It has been almost 3 years since I moved to Belgium. A small European country, three times smaller than Portugal, a bit larger than the state of Alagoas. Coming from Brazil, mainly from Amazonas where everything is big and far away, it takes some time to understand local distances.

Slightly more than 10 million inhabitants live in Belgium. To complete, they speak 3 languages: Dutch, French and German. Where I live, French is spoken. The conflict between the north (Dutch) and the south (French) is growing. The part that speaks German is very small to create a problem, they simply are there.

I watched a video on The Progress Project, about Nokia Data Gathering. The video shows an initiative very interesting in using mobile phones to collect information about dengue. But what caught my attention was remembering the state of poverty that most Brazilians live in. As I said, I now live in a small country. The climate is bad, natural resources hardly exist, today we live in peace, but before it was surrounded by enemies everywhere around. What went wrong with our rich poor country?

I remember living very well in Manaus, but in 2003, my son had an “accident” in a car. He was taken to a public hospital (João Lúcio) and then transferred to Unimed. One of the things that caught my attention is that the public hospital was better equipped than the Unimed itself :( Worse, it seemed that the boy was at fault for having had an accident and what the Unimed did us the favor of accepting him, but that’s water under the bridge… The important thing is to remember the state of basic needs in Brazil: education, security and health.

Arriving in Belgium, my daughter needed to be hospitalized. Hospitalized here, because I think in Brazil they would have sent us home. The important thing is that the doctor decided on hospitalization and thus she was hospitalized. Money came later, first health. Considering that this happened with a foreigner who had just arrived and did not speak French, nor had finished all the documents, it was a miracle. But the most serious case would be to come, our daughter Iris, was born with hare lip.

At that time we already had all the documents, but we were not expecting anything like this. She made all the pre-natal exams (detected the malformation in the fifth month of gestation), we had psychological accompaniment and even presented photos of babies with the same problem to younger brothers, already anticipating the rejection that is common in these cases. On the day of surgery to correct the lips (with 5 days of life!), I went to the Hospital and asked how much it would cost, because no one had mentioned anything about money yet. The receptionist explained calmly: I don’t know how to say before the surgery, you will receive the bill later in your residence. I didn’t know whether to be glad or worried about this. Bill sent after 3 months?!? Normal here, hard for a Brazilian to believe, right? I asked her:

- How much does it cost on average? I have to prepare myself to pay this.

Calmly she replied:

- I don’t know how to inform, as it varies with the team and what happens during surgery. Why is this important to you? If you can’t afford to do the surgery on the girl, are you going to leave her like that?

I fell silent. I was already preparing to sell my car… my calculation was as follows: if the plumber’s visit cost 65€, imagine the plastic surgery… I turned my focus back to Iris and my wife. At least the first surgery was guaranteed. Everything was done with excellent results.

The second surgery was performed 4 months later. This one was bigger and took much longer. But the results were also excellent. Today she is a near 2-year-old baby, still in treatment, but happy.

The purpose of relating this type of experience is to try to explain or understand the huge differences between our country and here. Never denigrate the image of Brazil or Brazilian doctors, but highlight where we need to arrive.

I remember discussions about the wealth of São Paulo or other states in Brazil and I face numbers from a giant country, but at the same time poor and dwarfed. Even São Paulo is not that rich. In terms of infrastructure, starting with the metro, it’s easy to see the differences between a large rich city (Paris) and a large poor city (São Paulo). With fewer than 30 million cars for almost 200 million inhabitants and a precarious transportation system, it’s clear that things aren’t as rosy as some try to convince themselves. Of course, reading this on the computer screen already separates you from the majority of Brazilians.

But as I said, I’ve been here for almost three years now, and it’s not about personal competence or the result of an incorruptible government (which doesn’t exist even here). What will be the great difference between these two countries?

My opinion, humble since I didn’t make a big study, just observations from daily life; is that the great difference lies in the role of the state to provide basic things for the formation of a healthy society. I’ve already talked about health, Brazil has made progress, but it’s still very backward: the poor suffer at the hands of public care, underfinanced and the rich are hostages of private health plans, which solve the most basic problems. This prevents improving life and caring for the poor because no one cares about the poor, they live in another world, right? Except during election time.

Education is another point. Excellent public universities, but primary and secondary schools are part-time. Not that there’s no improvement, but we have two parallel systems: the rich in private schools and the poor in public schools. Who studies in the group is the maid’s son, so no one cares :-(

Security isn’t even worth mentioning. Looking at the violence indices by neighborhood (I did it with Manaus’ ones in 2005) it’s clear that the most violent neighborhoods are the poorest. This gets worse in cities where the poor are truly excluded, living far away from everything. In rich neighborhoods, crimes also occur and these are the ones fought against and shown on TV!

It’s not about rich vs poor, but the existence of parallel realities within the same country. If the health system were really unique, if everyone had to wait for the same thing to have a medical consultation or study in the same schools, things would be different. We’d actually care about what happens in another world. We’d stop seeing the rich as thieves and the poor as pitiful… or was it the other way around?

All of this boils down to reducing social inequality. In Europe, the rich are very rich, but they’re also few. An engineer earns twice to three times more than a worker and depending on the country that difference is even smaller! Nothing like the difference between 10 or 20 times more between an engineer’s salary and the minimum wage. Then you don’t understand why inequality exists!

The rich live in gated communities with private security and shop at shopping centers… the problem of security is worse during their commute to work, but that’s tolerated. We create two worlds within the same country, an imaginary border between the rich and the poor.

What can be done? What’s worse, being rich in a country of the poor or being poor in a country of the rich? We have to choose and think about everyone’s well-being. Violence is solved with income and employment, but people need health, housing, and education to get there. I always thought programs like Bolsa Família were populist and created by politicians during election time, but now I believe it’s the way to achieve social balance during our society’s formation. Today the Bolsa Família value is still very low, we’d feel more results if the value were close to the minimum wage. It’s not as utopian as it sounds; it’s common in Europe. In Belgium, it’s called Family Allowance and it’s paid per child between 0 and 24 years old (if they continue studying). Although it doesn’t have the name Bolsa Família, it’s very similar. During back-to-school season, they deposit around €50 to help with expenses (here €150 for school supplies is a scandal and comes out on TV… I paid much more than that, around R$1,000 to R$1,500!). They receive €800 as a prize for the birth (€1,200 for the first child)… until they graduate, values between €95 and €200 per month/child are deposited into the wife’s account (for the father not to buy liquor!).

We have a complex of inferiority as a people. Things like Europeans are good (referring to whites born in Brazil) and everyone else is vagabonds, corrupt, or simply out of place are forms of racism that contaminate our society. We accept the stigma of the Brazilian way as something ingrained in our DNA. After all, here everything is equal. A European is someone with a European passport, and it doesn’t matter what their skin color is.

Knowing we’re not predestined to failure as a people and that neither blacks, Portuguese, nor Indians have anything to do with it… what’s missing? Taking responsibility for our actions and omissions and continuing life as agents of change, not as victims of history.

I really believe Brazil will be a great country in the near future, thinking about 2050. Education and growth rates are improving, slowly but continuously. It’s necessary to believe and identify what’s actually wrong. Initiatives like the Amada Association, responsible for spreading the cochlear implant in Manaus, show how to get there and what to do along the way. That’s when our society organizes itself to strengthen its foundations and not just party (nothing against the celebration, but imagine a massive education drive or math and science tents!). Happy September 7th, Independence Day of Brazil.