Stories began to surface about a strange holy man with incredible healing powers living on the streets in one of the poorest slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Being a well-to-do freelance journalist with several high profile magazines at my beck and call lent me wherewithal to travel anywhere in the world. Rio was beautiful, from what I’d been told, and even if the story didn’t pan out, as I expected it not to, I could call it a working vacation and drum up some sort of story.
We were in the middle of a slow news cycle in the States anyway. The President had just been sworn in for his second term, the economy was slowly inching back to life, and everyone was sick of reading about the dreadful wars we just couldn’t pull ourselves out of, as a country. I had made a living of putting myself in harm’s way to tell stories of our soldiers risking their lives to fight ambiguous enemies who seemed to increase three fold for with every new death count. To be honest, I was sick and tired of it. I wanted to do a feel good story. No, I needed to do a feel good story, just to keep my sanity. (more…)