Sunday, July 19, 2009

Introduction

This blog is more or less a diary of how I will hopefully get out of the worst personal crisis I have had in the past 25 years.

It is kind of the inverse of the coin of a previous blog I created when arriving in Israel about a year ago.

Back then I was over the moon, working on an animated film in Jerusalem. Both factors together summed up basically all of my aspirations at the time. I had finally the opportunity of showing my talent in a proper project, taking my career to the height I had always wished and there was the excitement of bringing my family over to the Holy Land, a great spiritual achievement in my view. It couldn't be better.

The optimism quickly faded away when confronted with the inexperience and the appalling mistakes I witnessed at work, but there was still the hope that things would gradually sort themselves out and that my experience could help them in doing this.

There was another aspect, I was to live together with my family. I had been a freelance Computer Graphics artist in the UK, which meant staying away from home most of the time, only returning to Glasgow, where I lived, on weekends.

Finally there was the fact that I was in the holiest of cities where one can go to the wailing wall whenever one wants and there is an abundance of Torah knowledge which I was thirsty for. Ultimately I was in a land where most people shared a story similar to mine. I believed I could flourish and was genuinely proud and happy to be there.

Everything seemed to indicate that things were falling into place. The company got me a beautiful apartment overlooking the Old City. The main street leading to the studio had, by chance, a flag on each side: one from Brazil, where I come from, and facing it was the Scottish one. I was invited to attend classes on the Holy Scriptures on Mount Zion itself, and became friends with the TV Globo's, Brazil's main TV station, Middle East correspondent who happened to be a neighbour.

The international economic crisis was to change all of this. It would put in evidence the incompetence of the team in charge of the project. Drastic decisions had to be made: first one third of the staff was fired to cut costs and a few weeks later the company was shrunk to one tenth of it's personnel. That was when my dream fell into pieces.

Previously to the firing my wife had a high risk pregnancy and had to abort on it's first day. This was shortly after a very strange event happened: One of her sisters became terminally ill, in her desperation she went to the Wailing Wall to pray for her sister's life. Her prayers were attended and the sister survived, but on the same night she got better another sister unexpectedly died of the same illness.

She proceeded to go back to Brazil with our daughter to look after her surviving sister and was away from Jerusalem when I lost my job . The relationship was not great before these events and only went down hill form there. Despite my efforts to comfort her through those mad days she seemed totally indifferent to the painful events that happened to me.

After loosing the job I had to stay on in the flat for another three weeks on my own not really knowing what was going to be and with no one to talk to, the war broke out and there were many more questions than answers ahead. I could not understand why after so much devotion and personal effort I had been abandoned to the material powers of the world.


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