‘No matter what, never stop walking,’ her mother had told Brazilian born Christiana Mara Coelho. Most of us probably heard our mothers express similar encouragements when faced with difficulties while growing up: ‘never give up’, ‘keep your head up high’, ‘don’t doubt yourself’, etc...
These three words by her loving mother, however, become her lifeline and the mantra that keeps Christina going as she fights for survival on the back streets of Sao Paulo, fighting – sometimes even to death – for a slice of bread retrieved from a dustbin; ending up destitute, losing her best friend, sleeping alone on the streets; and finding herself in an orphanage – forever separated from her mother. Those words keep her going as she is adopted by a Swedish couple and whisked away to a life of opulence on the other side of the world.
It’s a hair-raising memoire recalling, in breath-taking detail, her first seven years in the early eighties living in extreme poverty in Brazil. She and her mother live in the caves around Diamantha where they are later forced to leave, resulting in Christina becoming just another street urchin sleeping under the highways in the poorest parts of the city – sometimes seeing her mother, sometimes not.
Thinking she is placing her children in a school, her mother leaves Christina and her 18-month-old son in an orphanage of more than 200 children. Without explanation, she is forbidden to see her children again. Christina and her little brother are then adopted by a childless couple from Sweden without an opportunity to say goodbye to their birth mother.
Later, as a thirty-something, Christina decides to go back to Brazil in order to revisit her early childhood and to search for her birth mother and her family. It’s a rollercoaster ride, but at the same time a wonderful experience that helps in many ways to give her some perspective, affords her some form of peace and acceptance, and to help her along her path of healing.
Christina writes in her afterword that, while she is eternally grateful for the opportunity of a better life and for being adopted by loving parents, she continues to deal with a lot of anger about how it was done. By the lack of communication to help her understand why she was separated from her mother, and of what exactly adoption into a foreign culture entailed. As a grown woman, she continues to deal with the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder, and still struggles to find her identity between the extremities of the two cultural realities in which she was forced to exist.
Today, Christina oversees the work of the Coelho Growth Foundation for children at risk. Coelho Growth is a non-profit charity targeting the plight of more than seven million street children in Brazil. The organisation also works directly with the orphanage in which Christina and her brother were sheltered before they were adopted.
It’s a riveting read, eloquently written, and one I would recommend to anyone.
