Ten other South American countries lie contiguous to Brazil, but in Recife and Olinda, where the nearest border is thousands of kilometers away and few foreign tourists venture, the rest of the world feels small. Poor people would ask me what it was like lá, or there, for many had not heard of the United States.

The topography and climate of Brazil range from the dense and humid rainforests of the Amazon to the harsh, arid backlands of the Northeast known as the sertão, from the temperate rolling hills and fertile plateaus in parts of the South and Southeast to the vast floodplain in Mato Grosso do Sul known as the Pantanal. The socioeconomic conditions are no less varied. Brazil is sometimes described as Bel-India, since it combines in one country the wealth of Belgium and oppressive poverty of subcontinental proportions.

Recife is the capital of Pernambuco, the state lying at the heart of the poorest region of Brazil. Pernambuco in combination with all or parts of eight other states constitutes Brazil's Nordeste, or Northeast. Much of the state of Pernambuco consists of the semiarid sertão, which also extends over vast stretches of the states of Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Alagoas, and Bahia. Droughts have struck the sertão at least 10 times over the past century, and each time disease and starvation have ravaged the sertanejos, its inhabitants.