I have some great stories about Brazil from people I know who used to live there or have gone there on vacation. I was even invited to tour the Brazalian embassy in Washington DC, as the legal administrator to Brazil’s Ambassador was married to a co-worker and we all became good friends while we lived in the DC area.

She would show us pictures of her very very very large family in Brazil and their house on a huge plantation. They were considered well off as they owned several hundred acres of prime farmland, yet they did not have indoor plumbing in the house and they did not have a telephone on the property – and this was a recent as 1990. If you wanted to make a phone call you had to travel to the nearest town – about 200 miles away – and stand in line to use the onepay  phone mounted on a pole in the center of town.

With the advent of cell phones and satellites, they do have both phones and TV in the house now, but they still have many primitive limitations and I find it amazing that with today’s technology so many people still live with the challenge of basics like getting clean water and protecting your children from attacks by wild animals like crocodiles and panthers.