“Ireland was everything I was looking for, but I’m not sure if I knew that. I just knew that I wanted to see it.”
Barbara Vieira (27) moved to Dublin when she turned 19. She arrived not speaking much English and spent much of her first year here studying English in various language schools.
“Life in Dublin was very chaotic. I spent three years there and I had to move seven times. It was bad then and I’m sure it’s worse now.” She is now based in Sligo.
She sees similarities between Irish and Brazilian sense of humour. “In Brazil we communicate through laughter which goes well with the Irish culture because even though the humour is a bit dark it is also very funny. I think it goes well.”
After completing her language courses, Vieira worked as a care assistant.
“I choose to work as a care assistant because I wanted to be closer to the culture. I wanted to understand more and hear about the stories and improve my English as well. As a care assistant a lot of the time I would just talk and be present, so I would ask the questions that I was always curious about. And they would tell me stories; sometimes I didn’t even need to ask anything.”
Vieira worked as a care assistant for three years in Dublin; it was a job that had a profound impact on her.
“I don’t think I can fully measure how much I learned from working with those people. A lot of it stays with me. I’m 27 and I feel very mature for my age. I think that I observed a lot and listened.”
At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic she and her then boyfriend went to Brazil where they got married. They then moved in with his parents in Co Sligo, before moving to Sligo town. The pair are now separated.
Barbara Vieira: ‘I love writing. In Brazil it’s very hard to take art seriously.’ Photograph: Bryan O’Brien
While she found life in Dublin chaotic, Vieira feels at home in the Irish countryside. “Ireland is so green and feels so connected to nature and healing. Brazil is very noisy – there’s a lot happening – and in Ireland you find little villages that aren’t stuck in time but are frozen in a very sweet way. The culture is alive, with all the different accents and things like that.”
Today she works in an art studio at a community centre two days a week.
“My job is pretty much to make coffee and tea. Everything there is complementary and it’s open for refugees, people with special needs and elderly people. It’s a place where they can create, paint, sing, whatever they want.”
The other days she still works as a care assistant, doing house calls across Sligo.
“The job requires a lot of energy and I’m a very sympathetic person so it’s a dangerous line. It’s hard not to get attached to people. I have to find my own boundaries of how many calls I can do and things like that.”
Vieira plans to stay in Ireland for the foreseeable future. “I think Ireland truly understands me better than Brazil. When I learn a different language I start from the beginning; my personality is more who I actually want to be. Ireland gave me the space to find out who I want to be and who I am.”
Her dream is to become a writer; she has found writing healing, she says, and she has recently had her first short story accepted for publication.
“I love writing. In Brazil it’s very hard to take art seriously because you were too worried about just surviving to even think that you could create something one day and get money from it. I didn’t take writing seriously until very recently because it’s one in a million. But I think I have a shot.”
She feels that she was called to move to Ireland.
A large part of this calling had come from a Celtic energy that Vieira says she would get in contact with when she drank ayahuasca in her native Brazil. Ayahuasca is a psychoactive beverage that has been used by indigenous people in South American cultures for at least two millenniums, for a variety of medical, spiritual and social purposes. Usually, ayahuasca is drunk in group rituals and ceremonies guided by shamans. Vieira started to attend such ceremonies with her family when she was 16.
“My family was always very different,” she says.
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Her mother is graphologist, someone who analyses people’s handwriting to determine the writer’s personality traits, while her father is an accountant who also works as a therapist.
“My mum said society is a little weird, let’s embrace the real world, and we went to live on a holistic farm.”
Her mother had always been a big advocate of spirituality and holistic medicine and for a time her family lived on a commune with other families and grew their own food, before settling in Belo Horizonte, a city 450km north of Rio de Janeiro.
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past 10 years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
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