hold it while they cut it. There are no limits, so you just have to pace yourself and make good choices. And even with those two ideas in mind, you are going to overeat. We did. No regrets. 

We had some time to talk at the end of dinner about our thoughts on leaving Anã. We all expressed our deep love of the community and the people we met there, along with our joy about the projects in which we participated. But then we started talking even more about what made that community so happy and why we were so drawn to it so quickly. We talked about the things that make life meaningful and how sometimes we forget about meaning or get distracted by trivialities or get burdened by things that are out of our control. We speculated about why our communities at home don't feel as close as the one we experienced in Anã and we thought about ways that we might try to shift things, even if only in small ways. We rethought what it means to be "rich" and "poor." And we tried to think about whether our aspirations for our own lives might be changing. We will have to see how things play out once we return. 

Speaking of our return, please SAVE THE DATE for our public presentation of some of our final documentary projects from this class: We hope you will join us on Thursday, February 19, at 7pm in Galileo Hall, Room 201 (we think?), on the Saint Mary's College campus. We will also try to livestream the event, though we don't have that part figured out yet. 

We hope to see many of you there and we hope you bring friends, family, neighbors, and anyone else you can think of that might like to see what our experience in the Brazilian Amazon has been like. Of course, we hope to see many of you much sooner than the presentation date. Don't be surprised if we seem a little different. For one thing, our laundry STINKS worse than it has ever stunk. Sorry. For another thing, we have a tendency to try to think in elementary Portuguese. We will try not to be obnoxious about transitioning back to full time English. Most of us are also a little bit speckled from mosquito bites. We hope that those marks will fade soon. What we are sure won't fade is our deep connection to the place that has been our home for these few weeks and our sincere hope that the progress we've witnessed there is only the beginning of a continuing upward trajectory for those who live there. 

Many thanks to all of you for supporting this endeavor, following our blog, and keeping us in your hearts throughout our time in the Amazon. We look forward to seeing you on February 19!