I send money to Brazil on a regular basis. My family comes from a rural part of Brazil. We first moved to the United States in the mid 70s where my father started a painting business. Through the years, more of my family has moved to America. Still, half of my family still lives in a rural state in Brazil called Amazonas in the Northeastern part of Brazil bordering Venezuela and Colombia.



For decades, Amazonas were one of the poorest states in Brazil, and it still is. However, the industrial sector of the Amazonas has made Brazil one of the major global competitors today. For years, my family worked in the fields of the rubber industry or the factories in Manaus manufacturing rubber.

Now, the town of Manaus manufactures mobile phones, electronics, and motorcycles. Agriculture only makes up 4% of its GDP (gross domestic product). Manaus was once one of booming cities in the 1800s. The rubber industry brought luxury to our cities, but not without a price of overworked natives and poor health conditions. The Brazilian monopoly of rubber had a slow death when the British and Dutch set up plantations in Southeast Asia.

The larger cities eventually fell into poor shape. My father was the first person to move out of the region and to the US. He would send money to Brazil on a regular basis. We would wait forever on the mail courier to get the money to us. Sometimes, it took months.

Through the years, my mother was able to start saving money. We no longer suffered trying to meet the daily needs of food, clothing, and shelter. My brothers and sisters received an education. I moved to the US with my father and started sending more money back home. I married a beautiful Brazilian woman from San Paulo and started my own family in the US.

I would still send money to Brazil on a monthly basis. The last time I tried to send money through a mail courier, it never made it back to my family. I started sending it through the financial institutions, but soon the $300 dollars a month that I would send was so riddled with fees that the amount was closer to $200.

Finally, online money transfers became a thing of the norm. I have to admit that my aunts and uncles were resistant to the FedEx van that pulled up with a piece of plastic. They didn't want to use it. They were so used to dealing in cash. Eventually, they began to appreciate the safety and extra piece of insurance that the card and PIN offered opposed to the cash-under-the-bed method.

The $200 dollars that I was now sending shot back up to $300. I'm so proud of our little grassroots effort to reduce poverty within my family. I have cousins that have a college education and work for major manufacturers in the accounting department. I have aunts and uncles that were finally able to purchase pieces of land and offer specialty crops like acai berries and specialty fruits and vegetables.

If you send money to Brazil on a regular basis, I urge you to really think about the methods you use because the little bit of money you save has a huge impact on the poverty level in Brazil.