This interesting story was written by one of our users from Brazil, a nice read for the weekend!
Vancouver, 2:15 am: my sister is probably still sleeping, she won’t have answered yet.
Maringá (Brazil), 6:15 am: my mother will soon be awake. I hope she will soon read about the good news!
Tokyo, 6:15 pm: my brother is still at work…
Hamburg, (Germany) 11:15 am: I’m hungry!
This how Valéria describes her daily routine: always counting hours to find out what time it is here and there – did my mother have a chance to read the mail yet? Has my brother’s daughter been born already, so I can see the pictures online? Did my sister get the job? So many questions…
A family that was likely to drift apart has managed to overcome the distance and the time difference, and is still very close, against all odds. It all started when Valéria, the oldest daughter, decided to move to Germany to study, and stayed instead of moving back to Maringá, the Porto family’s home. Two years later, Fernando, the youngest son, emigrated to Japan to work at Sony as an engineer. Finally Alessandra, the second child, also left Maringá after having received a scholarship for her doctoral dissertation.
The parents, Amanda and Felizardo Porto, stayed behind in Brazil. Thy attended several classes about working on a PC and using the internet in order to stay in contact with their children. “When I left, calling Germany from Brazil or vice versa was very expensive. We discovered emailing, which was quite new back then, since the normal mail was just too slow. We only called each other on birthdays or Christmas”, recalls Valéria. Her mother, who is 65, still remembers how difficult working with a PC was at first: “I always did everything wrong, and sometimes our PC crashed, I then had to ask my neighbour for help. Roger, one of our friends, taught me how to use the PC properly then, and everything got better.”
Many Brazilian families experience globalization in a similar way. A lot of Brazilians of Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, German, or Spanish heritage try obtaining dual citizenship in order to be allowed to work in the European Union, and thousands try reaching the United States to get a chance of living the American Dream. Their families thus have no choice but to acquire new means of staying in touch.
The Porto family exchanged emails first, and then discovered social networks like Orkut, Facebook, and Xing. When they discovered the genealogy network meusparentes.com.br, they had found the ideal platform for their family. Felizardo Porto, 68 years old, retired, explains: “I can do everything in one place here: send messages to everybody, upload pictures and look at those others uploaded, receive birthday reminders, and even write a blog!”.
Besides the comfortable all-in-one way of communicating, the platform’s privacy is importat to the family. Only those family members that are invited to the common family tree can access it. Furthermore, the whole family can work at their common tree to expand it. Amanda Porto agrees: “I did not care about computers or the internet, but having everybody work on our tree really makes it exciting. I can pass on my knowledge about our family’s past, and that is very important to me.”
