Gabriel is a 28-year-old Brazilian economist who has been lost since last Friday on Mount Mulanje, in the Central African country of Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. We need help to keep this issue in the media and ensure continued government support. We explain how at the end of the email.
Over the past year, Gabriel Buchmann has traveled to dozens of countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Always with limited resources, hitchhiking, and with the help of locals. His intention was to experience the world, its beauty, its pain, its mistakes, its poverty, and the injustices of humankind against nature and their fellow human beings.
Gabriel is a brilliant economist. He ranked first overall in the entrance exam at PUC-Rio. In college, he pursued two undergraduate degrees: Economics and International Relations. During his time in college, he received two scholarships to study in Europe, at the French Science-Po and then at the University of Madrid. He returned to Brazil to complete his thesis on agrarian reform. He then began his master's degree at PUC-Rio, defending his dissertation on the relationship between education, fertility, and the country's political system.
After completing his master's degree, he joined the FGV Center for Social Policies, where he worked on evaluating various government programs. This would be his preparation for his doctorate in Poverty Economics at the University of California.
Before his doctorate, Gabriel said he needed to understand poverty more closely, and this was one of the reasons for his trip to Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Not that he wasn't familiar with it. While still in college, he boarded a Brazilian airmail plane to the Amazon, where he climbed the Pico da Nevo and lived in the local poor communities. He abandoned his summers in Rio de Janeiro to spend months in cities in the Northeastern backlands, where he made a point of visiting the poorest and staying in the homes of the region's humble inhabitants. His interest was their lives, their problems.
For Gabriel, the road is to know and live. This is an excerpt from the email he wrote on June 1st. (see more on the blog: http://ajudegabrielbuchmann.blogspot.com/ )
"But the best of all is that here in Africa I'm being able to put into practice the trip I've always dreamed of... Today I'll be staying in a hotel for the second time since I set foot on the continent. Every other day I slept and ate at locals' homes, spending about $2-$3 a day, which allowed me to distribute my daily budget each day among the people who hosted me, fed me, etc. I'm very happy about this, being able to live great adventures and take a deeply immersive trip to the African continent, absolutely non-touristy, and in a totally sustainable way, transferring 80% of my expenses to poor Africans... And here with almost nothing you make a substantial difference in people's lives... This Congolese friend of mine, for example, with $12 I paid the monthly rent for his family's house, this boy with $40 I guaranteed a year of school for him in a really cool school..."
Malawi was the last country he would visit. On the 28th, he was (is!) scheduled to return to Rio. Gabriel has been missing for a week, but in 1994, a Malawian man spent three weeks alone on the mountain, being found on a trail after fainting from hunger. There have been other rescues. HELP US KEEP THE FLAME LIVE!
HOW TO HELP:
It's important to keep the topic in the media! To do this, use your imagination and feel free to contribute in any way you see fit. Here are some suggestions:
a) Forward this email to as many people as you can. This is a chain of goodwill.
b) Email journalists and bloggers. We need to publicize it in the press and online. In many newspapers, columnists include their email addresses at the end of their columns; ask them to comment on the topic!
c) Put the link on your Twitter, Facebook, MSN. Our Twitter is Ajudegabriel.
d) Comment on the news that appears in the media! It's easy to find on UOL, globo.com, and various portals.