Klaus Hart Brasilientexte

Here in France there is general consternation regarding the death of 228 passengers and crew members on board Air France flight 447 which occurred on Monday June 1st. The plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean on the Rio de Janeiro “ Paris route.

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President Sarkozy interrupted his long weekend (Monday was a religious holiday in France) and, together with three ministers, visited Charles de Gaulle airport to console victims™ families. In Brazil President Lula asked his vice president, Jose Alencar, to do likewise.

A short time ago I lost an acquaintance, Roger Wright, in a plane crash in the Troncoso area in southern Bahia. 13 people died with him, amongst them his wife, his son and daughter from his two marriages, their spouses and his grandchildren (his first wife had also died in a plane crash). Three generations of one family tragically had their lives cut short.

Life is a game of survival. Amongst millions of sperm in search of the warmth of an egg, only one survives. This one is you; it is I, and all the billions of inhabitants on this planet. We all won the biological lottery. None of us chose the family or the social class into which we were born therefore it should not mean a privilege for those of us who are free of poverty and misery, but we do have a social debt.

The frail miracle of existence demands two basic conditions which are becoming more precarious: oxygen and nutrition. Now we all know that due to ambitious profit and the lack of an awareness of sustainability, we contaminate the air we breathe.

In Sao Paulo where I live, children and the elderly particularly suffer from heavy pollution. On the other hand the high index of development in the most industrialised city in the country demands an equally high price from its city dwellers who are obliged to absorb pollutants which damage their eyes, contaminate their lungs and provoke allergies. The six million vehicles which circulate in the city exhale carbonic gas which turns the air practically unbreathable.   Â

In order to assure food in both quantity and quality for one™s organism there must be employment and income capable of guaranteeing a dignified and healthy life to every family. In Brazil we are a long way off from the Cuban level where all 11 million inhabitants have the right to a basic food allowance as well as free access to education and health.

Nowadays, with the neo liberal capitalist crisis, we see unemployment menacing the survival of millions. As nobody wants to go hungry and homeless, it is inevitable that urban violence will increase.

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We all know that human beings are faced with insurmountable limitations: faulty manufacturing and ”best by date. What the Bible calls original sin. We will die, even if we have many long years of life. We just don™t know how or when. Therefore we try to give meaning to our short existence through religion, art, our profession and, above all through love (of the family).

Some mistakenly search for what we all search for “ happiness “ through the possession of finite goods. They spend their lives acquiring and preserving superfluous goods which could be useful to those who were unjustly deprived of access to a dignified life “ the poor. Others make their journey through life acquiring eternal goods such as friendship, solidarity and sharing.

We all know that happiness does not consist in the accumulation of pleasure, such as demonstrated by propaganda within the consumer society. But how difficult it is to practice the exercise of virtue, ethical rigour or interior eco biology which will free us from accumulation, from an acid tongue, from envy or resentment and fill our heart and mind with spirituality, altruism, wisdom and hunger for justice!

As Jesus said about our death we know not the day or the hour. Or the how. We certainly will not have Francisca™s luck, the heroine in Jorge Onelio Cardoso™s (1914-1986) story ”Francisca and death.

Death, mindful of its duties, went early looking for Francisca in the region where she lived. It sought her at home, in the fields, in her neighbour™s house. Wherever it went, Francisca had just been, always dedicated to caring for others. Seeing the hours go by and the last train about to leave, death gave up trying to take Francisca with it.

Soon after an old acquaintance rode by on his horse and saw Francisca tending the school garden. He greeted her saying ”So, Francisca, are you never going to die? ”Never she responded ”there is always something that needs to be done.

*Frei Betto is a writer and author of ”A arte de semear estrelas (The Art of Sowing Stars) (Rocco). He is a Brazilian Dominican with an international reputation as a liberation theologian. Within Brazil he is equally famous as a writer, with over 52 books to his name.  In 1985 he won Brazil™s most important literary prize, the Jabuti, and was elected Intellectual of the Year by the members of the Brazilian Writers™ Union. Frei Betto has always been active in Brazilian social movements, and has been an adviser to the Church™s ministry to workers in Sáo Paulo™s industrial belt, to the Church base communities, and to the Landless Rural Workers™ Movement (MST). In 2003-2004, he was Special Adviser to President Lula and Coordinator of Social Mobilisation for the Brazilian Government™s Zero Hunger programme. 

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