SALVADOR DA BAHIA, Brazil -- When she sees our volunteer group approaching, Laira flashes us a mega-watt smile. A crocheted pink hat covers her head, bald from chemotherapy treatments, and her frail body takes up a fraction of the bulky wheelchair. Laira has bone cancer. She is 16 years old, and one month after I meet her, she is dead.

Laira and her family traveled from the interior of northeast Brazil to Salvador, a coastal city of nearly 3 million people that was established as the first capital of the country by the Portuguese settlers in 1549. Laira's family made the trip to the coast so she could receive treatment for her cancer at the Erik Loeff Pediatric Cancer Center at Santa Izabel Hospital. Her story is like that of countless children in northeast Brazil with countless types of cancer whose parents uproot their families, travel hundreds of miles, lose their jobs and spend hours each day in waiting rooms for the hope that treatment at Erik Loeff will make their sick child well.

My husband and I traveled to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, with Global Volunteers, an agency that organizes one- to three-week volunteer vacations in places all over the world and offers volunteer opportunities as varied as teaching conversational English in Ghana to building a playground in Costa Rica. When we meet Laira, we know we have made the right choice in how we opted to spend our two weeks of vacation this year.

Laira was just one of the many children in whose precious lives we were able to share a few hours. We also met Marcone, an 8-year old boy with leukemia, who loves Bob Esponge (or SpongeBob SquarePants); Jociele, a 17-year-old girl with lymphoma, who was in Salvador all alone having left her sick grandmother behind in the interior of the country to care for her younger sister; and Jefferson, a 16-year-old boy with osteo sarcoma who loves soccer and was awaiting amputation of his leg to stop the cancer from spreading.

We spent our mornings over the course of our two-week stay in the "toy library," or playroom, entertaining children who were waiting for follow-up appointments with their oncologists. In the afternoons, we sorted beans, sewed linens or played dominoes with children at one of several support houses — charitable housing set up for families who lived outside of Salvador whose children were receiving treatment at Erik Loeff.

Each day at 4 p.m. we said goodbye to the support house staff and families and walked a quarter of a mile through cobblestone alleys to our pousada (loosely translated as "bed and breakfast"). Our walk took us past a cathedral built by Portuguese colonials that stands next to a dirt soccer field with wiry boys chasing each other in the dusty heat. While our days were filled with children's laughter and sometimes the tears and anguish of their parents, our evenings and weekends in Salvador were full of music, spice and color.

Pousada da Mangueira, the pristine inn whose staff cheerfully hosted our volunteer group, is just a short walk from the city's Historic Center, known as Pelourinho. A prominent tourist attraction, Pelourinho was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site by the United Nations in 1985. Throughout Pelourinho, brightly colored tourist shops in converted colonial buildings line the narrow cobblestone alleys. These open into wide squares with sprawling cathedrals.

Salvador's primary attraction for the Portuguese when they colonized the region was sugar cane, and for three centuries Portuguese settlers imported African slaves into Brazil's northeast region to harvest the crop. Today, 80 percent of Salvador's population is Afro-Brazilian, and West African traditions are well preserved and apparent in all aspects of Salvadoran culture. Candomble, a West African religion, is practiced as openly as Catholicism, so much so that in one of the most important festivals leading up to Carnival, Catholics and Candomble worshippers gather at the steps of the Nosso Senhor do Bonfim cathedral to pray for miracles to their respective saints and deities.

Religious syncretism is just one of the many examples of seemingly conflicting ideals that blend seamlessly in Bahia. Another is artistic expression. When slaves from Angola were brought to Brazil they were not permitted to engage in any form of self-defense because of their masters' fear that slaves would hone and use combat skills to overpower their captors.

In trickster fashion, the Angolan slaves began to practice a form of combat disguised as dance and set to the beat of a drum and other specialized instruments, the clapping of hands and singing. This martial art came to be known as capoeira, which is now practiced all over the world (including in San Antonio).

In Pelourinho it is not uncommon to see a group of young men in a circle, clapping and chanting, while two capoeiristas in the center of the circle dodge, kick and somersault to the rhythm with perfect grace.

In the weeks leading up to Carnival, the whole of Salvador prepares for the weeklong celebration, which brings an additional million people from all over the country to the city to celebrate a more raw and rustic version of the street festival than the pomp and glitter that Rio de Janeiro's exclusive celebration offers.

Every day in Pelourinho, the drumming begins around three in the afternoon — musicians marching through the streets, sharpening their skills; dancers trailing behind them in a colorful procession. We could hear the drums from the patio of our pousada every evening as the sun set over the cathedrals in the Historic Center, their steeples glittering in the brilliance of the cloudless day's last light.

And if we listened closely, we could hear the crashing waves of the Atlantic breaking over the rocky shores on the coastline just a few miles away. We could hear families laughing over dinner and hymns lifting up through the many churches into the golden skies. We could hear the slap of the feet of capoeiristas on the pavement and the chanting of the women channeling orixas (deities of indigenous African religions) as they practiced their Candomble rituals. In the midst of this symphony, we slept each night, eager to greet the smiling faces of children in the morning - children whom we hoped we helped to forget they were ill, if just for an hour or two.

At the end of our two weeks, we said tearful goodbyes to the friends we made and to the city we grew to love in such a short time. We know that our spending time as volunteers in Salvador didn't change the world, but it changed us. We are privileged to have been able to spend just a part of our lives in the presence of the courage of the children we met, the vibrancy of the city, the beauty of the country. And the gratitude that we brought home with us is worth more than any souvenir from the stalls outside of an exclusive resort anywhere in the world will ever be.

By Jennifer Yeagley
Special to the Express-News
Original article on Express-News.net

Jennifer Yeagley is a former associate director for Child Advocates San Antonio and holds an M.A. from Texas State University. Her trip to Brazil was her second with Global Volunteers; in 2004, she visited Ghana and taught conversational English to elementary school students. She now lives in San Francisco, where she continues to work in nonprofit fundraising. Contact her at jygemini@yahoo.com