Finding Herself Among the Sunflowers
A story about Gabriela Pelogi’s return to Brazil and finding a missing part of herself.
Story by TYLER URKE
It wasn’t until she sat cross-legged at the gate waiting for her flight that Gabi Pelogi started feeling butterflies in her stomach. Surrounded by people chatting in Portuguese waiting to return to their families, she finally realized she too was going home.
A 9 hour-40-minute plane ride from Mexico City was the last leg of a long trek that began in Bellingham. Gabi was leaving her boyfriend behind and forsaking a month of her soccer offseason to travel solo to São Paulo, Brazil.
The purpose of her trip? To find something that had been missing for more than a decade.
Anxious thoughts crept into her mind.
“How’s my Portuguese?” she wondered as the plane descended on a muggy July morning in southeast Brazil.
When she landed in São Paulo, her luggage was missing. After an unsuccessful and frustrating attempt to explain her dilemma in Portuguese to an airport employee, she called her friend, Celina Sampaio, who was on the way to pick her up. Sampaio walked her through what to do, and 30 minutes later, Gabi’s only worry was being chastised by Sampaio for wearing slippers instead of shoes on the plane.
Their dynamic hadn’t changed in the 10 years since they’d last seen each other. Gabi wanted to listen to every word Sampaio had to say on their drive to the center of the city, but at the moment, she could only focus on the slums they passed along the way.
Gabi’s earliest memories come from inside the walls of an orphanage where she lived from the ages of 5 to 12. Or at least that’s how old workers guessed she was when they took her in — she has no way of knowing her real age.
Her parents were shot and killed in the favelas, Portuguese for slums, for reasons that are unclear to her still to this day. She wasn’t there to witness their deaths, unlike her brother, William, but it’s still something she struggles to talk about now.
Gabi planned the first nine days of her trip to be emotional. She planned to stay with Sampaio and return to the orphanage. Sampaio is a social worker who helped facilitate her adoption to Rodrigo and Tabitha Pelogi from Federal Way, and she knew more about Gabi’s biological parents than Gabi.
Before leaving for Brazil, Gabi said she often depressed and unmotivated. A multidisciplinary studies major, she was coming up on her senior year of college at Western. She had a loving boyfriend in Bellingham, a supportive family in Federal Way and three adopted siblings who shared the same orphan background. Just last season, she’d led the Great Northwest Athletic Conference in goals scored. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling of emptiness.
“I felt like I forgot who I was,” Gabi said. “I was confused and lost.”
As she and Sampaio drove an hour south to the orphanage, whose name Lar Social Girassol means sunflower social home in Portuguese, Gabi felt both nervous and excited. She thought of her adoptive father, Rodrigo, who’d been the inspiration for the trip. Last summer, he and his two biological sons had visited Brazil and suggested that Gabi do the same.
Journeying from the metropolis of São Paulo to just outside the favelas in Grajaú, she started to recognize sights from her childhood. There was the tree she used to climb. And there was the mural covering the brick borders of the orphanage — her favorite flower, a sunflower.
The orphanage, now a daycare, wasn’t as big as she remembered it being. The playground had been refurbished to include aqua floors that looked like a puzzle of the sky and a wooden hut-like structure with an attached slide and swing set. But there were the same three buildings that housed roughly 50 girls when she was here. One of these thatched-roof buildings was just a slightly smaller than the locker room building at Robert S. Harrington Field.
Sampaio had arranged for Gabi to have lunch with another child from the orphanage. Although Gabi didn’t totally remember her, she wasn’t going to turn down another chance to snack on Brazilian food. It had been a steady diet of rice and beans and fresh fruit since she landed.
As the three caught up, Gabi’s adoption process came into the conversation. Sampaio filled in details for Gabi that she had either forgotten or never known. She told Gabi most girls had the opportunity to be adopted but many didn’t take it, and Gabi wondered what made her decide to be different from the other girls.
When Gabi was 9 or 10 years old, her older sister Natalia ran away from the orphanage. She had run away plenty of times before, but this time no one bothered to bring her back. Gabi would later learn that Natalia lived in the favelas and got pregnant shortly after leaving. William had already abandoned the orphanage and was living in the favelas as well. He was deemed too dangerous to return to the orphanage after he set two girls on fire when he was 7 years old.
Nights in the orphanage were frightening after Natalia left, Gabi recalls. Often, she would hear gunshots ring out and on one occasion men came into the orphanage to rob it.
“I was too scared to run away,” Gabi said. “But I don’t remember life being tough because the orphanage was all I knew. That was my life. I remember a lot of girls tried to fight us because a lot of the orphanage caretakers really liked me. I was a good girl and a good student.”
Eventually, it was just Gabi and her younger sister Jessica at the orphanage. The two were adopted together at first, but Jessica was scared and wouldn’t stop crying. Gabi chose to return to Lar Social Girassol with her sister rather than stay with the adoptive parents.
When Jessica was adopted again, alone this time, it still didn’t work out. Before a family can take their adopted child back to their respective country, they must live together in Brazil for a month. Gabi said during this time Jessica would call her begging to come back to her at the orphanage, and eventually, she did.
The second time Gabi was adopted, she knew she needed a change of scenery, even if it meant leaving Jessica.
“I said to myself, ‘I’m going to have to be strong and do this,’” Gabi said.
So, at 12 years old, Gabi moved to Walla Walla, Washington with an American woman that spoke little Portuguese. Gabi said there was no connection between the two.
“I was constantly crying and didn’t want to learn English,” Gabi said. “I wanted to go back to Brazil. I just remember being scared and very confused.”
Luckily, the woman knew Rodrigo and Tabitha, and she was aware the two had already adopted three children from Liberia. Rodrigo is a Brazilian native, and the two met there while Tabitha was traveling from America. Both were fluent in Portuguese and had the means to support a 12-year-old Brazilian girl. So Gabi found a new home.
She said being surrounded by her adopted brothers and sister helped her feel more comfortable. Plus, the family often made Brazilian food for dinner.
Gabi broke down as Sampaio talked about her biological parents and leaving Jessica. She was feeling things she had suppressed for so long because she wanted to appear tough. Gabi thanked Sampaio for everything she had done to help her adoption process along and prepared for the next chapter of her Brazil trip.
For the next nine days, Gabi visited with Rodrigo’s mother, a hysterically opinionated Brazilian woman who kept things light and relaxing. And of course, Gabi ate more food.
She called Claire Morgan, assistant soccer coach at Western after roughly a week in Brazil and explained she hadn’t been doing all the offseason running the Vikings players were supposed to be doing. She also let slip how being back in Brazil was making her feel.
“She called me and said, ‘Claire, I don’t think I’m coming back to America. I love it here,’” Morgan said. “She really felt like she was home.”
Morgan said she could have freaked out, but told Gabi she’d support the decision.
“She called me a week later saying she was returning to America as planned and I knew she would make her way back home,” Morgan said. “But I had to let her come to that decision on her own.”
The last stretch of her journey led her two hours north of São Paulo to Piracicaba where Jessica, now 21, lives. The roads were rocky and at times Gabi worried about her grandparents’ car breaking down where they didn’t have cell phone service. They drove past lush forests and coffee fields. The rich red soil and craggy terrain opened to a bustling city of almost 400,000 people.
As she approached Jessica’s house, Gabi wondered if it would be strange seeing her sister. It had been 10 years since she left her. She held her breath as she approached Jessica’s front door and knocked three times.
The door swung open and the wrinkles of Gabi’s smile spread across her face. Gabi’s family had been telling her how much she looked like Jessica, and now Gabi agreed.
“I couldn’t stop looking at her,” Gabi said. “I felt relieved seeing her. It was like, ‘OK, I can breathe. She’s fine. She’s happy.’”
Jessica ushered Gabi and her grandparents into her home and brought them food. As the two caught up, talk shifted to William, who had turned to using crack. Jessica knew where he lived, so the two decided to visit him at some point during the next nine days.
While staying at Jessica’s house, Natalia messaged Gabi on Facebook for the first time ever and asked if she could FaceTime her. Natalia had no idea Gabi was in Brazil or that she was staying with her sister. It was pure coincidence.
“All these things kept happening to me while I was there,” Gabi said. “It was like every minute was meant to be.”
Natalia showed Gabi her children and Gabi cried as she looked at Natalia’s youngest son. He looked like Gabi, too.
Gabi and Jessica went to meet their brother for dinner. Gabi said he was nervous and had a skinny face from using drugs. He might have been withdrawing from them because his hands were sweaty, but she wasn’t sure. She said it was sad seeing him in his current state and they kept telling him he needed to get better.
When Jessica dropped Gabi off at the airport, Gabi bawled. She listened to a Brazilian song Jessica had shown her on repeat to numb the pain of leaving her sister and Brazil. She knew she had to return to help lead Western’s women’s soccer team and she missed her boyfriend, family and friends.
“If I didn’t have any other commitments in America, I probably would have stayed or stayed longer,” Gabi said.
When she returned to Federal Way, Gabi told her adoptive brother from Liberia, Odason, about her month in Brazil. Odason hasn’t returned to Liberia since being adopted, but the 24-year-old graduate from Northwestern is now planning his own trip back home.
“It was good for her to see where she came from,” Odason said. “It inspired me.”
As she wraps up her final year of college, Gabi is thinking about the future — and the past. She wants to play soccer for at least one more year, and ideally, she will do it in Brazil. She can see herself working through something like the Peace Corps where she gets to travel and help kids that have been through a lot, like she has.
She didn’t have this kind of direction before returning to Brazil. She was never satisfied and lacked motivation.
“I had all these people telling me who I am, and I didn’t feel like I was that,” Gabi said. “Going back to Brazil helped me. It helped me be content and realize I’m lucky … [It] was the best experience I’ve ever had.”
She finally found the thing that had been missing.
Want to know more about Gabi’s soccer skills? Read ‘Genuinely Good at Soccer’ by Tyler Urke at klipsunmagazine.com.