Ruadhán Mac Cormaicreports from Brazil, and witnesses an economic boom fuelled by the fruits of Irish toil, in his continuing series on immigration
Outside the corner shop on Avenida Matadouro Industrial, a huddle of young men sit swigging beer in the shade. Across the cracked and cratered street a grey horse stands in the shadow of a tree, tethered with an old bicycle tyre-tube and flagging under the midday sun. Next to him is a red Volkswagen Golf so pristine it sparkles.
It has rained incessantly for the past three weeks, but now the low-slung sky is clear and sleepy Vila Fabril is ablaze with sunlight. One of the men steps forward. He's local, in his mid-20s, in shorts and a canary vest. He thrusts out an arm.
"Howaya. Are ye from Ireland?" he asks. "I live in Clonee myself." Then he introduces his friends. Like him, most of them are home for the Irish winter: there's a builder who lives in Naas, Co Kildare, and a couple of meat factory workers who have been based in the west of Ireland for years. And then there's the shopkeeper, who has six nephews in Co Clare.
Farther along the street, Rosina de Souza Coelho points to the homes with an Irish connection. Her sister, husband, son-in-law and two nieces are living in Gort, Co Galway, a place so familiar to people here it might as well be a neighbouring townland.
"On this street, every home has at least one person in Ireland. And in this part, where there are at least 20 homes, there are at least 15 people in Ireland.
"That house," she says, pointing across the street, "four people in Ireland. Over there, six people. In another house, they are all in Ireland. You know, here we call Ireland 'Fabril 2'."
There is no need for her to point, for the trappings of Irish money could hardly stand out more. The older houses are uniformly ramshackle, mostly two-room shacks built with bare brick and corrugated iron roofs held down by slabs of concrete. Their wooden doors are warped, and in places there are opaque sheets of metal where the windows should be.
But among them, every fourth or fifth house is new, elaborately decorated and freshly painted in loud reds, yellows and greens. The more extravagant among them are adorned with steel gates, intercoms, satellite dishes and a new car in the garage.
Vila Fabril is quiet, Rosina points out, because so many of its people are in Ireland.
To the Irish visitor, the place is a study in the incongruous.
Here, on the outskirts of Anápolis city in subtropical Goiás, where coffee plantations and fields of soy and bananas run to the horizon, places like Gort, Clonee, and Ennis are talked about with the familiarity of long-standing acquaintance. Extreme poverty and conspicuous wealth stand side by side, the latter's accoutrements stamped with an Irish postmark and paid for by men who would never have heard of Ireland before going to live there. One newly-built house is painted in the colours of the Irish flag.
A community of a few hundred homes, Vila Fabril arose in the 1950s to house workers from the enormous meat factory that stretches the length of Avenida Fabril at its southern edge. It was easily the largest single employer here until the late 1990s, when a slump in meat exports forced the owners to close the facility.
The Irish connection dates from the factory's demise. One of its managers at the time was Jerry O'Callaghan, an Irishman who had been working in Brazil's meat business since the late 1970s.
Knowing that the industry in Ireland lacked skilled workers, he notified friends in Ireland and set in train the first movement of workers from Anápolis to Ireland.
"The first came to Kepak in Clonee. We checked the legislation there, and we saw that work permits could be had in Ireland. So in 1998 we put together a group of 25 people, we organised accommodation in Dunboyne, and we sent over the first 25," he recalls.
Seeing Kepak's move, other Irish factories started sending their people to Anápolis to begin mining the same pool of skilled workers.
Among them was Seán Duffy Meat Exports in Gort, which brought six Brazilians from Anápolis to Connacht in 1999, thus establishing a link between the two towns that has made Gort the hub for Ireland's Brazilians.
Today, almost 40 per cent of the town's population is Brazilian - the south Galway town has become to Vila Fabril what Springfield, Massachusetts was to the Blasket Islands.
On the other side of town, Darcy Pereira Gomes is overseeing work on the family's radically-refurbished home, an attractive and spacious two-storey building painted in deep blue with parking space for five cars around it.
Gomes has returned home for a few months to carry out some work on the house. The rest of his family - wife Marlene and sons Junior and Denisson - are in Gort, where they have lived for the past five years.
He beams with pride in the new house, delighting in every detail of his family's five-year adventure. And well he might: as well as this home, they own two other houses, which are rented out, as well as 18 acres of land and three cars: an Opel Corsa and two Volkswagens - a Golf and a Beetle. Most of it has been funded by his wife's job as a cook and his casual work as a panel beater in Galway.
Gomes's story can be heard retold in houses across Anápolis, but not everybody who returns from Ireland has found such good fortune. Judite Luiza dos Santos Rodrigues still wonders what would have been had her husband not gone to Ireland two years ago to raise money for a house for the couple and their two children.
They paid for his plane ticket by selling the shed they lived in, she says, pushing a tear from her cheek.
In Judite's hand is an Irish newspaper clipping from December 2nd, 2005, the day after her husband Elry and his nephew Roberto died in their sleep in the rented bungalow they shared with six other compatriots on the Ennis Road in Gort. They died from fumes from a home heater left on overnight.
Judite's son remains in Ireland, while she and her 19-year-old daughter Anapaula live in her brother's cramped house a few miles outside Anápolis. On the concrete floor in the front room there is nothing but a tattered sofa, an old stereo and a motorbike.
More than a dozen religious pictures cover the interior wall.
Judite is grateful for the support she received from Ireland after her husband's death. Bureaucratic wrangling has meant that she hasn't yet received her widow's allowance, but with the money raised by the community in Gort, she hopes to move into a new house with her daughter later in the year.
"He was a good provider," says Judite of her late husband. "He was a bit scared. He was always working in the fields - simple things. He was not a very schooled person, not very courageous.
"I supported him, because here there was nothing else for us to do. He used to say that his destiny was in Ireland and to get what we needed, Ireland would give it to him. Doing what he was doing here, we would never have been able to get our own home."
Anápolis, celebrating its 100th birthday this year, is in the throes of resurgence. A low-rise city about twice the size of Cork, the centre chokes with the contained chaos of an unexpected boom.
Endless lines of cars snake their way through streets lined with gaudy shopfronts advertising imported televisions, fridges and mobile phones.
In the electrical shops, owners tell of how Irish money being spent on fridges, cookers and washing machines has been helping to drive profits for years.
The economy has grown six-fold since 1998, aided by remittances from Ireland and incentives that continue to lure the multinationals.
The boom in Anápolis coincided with emigration to Ireland, notes Bill O'Dwyer, the managing director of a Mercedes dealership on the city's principal boulevard.
O'Dwyer, whose great-grandfather came to Brazil from Ireland to work in the lumber industry in the early 1900s but has never been to Ireland himself, takes pride in the observation. "The economy of the city has grown with emigration to Ireland. Once the dream was to go to the United States, but now they go to Ireland, and they can buy houses, they can buy cars. For many families, it was a gift from God. Now they have better life conditions: they're eating better, they're living better," he says.
For most of those who left Vila Fabril for Ireland, the intention was to spend a few years working and to save as much as possible before returning home to a better life. But here, the parents of young emigrants talk of their loved ones' return with more hope than conviction.
They know that their sons and daughters have good jobs and comfortable homes. Their children attend local schools.
Most of all, staying in Ireland makes financial sense. Darcy Pereira Gomes recognises as much.
If his two sons ever return home, he plans to build a swimming pool in the back garden of their refurbished house in Anápolis, but the prospect becomes more remote with each passing day, he concedes.
Twenty-three year old Junior, who works at a landfill site near Ennis and already speaks (and swears) like a native, is engaged to an Irish girl and wants to stay in the west of Ireland. Denisson is less attached, but he too could be tempted to stay.
"Both boys speak very good English, and Junior never mentions coming back to Brazil . One day, Junior will tell me: I'm going to live here now, this is my home."
The thought saddens Gomes, but how could he expect it to be otherwise, he says.
"Both of my kids, if they do tell me that, I won't mind because I know that there are better opportunities over there for them. Both of them are old enough and they now have to take on their own lives. If they decide to stay there, I've got to applaud them."