Friends For The Journey

CIDEC is devoted to keeping thousands of documents and oral histories of the postwar Catholic student movements preserved and organized for researchers. I spent 7 or 8 hours each day at CIDEC listening to cassette recordings of interviews with former Catholic student activists (in Portuguese). I gathered thirty pages of notes to use for my dissertation and I hope to apply for another academic research grant to return next year for a more extended time.

I also did a bit of research in Rio de Janeiro and a lot of social networking with colleagues and other academics who work in my field. A Brazilian sociologist at the Catholic University in Rio graciously agreed to assist me in my research. I renewed my acquaintance with Luis Alberto Gomez de Souza (who was the international director of the Young Catholic Students organization in Paris from 1958 to 1960) and his lovely wife Lucia Ribeiro who is working with the University of Florida in a research project studying Brazilian immigration to the United States. They were key people in the 1960s in the students movement and eye witnesses to a fascinating and difficult period of the history of the Brazilian church. I hope to return to interview them next year.

In addition to deepening friendships with many of my friends from FIU, and former acquaintances from my two stints in Portuguese Language school in Copacabana, I also met a number of wonder new friends from the University of Miami, University of Florida, University of Texas, Austin and the University of Arizona, as we enjoyed Brazilian culture and spent an evening listening to classic Bossa Nova music just across the street from where the famous song, The Girl from Ipanama (A Garota de Ipanema) was written.

In my humble opinion, the highest purpose of life is friendship. As the writer in Moulin Rouge said, the greatest thing we will ever learn in life is to love and be loved. Jesus said, I no longer call you servants but friends. Everything else will pass away, but if one believes in the immortality of the soul, the only thing that will last forever is friendships.

I am deeply grateful for all my delightful friends, new and old. It does not get any better than that!