The homeless are without home for many and varied reasons — few of them are happy reasons though. Often times someone who is homeless struggles to fight their way back towards normalcy. It can be difficult to get a job, hard to make friends, and harder still to find a place to sleep at night.
But one Brazilian man, Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho, did not waste his days living on the street. For thirty five years he spent his time writing poetry in an effort to perfect the art he loved so much. His home was a grassy and garbage blanketed lot, infested with rats and tarantulas. A horrible place. But a place where Sobrinho has dutifully and single-mindedly pursued his passion.
A woman happened by his lot one day, and noticed him amongst the piles of garbage. They began speaking and Sobrinho gave her one of his poems and it changed her life. From that point forward the woman would seek to help this man get the recognition he deserved for his studious and long-practiced talent.
She created a Facebook page displaying some of Sobrinho’s work and within only a few months the page gathered as many as 100,000 “likes”. A year ago, no one knew about the garbage hermit of Sao Paulo, hiding amongst his filth and scribbling away in his book of poems, and now thousands of people read his writing every day.
Fatefully, one of the people to read the work of Sobrinho was his long lost brother. The two were reuinted after years of separation and finally, after 35 long years of poetic preparation, normalcy is at last returning to Sobrinho’s life.