By Paul Archer
"I just didn't have any money. I was just trying to survive in Brazil. I had a little kid, I was divorced. I was just trying to make good."
When people meet Andrew now, they meet the finished version: fluent Portuguese, a business he built himself, two decades in São Paulo, a life most would envy. What they don't see is the decade before it — the years he couldn't afford a flight home, couldn't explain a problem to a mechanic, and wasn't at all sure he'd made the right call.
He came to Brazil at twenty-one. There was no plan. He'd met a Brazilian woman while living in the United States and followed her south, and within a remarkably short stretch he was married, then a father, then — when the marriage ended — alone in a country whose language he barely spoke. He stayed anyway. He's tried to leave twice since. Both times he was back within months.
We sat down to talk about it.