Article

Change

Community

Development

22 June 2023

7 min read

To a house on the hill

Why did a New York lawyer move to a Brazilian slum? Jane Cacouris talks to Luke Simone about his extraordinary story.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

an aerial view of a shantytown on a steep hill side in Rio, Sugerloaf Mountain is visible in the distance

Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro.

It was a hot and humid evening in 2015 and Luke had just moved into a tiny house in Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro’s oldest favela, a shantytown located in the heart of the city. His new home was near the top of the hill, sandwiched between two loud and rampant drug dens. He could hear the parties and orgies happening above and below him twenty-four hours a day; his neighbours regularly firing bullets out of the windows. The noise was draining and constant. It was dark outside, and Luke sat frozen in fear, staring at a blank laptop screen by his window facing the street… waiting and praying. He had just been informed that the bandidos (drug traffickers from the main drug gang in the favela) were on their way to pay him a visit. Gossip on the street had spread that he was an undercover police officer. Why else would a white British gringo in his thirties choose to buy a house in one of Rio’s poorest and most dangerous communities?

“After about five minutes I saw a glint out of the corner of my eye… I looked around and a number of drug dealers were arriving on the porch.”

Faced with ten heavily armed gang members, they asked who he was and what he was doing in their community. Luke took a breath and explained that God had called him to Brazil from New York, and that he was choosing to live in Providencia because he loved the neighbourhood, and wanted to serve the community and build something for them; for their children and their young people. The gang listened. Then remarkably they lowered their guns, said “ok then”, and walked away. Luke was stunned.

“I know what happens to people… It was a very violent time. I thought I was going to die and it was terrifying. But God turned it around...”

The relief that he was alive quickly turned into disappointment; a realisation that despite all the sacrifices he had made to be there, he wasn’t wanted by the people he had given up everything to serve.

Armed police patrol the favela.

Armed police stand on steep steps between shantytown dwellings

Five years previously Luke was living in New York working as a finance lawyer with a corporate law firm. He was single, his firm paid for his Manhattan apartment, and he had so much disposable income that he saved half his pay each month. Originally from the UK, he grew up going to a local church in Surrey with his family, but he’d fallen far away from God.

“I was in a favourable position to go off the rails. And I did go off the rails.” he says.

In 2009, the financial crash hit and having spent five years living and working in New York, Luke began to question the premise and direction of his life. Through a family member, he was put in touch with a Christian association working with street children in São Paulo in Brazil, providing living accommodation to homeless children, who were disenfranchised from their families and/or victims of abuse and neglect. The aim was to reintegrate the children where possible with their families. During a weekend visit to São Paulo, within fifteen minutes of being shown around one of the shelters, Luke had a deep conviction that this was where he was meant to be.

“It was not this Damascus Road moment,” he says. “It was a familiar voice. Not someone who was needing to twist my arm or convince me. I felt I was in good hands. Even though change was going to mean going from a six-figure bonus to zero salary…. I was suddenly ready to risk everything knowing I was in these safe hands.”

A few months later Luke moved from New York to Brazil and went on to live and work in one of the shelters for street children for several years. He talks about a particularly bleak time when one of the boys in the shelter took a dislike to him, the relationship becoming so acrimonious that Luke even began fearing for his life. Emotionally and mentally drained, feeling rejected by the children he was trying to care for, he went away for a couple of days to regroup and called his sister. He recalls,

“She said to me, ‘Just come home Luke. Just come home.’”

Her words made him realise that he had life choices the street kids simply didn’t have. He could choose to leave them and “go home” at any moment; home to people who loved and cared for him. The children he was working with were born without options or choices. So, Luke decided to stay, and by making that decision, hoped to model a love and commitment to those who perhaps had never experienced it. A love that doesn’t diminish or disappear, even when we turn our backs.

Luke Simone.

A man sits on a concrete path with one leg splayed out in front.

What is intriguing about Luke’s story is not the desire to “re-purpose” his life. So many of us feel at times in our lives that we are drifting without purpose or meaning but when we look for more purpose, it tends to be either seeking fulfilment in our work - towards more wealth or influence or social legacy - or through our relationships. What is intriguing is that Luke chose to follow God’s purpose, rather than his own.

Luke’s story is one of sacrificing comfort, wealth and status to simply do life alongside the people that society in general has given up on, and, at times, in return getting hostility and death threats from the very people he is walking with. The story is a little reminiscent of the gospel story of Jesus Christ. Although, of course, Luke will be the first to say that he’s certainly not Jesus - “unqualified”, “unprepared” and “broken” are words he uses to describe himself – but perhaps this self-awareness of his own flaws has given him the ability to rely entirely on God rather than himself, in a place where he simply has to.

Missionaries, like Luke, are perceived by many to be the outworking of a colonial interpretation of the “Great Commission.” This refers to a number of passages in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells his apostles to “make disciples of all nations.” People assume this means going to far flung places and preaching about Jesus. But when I asked Luke about his work in Providencia, for him, mission is far more integral and encompassing than “straight evangelism.”

As theologian Christopher Wright points out, Jesus was concerned with responding to the needs of people - both materially and spiritually - in the power of the Holy Spirit. The two go together and are integrated. The Book of Acts and letters of the apostle Paul in the Bible show a commitment of the followers of Jesus to preach the good news and bring others to faith, but also to live with compassion as a loving community seeking to address the social and material needs of those around them. In fact, Paul’s first of many missionary journeys was to provide famine relief to prevent starvation of the people in Judea.

So where is Luke now thirteen years after he first left New York? He still lives in Providencia and together with his team of volunteers and a local church in Rio, he has built and runs a community house, Casa Cruzeiro (House of the Cross) and adjoining educational annex at the highest point of the favela.

Casa Cruzeiro.

A group of buildings jostle together at the summit of a hill in a city.

On entering Casa Cruzeiro during my visit to Rio a few months ago, I was struck by the sense of peace. The community around the house is far from calm. It’s poverty at its crudest and, as Luke will say, at times depicting humanity at its darkest. Murder, rape, incest, drugs, extortion, prostitution, abuse, neglect… the list goes on. Life at the margins doesn’t get more marginalised than this. Casa Cruzeiro is a light in the darkness, a stillness in the chaos. It operates an open-door policy where anyone is welcome, drug traffickers included (as long as they behave), for a meal, to hang out, to talk, even to stay if someone needs a roof over their head. About 200 children, adolescents and adults pass through their doors each week, and some of the activities include an afterschool programme, adult literacy support, a communal vegetable garden, career counselling, guitar lessons, bible studies and prayer groups. Material and spiritual needs met seamlessly and uncomplicatedly together as part of a whole.

A Providencia family.

A mother sits with a toddler standing in front of her. The father appears from the side lying on his back reaching an arm out.

A family play in a Rio favela.

If you could rewind the clock by thirteen years, and make a different choice, would you? I ask Luke. He pauses, and says no, but is clear that it hasn’t always felt like an easy choice. He’s often pondered over the comfort and wealth that he left behind. But at the moment he has no plans to leave.

And what has he learnt about God over these years in Brazil?

When he relies on God he feels a deep sense of peace, and a conviction of God’s love in a way he hadn’t known before.

“When God called me to Brazil, he was saying, ‘You need to know me again. I want to reintroduce myself to you. This is who I am. And this is how much I love you.”

Jesus said to His father, “Let thy Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” And as I walk around the safe, clean space of Casa Cruzeiro… chat with Iam over lunch, who became a Christian five years ago when reading a passage of scripture with Luke… hear about Monique, who with the team’s help, has been accepted onto a youth apprenticeship programme… look out from the roof top past the carefully nurtured community vegetable garden to the dark winding alleys and mish mash of favela shacks sprawling down the hill and into the city beyond….and watch Luke’s eyes lighten as he tells me about the young people that he and his team look after and walk through life with…

I realise this is what Jesus meant.

Article

Change

Politics

Psychology

5 November 2024

5 min read

How to be a wise diplomat about the election result

It’s not just American citizens weighing-up and trading-off.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

An ambassador presents credential to President Trump

President Trump accepts credentials from Indonesian ambassador M. Lutfi.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

The American election result, whatever the case, is a landmark event in geopolitics. And here, it is unclear which result is better for the world in the long-term, given the ambiguous motives, interests and intentions of its main characters.

Whereas the Biden Administration led by the Democrats has been fraught with war, the Trump Administration was comparatively peaceful, with breakthroughs such as the historic Abraham Accords. Yet, the rhetoric of President Trump is aggressive and divisive.

Despite mainstream media assertions focused on the clear best choice in the election, a balanced perspective is necessary involving consideration of trade-offs between what the parties and their leaders each offer. This balance, however, is difficult to achieve as polarisation encourages retrenchment into simple views.

As the American election approaches, it is worth considering what a diplomatic approach to an election transition might entail. Here we can look to the example of Henry Kissinger, whose diplomatic mindset is illustrated in Barry Gewen’s The Inevitability of Tragedy. Gewen eloquently illustrates the Kissingerian – even if often cold-hearted – approach to the consideration of trade-offs in diplomacy.

Gewen traces the early-life experience of Kissinger, a German Jew forced to flee Nazi persecution, both serving in the US Army and attending Harvard. Unlike his American peers, Kissinger understood through personal experience that authoritarianism could rise through democratic means, Adolph Hitler the primary example.

It is partly for this reason that Kissinger was willing as US Secretary of State to intervene in the affairs of foreign states to halt dictators emerging through democratic processes. The trade-off was here between respect of democratic process and the possibility of dictatorship, a trade-off which Americans without German-Nazi experience would never understand and which they saw as deeply unsettling.

Kissinger is the archetypal diplomat. His example is worth reflecting on in the wake of the American elections. Kissinger approached geopolitics with little emotion, instead considering what course of action in a particular situation served as the least worst evil available.

He engaged across a wide variety of networks, talking with individuals who would not speak with each other. And he maintained a considerable sense of calm throughout his career as both an actor and commentator, responding to events as they developed.

An initial consideration in emerging from the American elections is that too much emotionality – amplified by political polarization – will expose politicians, diplomats and the public to risk. Emotion colours careful, strategic calculation of various scenarios and actions across potential scenarios.

‘People constantly show you who they are; we are just too busy to notice,’

An effective diplomatic (or strategist) will carefully consider what might happen and think through potential steps in case these realities actually transpire, while recognising that too much anticipation risks cascading into fantasy. Too much emotion impedes this careful process of reflection and deliberation as part of the development of strategy.

A second element of effective diplomacy and strategy is to consider people as they are, rather than rely on superficial descriptions in the media, biased second-hand accounts or who or what one hopes another person is. People’s motives, intentions and interests are not easily discernible at first glance, instead requiring careful probing and questioning.

At the same time, there are few more accurate sayings than ‘People constantly show you who they are; we are just too busy to notice,’ conveying that counterparts are always providing information as to who they are, few careful or disciplined enough to mask their real thinking.

An effective diplomat might consider the early upbringing – much like that of Kissinger – that shapes a person’s character and behaviour, if not their worldview informing action.

Consider Donald J. Trump, learning right from wrong on the streets of New York City via the mentorship of lawyer Roy Cohn, who served as Chief Counsel to Joseph McCarthy while McCarthy prosecuted potential American communist sympathisers.

Cohn’s rules of life, work and play were as follows (these summarized by a friend well-acquainted with Cohn and his colleagues): ‘One, attack, attack, attack! Two, deny everything! Three, always claim victory!’ The logic of these three rules of life are readily understandable when considering the harsh New York realities within which Cohn and later Trump operated.

These considerations are overlooked, however, amid the onslaught of media which fails to consider what really shapes the character of a man or woman.

Curiosity, a critical mindset and self-restraint in the face of the human temptation to reach rapid and satisfying answers are here necessary, as part of figuring out what exactly is driving action.

A wise diplomat would pay particular attention to these pivotal factors – such as the influence of a long-standing mentor or advisor – as they might manifest in the present. This requires an intellectually honest and serious consideration of the worldview that shapes a counterpart, rather than considering superficial media commentary.

Third, a wise diplomat will maintain relations across a wide variety of networks, understanding that it is fine to talk with two or multiple individuals whose own relations are fractured (in fact, these strains in relations can be beneficial within diplomacy, the diplomat in this case able to play broker as he or she needs or wishes).

The maintenance of broad networks is vital, because this enables action under a wide array of potential circumstances, understanding that anything can happen (we are here reminded of Harold MacMillan’s saying “Events, dear boy, events!”) And a key lesson in diplomacy and in the cultivation of strategy is that, once crises unfold, it is the preparatory work in developing networks and alliances that counts; little new network-formation is possible afterwards.

The previous two points suggest that a wise diplomat will not pay too much attention to what is in the media, but will instead consider their own learning gleaned through in-person interactions with others, as well as the perspective of their most trusted contacts. Curiosity, a critical mindset and self-restraint in the face of the human temptation to reach rapid and satisfying answers are here necessary, as part of figuring out what exactly is driving action, and what can in turn be done to shape action in accordance with interests.

Finally, an effective diplomat will not try to play God, serving as the arbiter of right or wrong, adopting instead a more considered approach anticipating and responding to circumstances as they gradually or quickly evolve. Effective strategy requires an aloof approach (caring – but not caring too much), removing the self from a given situation so as not to allow natural human vices such as presumptiveness, arrogance or short-term self-interest to affect judgment.

And the American election bring with them a number of trade-offs, these to be weighed carefully by American citizens, as well as by diplomats and strategists in other countries. These trade-offs will be considered most effectively if approached with calmness – the aloof, even if cold-hearted, approach personified by Henry Kissinger.

In an age of catastrophising, emphasing emotion, it is easy to descend rapidly into despair, rather than consider action from a long-term perspective. Diplomacy and strategy require the latter, which will be a key to success for those who emerge effective in advancing their interests in the wake of the American elections.