Of hugs, happiness and human connections

So the Brazilians are gone.

After 12 days with us, Paula and Luiz flew back to Washington, D.C., today with their fellow Youth Ambassadors. There they'll meet up with other young Brazilians who spent time in Seattle, Tulsa, Charlotte, and Bozeman, Montana. The full group of 45 will fly back to Sao Paulo on Saturday.

We saw them off with a potluck dinner -- such an American event! -- at the home of the Fortkamps, one of the other host families, on Sunday night. There was plenty of food, a lot of laughter, and more than a few tears.

The tears you can understand from the Brazilians. They're a very open, emotional people to begin with, and when you combine that particular national trait with the fact that they're 15- through 18-year-olds, the waterworks were to be expected.

This was, after all, an intense experience for each of them. They were visiting the United States for the very first time, staying with families whom they had never met, speaking a foreign language and trying something new every day for almost two solid weeks. Seen through teenage eyes, the words "life changing" and "profound" come readily to mind.

But there were also a lot of red-eyed suburban Americans gathered in that basement, which is maybe a bit more surprising. As the Brazilians stood at the front of the room and one at a time expressed their gratitude to the families that had taken them in, there was a lot of sniffling among the natives.

Why is that? It's not like this was a true exchange program in which the students spent an entire school year here. They were here for 12 days. People get less attached to their own relatives in that time.

Well, I was one of those who were teary-eyed as the young Brazilians spoke, especially a very emotional Paula and the normally boisterous but clearly speaking-from-the-heart Luiz. And I have a theory as to why that was.

It stems from the very human need for connection, and specifically connection to people worth connecting to. These Brazilian teens were the cream of the crop. They were 45 selected from a group of more than 7,500 applicants. Each was picked for their character, community service, and (I'm guessing here) the intangible quality that just tells you someone is headed for great things. The "it" factor, if you want to give it a name.

I know I'm better off for having gotten to know Paula and Luiz. God puts certain people onto the earth, I'm convinced, so that the rest of us can benefit from interacting with them. Paula and Luiz are two of those people.

Does that sound melodramatic? Does it seem strange for a 42-year-old man to be gushing over a pair of Brazilian teenagers with whom he didn't even spend half a month? Yeah, probably. But to say that is to miss the value of human connection. And especially those connections that occur when people from different cultures and different circumstances are thrown together unexpectedly.

The thing is, I've lived my entire life in the same city. I've done this by choice, of course, but there are obvious limitations to spending four decades in the same place: Your opinions and attitudes can become static, and you in turn become fairly set in your ways.

When you're forced to confront the "other" -- different places, different people, different perspectives -- you benefit in unforseen ways. This is especially true for Americans, a people conditioned from birth to believe that we are the best and that everyone else wants to be like us.

I've mentioned before that the Brazilians are huggers. They don't always get the concept of "personal space," and that's a good thing. I'm not a natural hugger, but even when I met the other Brazilian kids besides Paula and Luiz, they leaned in for a "hello" hug. It was wonderful way to connect, and it forced me to drop my puritan inhibitions on physical contact between strangers.

Because that's just it: they weren't "strangers." Or at least they didn't think of themselves as being strangers to me. I was a host parent, and therefore I was someone who, to them, was worth meeting. And people worth meeting get hugs from Brazilians. That's just the way it is, and I think it's wonderful. It changed my view of them and their country immediately, and for the better.

There were a lot of examples of these moments when the Brazilian kids caught me off guard. They constantly made me think, made me laugh and -- on Sunday night in that basement -- made me cry a little. And now that they're gone, I'm forced to rely on myself a little more to create those moments where I suddenly realize, "Hey, I think I just learned something." As I get older, I find those moments are the most worth living for, and therefore I chase them all the harder.

I guess it's difficult to convey all this in a rambling blog post, but I have a feeling you know exactly what I'm talking about and have experienced it yourself. They say that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. I say life is what happens when you're standing in your living room watching your kids line dance with two crazy Brazilians.

I guess that's sort of the same thing.