When I had boarded the plane to Brazil early in the summer of 2014, my stomach fluttered as I tried to hold in my excitement. While everyone else on the plane was buzzing with World Cup frenzy, I was traveling on my own to work with the “Proteja o Gol” (Protect the Goal), a joint program between UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS) and UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund). At age sixteen, I understood that there would be strong differences between my Korean culture and that of Brazil in addition to a relatively significant age gap between my co-workers and me, but I resolved that I would not let my background or age prevent me in aiding the program. I thought my days would be all suits and ties and learning about spreadsheets, but as I entered the building of Grupo Gay da Bahia with Marcelo and his company, the large poster featuring two very attractive men posing together caught my attention and indicated that my experience would be anything but ordinary. Everyone’s openness immediately made me feel at ease because it reminded me of the organizations I worked with in Korea. The posters, however, were much more risque and straight-to-the-point than the ones used in Korea. Following Luiz, who accompanied us from the UN office and seemed to know everyone in the Grupo Gay da Bahia office, up the spiral staircase, I suddenly found myself inside the “museum.” It was not a museum in the traditional sense. Tickets were not sold and exhibitions were not publicized. But the small chamber revealed the history of sexuality in Brazil. Its exhibition included sex paraphernalia and cultural sex symbols from all around Brazil. As he showed me the wooden figurines depicting male sexual interaction and how homosexuality and male sexual attraction within Brazil’s tribes, I was fascinated by how this subject, which was so taboo in my own country, demonstrated the cultural reception of homosexuality in the tribal communities of Brazil.

After giving me a tour of the organization’s “museum,” Luiz sadly told me that they were taking down the posters and the exhibition to move to their new office that would be more strategically located closer to the center of the city. Unfortunately, the exhibit would not be traveling with them because the paraphernalia were a bit unsavory for the organization’s new goal of representing themselves in a more “professional” manner. I shook my head, agreeing that it was so unfortunate the compromises that we have to make in order to get individuals to acknowledge our advocacy as “legitimate.” I told him about my personal experiences in Korea and how founding the Korea Federation for HIV/AIDS Prevention was one of the toughest things I had tackled. Luiz’s eyes sparkled and he quickly excused himself. For a few moments, I found myself alone in this space and recognized that I was in the middle of living history. I heard Luiz’s footsteps on the rickety staircase and when he reappeared, he was out of breath and his arms were full of rolls of posters and the exhibition items from the whole office. He began placing them into my arms, telling me that they were mine now. I did not know how to react at first, both because of the weight of the bundle and what this gesture meant to Luiz. I was not even sure whether I could accept the gift at all; after all, Marcelo was the president of the organization. At this point, I wondered who Luiz was. Unlike Marcelo who introduced himself as the president of the group, Luiz never introduced himself and he seemingly tagged along somewhere in the middle. When I asked him what he did, he told me that he was “just a guy who helps out.” It was not until I came back to Korea when I realized that Luiz was not only the founder of Grupo Gay da Bahia, but also one of the most influential gay rights activists in Brazil.

The UNDP set my next destination to Rio de Janeiro, a city that I had always wanted to visit. As I flew from Bahia to Rio, countless soccer fans passionate for their countries’ teams accompanied me on the plane. Before my UN training began, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was in the center of one of the greatest cities. My first objective was to see the Cristo Redentor statue. After the long bus ride up the mountain, I stood on the line which seemed to extend forever. After two hours, having barely moved, a particular snack cart caught my attention. It was nothing special—the only items it sold were Ruffles, Coke, and cans of Brazilian beer with two penguins drawn on them—but to me and other tired tourists, it seemed like a beacon of hope during the three hour wait. As I bought my bag of chips and a can of Coke, I asked them how much money they made. I was shocked when they answered 20000 real, which is equivalent to 5000 USD. The vendor was also kind enough to tell me that they had two more carts strategically placed in the middle and the end of the line so people did not have to leave the line to purchase the food. I could not believe the amount of money that the carts were making, for such profitability would naturally attract more sellers to the location, creating more competition. When I directed my inquiries and musings on this matter to the vendor, he smiled and pointed at his green cap which had the letters ‘PCC’ (Primeiro Comando da Capital, one of the largest criminal organizations in Brazil) etched onto it. The absence of other vendors was not because people did not know how profitable it is to sell potato chips at the Christ the Redeemer statue line, but rather because people valued their lives. I looked around, amazed by how my seemingly small interactions in Brazil had enlightened me to the nuances of individuals and how openly everything, from sexuality to organized crime, was recognized.

I passed the remaining hours talking to other tourists in front of or behind me in the line. The group in front of me drove all the way from Ecuador to Rio de Janeiro to support the Ecuadorian team at the World Cup. Behind me was a Japanese photographer who was looking forward to make a collage of the photos he took from all the Latin American countries he had visited. When I finally got up to the Cristo Redentor, there was some fog covering the statue. While most people who were there believed that they were out of luck, I thought fog made the statue even more beautiful by giving it more mystique. After visiting Cristo Redentor and taking a walk at the Copacabana Beach, I met the next organization that I would be working with—Igualdade.

Igualdade was a transsexual/transgender rights group in Rio led by the president Marcelly Malta Dos Santos. She is not only a fervent supporter of transgender and transsexual rights in Brazil, but also an advocate of other marginalized groups such as that of homosexual inmates in prison. The Igualdade office itself was something completely out of a movie; the whole room was decorated with vibrant colors and the walls were plastered with photos of Marcelly proudly posing with the members or leaders of different local activist groups. I was pleasantly surprised that her office also comprised of a small section similar to Grupo Gay da Bahia’s museum (Marcelly, however, preferred to call it “the Gallery”). Her gallery did not have the same traditional and handmade feel of the Grupo’s museum, but its bright, vivid colors and the sheer beauty of the costumes and props that Marcelly’s group used for its past festivals and carnivals were more than enough to captivate me. I talked to Marcelly and her coworkers about my experiences in Korea: my involvement in HIV/AIDS patients rights group, the history and works of Igualdade, and the Brazilian ONU’s Proteja o Gol were some of the topics we talked about. At one point, Marcelly’s peer broke into tears as she was recounting her family and friends’ initial reaction when she first announced her decision to transition. The meeting ended with Marcelly taking a photo of us (which she immediately posted on her wall) and kisses on each other’s cheeks.

After the meeting with Igualdade, I decided to spend the remaining time in Rio de Janeiro by visiting Rocinha, the largest favela (a shanty town or, in less eloquent words, a slum) in Brazil. Before I had actually visited a favela, my impression of a favela from movies was a small slum village on a mountain. As I went deeper into the inner favela through the cable car, I was able to see how the image in my head and Rocinha seen from the outside were just the tip of the iceberg. As I went past the first hill of Rocinha, vast hills and waves of houses folding on top of another. Although the houses were in poor condition, I found beauty in the favela that I was not able to find in Brasilia: the beauty of community working together, the beauty of survival. Stepping off the cable car, I found myself beside a police station. Seeing the police officers holding automatic weapons demonstrated that these officers were more like soldiers than the police officers I had known while living in Korea and Texas. The tension in the air surrounding the station made me feel suddenly unsafe, but that unease quickly faded as I entered the domestic area of the favela.

Countless kites danced in the air and music surrounding me at every angle. Smoke from barbeques arose from every other house; every single soul seemed to be occupied with something. Even though I was still within Rio de Janeiro, the favela’s vibe was distinct from the Copacabana. My eyes fell upon a small shop next to a large steel cage where teenagers were playing soccer. The shop only sold acai berry ice cream and, in an attempt to challenge my palette, I ordered one. The owner, curious about this Korean kid now raving over his acai berry ice cream wanted to know where I was from and what brought me to his shop. Through the course of our conversation, I discovered that he was a former professional soccer player in his region before he retired and opened his acai berry ice cream shop. Just as I was about to inquire how he became inspired to open an ice cream shop, a teenage girl no older than thirteen stepped into the shop. It wasn’t until she went to hug the shop owner that I noticed she was pregnant. The owner welcomed her with glee, congratulating her on her upcoming child.   I was surprised at the reaction of the owner perhaps from the cultural difference between how Korean society would react to such individual and the reception at Brazil. The girl picked up a stroller that the owner prepared for her and talked with us for a while before leaving. She talked about the next steps and plans for supporting her child; although pregnancy at such a young age would be frowned upon in Korea, I saw a degree of maturity and foresight in the girl that I had never seen from any girl of her age. In the midst of the conversation, a boy much younger than her spotted us and ran to us. He was the girl’s brother who supported the family by selling water to the tourists. The owner gave a big hug to the boy and gave him a free ice cream. After finishing the ice cream within seconds, the young boy went to the steel cage soccer field to talk to the older boys. The owner lamented that there are only two ways for the boys in the favela to become successful: soccer or drugs. As I saw his eagerness to persuade the youth of his neighborhood from falling onto the path of narcotrafficking, I felt a newfound respect for this man who taught me everything about Rocinha and its people.

Boarding the plane back to Brasilia, I fell asleep reading the many brochures I had picked up at the cable car station and the Cristo Redentor ticketing office. Even as I drifted into sleep among the clouds, I was surprised by how Brazil was not very different from Korea. Even excluding Brasilia, which was basically Seoul with Brazilians, I discovered that my immersion in places like Bahia and Rio gave me a sense of community and symbiosis that I also felt in Korea although I was considered an outsider. I could see how in both Korea and Brazil, there was a universal struggle to survive and thrive that could be found in the richest neighborhoods in Brasilia and the favela at Rocinha. Floating above Brazil, I was reminded of the universality of human life.