Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

by Christina Rickardsson

Missing someone doesn’t have anything to do with how long it’s been since you last saw each other, or the number of hours that have passed since you last spoke. It’s about specific moments when you wish they were there by your side.

Because there’s a big difference between choosing not to take care of your children and living in a society that doesn’t give its citizens resources so you can take care of them.

My home is where I’m happy, where I feel safe, where my friends and family are. My home is where I work and where I feel at home.

That was what we did every day. And just about every day, people called us rats. Every time they did, we tuned them out and pretended not to hear. I don’t know what was worse, being spit on and pushed away, or being totally ignored. If someone spit on us, at least they saw us, and that was confirmation of our existence. Being totally ignored was like not existing at all, as if you weren’t a human among other humans.

Instead of seeing what I’ve lost, what was taken away from me, and all the injustices that were done to me, I can see the power of what I’ve received. And I’ve created it myself. Throughout my life, I have made the choice to never see myself as a victim.

Every time someone used a racial slur, it hurt. It was the intention behind the word that hurt. What they were saying was that I wasn’t one of them, not worth as much. And that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be one of them, because I was always going to have brown skin and black eyes and nappy hair.

They are so different, I think. And yet it feels like joy and happiness are appreciated more here. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t we be grateful and happy in Sweden about how well we’re doing? Or are we like the corrupt Brazilian politicians who only want more and more and forget or lose the ability to appreciate what we have?

These people have a lot of love and warmth. They have so little, but what little they have, they offer to share, and they do so with happiness and pride. I feel proud to have my roots here, despite all the injustices, despite all the horrors, in this warmhearted country, among these warmhearted people.

It’s not where you come from; it’s where you belong that matters. And it’s OK to feel like you belong in more than one place.

Sometimes you meet people you only get to be with for a short time. What’s difficult is accepting that and moving on. But sometimes that may be what you have to do. Accept that a relationship is only a loan, and when it’s not there anymore, you should rejoice at having had the honor of having it at all, of receiving so much without needing to give. Maybe it didn’t end the way you wanted or expected. Maybe it ended before it really had a chance to begin, or ended without your having a chance to say goodbye.

This is one of the things I’ve had a hard time understanding and getting used to growing up. We live in such different realities. If you’ve always lived in a safe and secure world, with a house and money, a mother and a father, children and a husband, a social safety net, access to healthcare, without war—the list can get quite long—then it seems to be so hard to understand and see things from the perspective of someone living in a much harder and more dangerous reality.

What does society expect abused, vulnerable children to grow up and become? Well-adjusted, contributing citizens? These children are growing up with their souls crushed. They will act out based on what they’ve learned. Why should they make any effort when no one has ever made any effort for them? And yet they give so much of themselves. Trust must be earned, and that seems to be something that Brazil has not understood. Rather than building trust, the country has built walls to separate the rich from the poor.

There are times when I think back, when I relive experiences and recall things that happened, that I’m ashamed to be a human being. How can people allow such things to go on? I feel angry at a country and at a people who just shut their eyes to the suffering around them. But most of all, I’m angry and sad that they choose not to see the value in all human beings, in all the beauty that is there.

Today, I worry about the changes I see in many of the world’s more fortunate countries. In the wonderful country I live in, Sweden, which I have come to love as my own, refugees stream in, and you see panhandlers and street children more and more often. At the same time, people and politicians close their eyes to the new problems that have arisen. They don’t have the experience to handle the changes that our country, like so many others, faces. Many of us want to help but don’t know how. We might open our borders to these poor people who are fleeing war and misery, but there is no plan of action for how to integrate them into our society. And somewhere along the way, their humanity is forgotten. I sincerely hope that Sweden and the rest of the world find a humane path forward through these crises. We must understand that it does no good to wish for how things were—the past is the past.

It is so profoundly upsetting to me to think of all these refugee children arriving alone, children who have fled from war and extreme poverty in the hope of a new chance in life. It hurts to know that they, who are already carrying so much—the loss of those who were near and dear to them, violence they’ve had to witness or endure, the loss of faith in humanity and life—are coming to a country that will not wholeheartedly include them in its society. I can honestly tell you that I don’t think I could have handled coming to a new country and not feeling welcome. I wish we could all stop for a second and ask ourselves: What are we doing for these children and these people? What can we do? How would we want to be treated if this happened to us? What difficulties do you encounter when you come to a new land? Let us join together and see the human being, see ourselves in these human beings who need help.

The two worlds are so different, living on the streets in Brazil and not knowing whether I’d have food to eat that day, and then coming to a country where people throw food away on a daily basis. There’s no logic to it. It feels like I’m reading about a former life, and if it weren’t for my having such strong emotions and dreams about what’s happened, if it weren’t for it having hurt so much and left such deep marks, I would believe I was reading someone else’s story.