Day 18 - Thursday, June 4, 2009: Last Day in Brazil

by Joshua Sheets

Our last day in Rio, so bittersweet. On the one hand this trip has been the most amazing journey of my life, taking me through three distinct parts of Brazil: the Amazon, Vitoria, and finally Rio de Jainero. On the other hand, I miss the comforts of home which have been given so little thought throughout the past three weeks they seem like a world away.

As I awake around 10 a.m. I know that some of my classmates, including Professor cummings, are on their way to the top of a mountain to experience hang gliding. I decided to spend my last morning in Brazil on Ipanema beach, enjoying the sun and thinking about what all this trip and the people I have met along the way mean to me. Before I had too much time to enjoy the hot sun and the cool sand, it was time to get ready for our last mini-adventure: another boat ride.



But this wasn’t simply another boat ride. It was the last hoorah for the group of WVU law students that went on this incredible trip to Brazil. It seemed fitting that we started the trip with a week on the Amazon living on a riverboat, and ended it on another boat, feeling the closeness of friends and the majesty of Brazilian culture. When we got on the first boat in Manaus, I boarded with 26 other people that might as well have been strangers. However, when I boarded this boat, on our last day in Rio, I was joined by people that I can truly call friends. The friendships that we all created cannot be described by words. We spent two of the three weeks of the trip practically sleeping on top of each other, and looking back I wouldn’t have it any other way. Getting to know all of these amazing people, the conversations and experiences we shared with each other, is something that I will never forget.

After a rocky thirty minutes of riding in the boat, we dropped anchor in a calm part of the water. There was a small grill in the back and a man began grilling sausage, chicken wings, and beef. We sat around the outside of the boat and enjoyed the food and recollected about our amazing trip. We all talked about what the trip meant to us and the things that we would never forget. We took this chance to thank the professors for making the trip possible, and thanked Luiz from “Be a Local,” the group that organized most of the events we did in Rio. We ended the boat ride with a group performance of “Country Roads,” which seemed almost surreal sitting on a boat in Brazil, thousands of miles from home.

After the boat ride, we had our last seminar by the pool of the hostel. While the rest of our seminars were academic, discussing various things in comparison between Brazil and the United States, this seminar was about reflection. We took turns saying something about the trip that was important to us, something that we learned. To hear what everyone said sounded like what had been going through my own mind throughout this entire trip. People talked about how humbling the experience was, how lucky we are to have the opportunities that we have in America. People talked about how close they have become with one another. People talked about how even though we lived thousands of miles away, and these people had an entirely different culture, we all still have so much in common. Despite our differences, we are all people, just trying to get by and get the most out of life. It makes me think of all of the close friends that I made in Vitoria. We couldn’t get much more different, yet at the same time we couldn’t be more alike. So if I had to say one thing that I will never forget, or what this trip has shown me, is that we should cherish our interactions with one other. I know that I will always cherish the conversations that I had, whether they were with a classmate on a boat in the Amazon, with my host Raquel, staying up late talking about everything from politics to movies, or with a street vendor on the side of the road using half Portuguese, half hand signals. It is these interactions that make us all human, and what makes life and its journeys so incredible.