People ask me how I came to live in an orphanage in Brazil and I tell them: volunteering.

Our orphanage has an international volunteer program, where anyone selected can come and participate in our life here.  For their work volunteers receive room and board and a great experience.  Casa do Caminho receives a skill base that we otherwise would not be able to afford.  We've had volunteers from all over the world who have worked in anything from maintenance to theater production.  They all come here with different skills and ideas and they all keep our homes full of fresh energy.

I arrived here as a volunteer.  With no Portuguese, a backpack on my shoulders, and five months in front of me, I decided I was going to change these kids' lives.  I was going to save Brazil, one child at a time. 

Every once and a while there are volunteers that come here with catch phrases that reflect these attitudes: I want to save lives, I want to help, I want to make a difference, I want to act locally and think globally,  I want to live simply so that others can simply live.  Thankfully the Casa do Caminho experience exorcises many of these grand delusions.

You see, it's hard to fill the role of life saviour when you stand up to introduce yourself to a table full of curious faces and realize that you don't speak Portuguese.  It's testing to see if you really want to make a difference when that means jumping into the septic tank to clean it out for the third time this week.  It's hard to say you want to live simply when you've just gone a week without water and electricity and you've had to take care of twenty-five kids at the same time.  It's difficult to sense the importance of acting locally when you're being told by a five year old that they are going to get their cousin Fabrício to kill you.

Us more "fortunate" members of the human race have been blessed with a very unfortunate thing:  arrogance.  It is pure arrogance to think that because we come from a "developed" country, keeping in mind that "developed" countries define what is meant by "developed," that we can go anywhere in the word and change others' ways of life.  What would happen if a "developing" country tried this with us?  What would we say if the next time we had an economic crisis we received goats from Senegal with instructions to offer the goats to our local marabout and all will be well?  We would either laugh, or get insulted, but we certainly would not take their advice.

And this is what I have to thank Casa do Caminho for.  It has taught me to leave my goats at home.  I leave my Millenium Goals, and my community development thinking and all the rest of it back in the academic classrooms and government think tanks.  I come here with one thing.  The humility to learn.  Only then can I live with other people.  Only then can I enter in a relationship not of saviour to saved but of human to human.

Because when you think about it we are all rich and poor.  Developed and developing.  I may be developed in honesty but poor in patience and I may just meet a child who lies through his teeth.  This will definitely improve my patience as much as my honesty will hopefully decrease the child's lies.  We can exchange our developements.  We can learn from one another.

What would the world be like if governments started taking this approach?  What if the World Bank was changed to the World Batter Market, where we all traded our values to gain values from others?  Perhaps we would see more peace and real developement throughout the world, or perhaps not.  I can tell you one thing though, everyday I learn from others here in Casa do Caminho and it is  a beautiful experience.  I am being saved by Brazil, one child at a time.