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

by Christina Rickardsson

The slum is like an independent state within the state, kind of like the Vatican but with God missing. It’s downright ironic, I sometimes think, because the slums are where people’s faith in God is the greatest. There aren’t very many people inside the slum who care what happens outside the slum, just like how most people who live outside the slum don’t care that the slum exists. It’s hard for some people who were born in the slum to advance and get anywhere in life. “Advancement” in the slum is becoming a gang leader, which often results in a short life.

I remember getting chills every time I came up against gang members or their leaders. It was pretty much only guys who joined the gangs. Sometimes you saw a girl who was in one, and everyone knew why she was there. Girl gang members shared more or less the same background: no parents, no family, no money, and nowhere to live. It was incredibly hard to protect yourself against boys and men if you didn’t have an adult or a gang looking out for you. Being raped, over and over, by men who didn’t care what kind of violence they used was significantly more dangerous than letting some of the guys in the gang have sex with you. Or being one of their girlfriends. This way, the girls were mostly “protected” from the rest of the street.

I’m tired. Outside the airport, the sun is just rising over São Paulo. I look around. I watch the people standing in the line and hear various languages. I get out my Swedish passport and look at my picture. After what feels like an eternity, it’s my turn to step forward to one of the glass booths and show my passport to a dumpy woman who seems extremely bored. I smile and say hi in Portuguese, “Oi,” as I hand her my passport. She looks at the passport and then looks at me, at the passport again and back at me. She seems a little surprised and asks me something in Portuguese that I don’t understand. I respond, “Eu não falo português, fala inglês?” She shakes her head, no, she doesn’t speak English, and stamps my passport. Finally, I’m let into the country.

I bump into an elderly woman and want to apologize, but I don’t know how to say that in Portuguese, so I say it in English. Already, I’m frustrated that I can’t speak the language and embarrassed that I haven’t taken the time to learn it.

I recognize the plants, palms, smells, and the language. The sun is warm in a familiar way, and even though I don’t understand what the people around me are saying, the language is familiar.

It’s strange how you can be away from a place for so long and yet so much can still feel familiar when you return.

“You’re Brazilian, and you haven’t forgotten your roots, and now you’re here to see us. You haven’t forgotten us, your people.” I admit that she’s right. This is a part of me, and I haven’t forgotten or tried to deny this part of my life. I’ve just been in a different part of the world.

Death has the ability to hang over you, enough so that you feel alive but wish to be gone. It reminds us at regular intervals that life is not to be taken for granted. Life reminds us that we don’t always get what we want. Life reminds us that death is out there.

One thing we all have in common is that we don’t know what life has in store for us. From the moment we’re born, we’re part of what I call the lottery of life.

I stop by one of them and see that they’ve drawn the Swedish flag and the Brazilian flag, with the words “Family United” between them. That makes my eyes well up again. It means so much to me that they drew the Swedish flag there and that they see our meeting as uniting. When I look at the two different flags, I see myself: my countries, my different families, my different friends, and my different lives.

I mean, my life is here, in Sweden, at least right now. But the most positive of all is that I feel like I’ve already been changed by my trip and by meeting people and experiencing Brazil. I’m filled with the sensation of having two homes, two worlds—and the two people who are both me can maybe finally be interwoven into one. I don’t believe that life is about finding yourself. For me, life is about creating your own reality. And I ask myself this question: Who do I want to be?

I’m so happy and proud to be both Brazilian and Swedish and to represent both cultures.