A Family’s Move from Molde to Rio

By Juliana Tafur, Editor & Publisher

RIO DE JANEIRO – The first time Dagrun Weglo Bye came to Brazil, she recalls holding her purse tightly while walking in the neighborhood of Leblon. “I get a good laugh now, because I thought it was dangerous everywhere,” says Bye. Four months have passed since her family moved from Norway’s coastal city of Molde to Rio de Janeiro. She knows now there’s no reason to be afraid, but it took some time before she let down her guard.

“The first time I went to the supermarket with my children [ages 7 and 3], I held their hand and told them to stay with me at all times. Now they’re running around and helping me get food items from the shelves,” she says.

Overcoming the fear of living in a foreign land, so different from Norway, was the first step in a long list of challenges her family has gone through.

“When I took my children to school for the first time, I could see the fear in their eyes. It was as if I was feeding them to the wolves,” says Bye. “I even drew on a piece of paper a toilet and a water bottle, because they couldn’t communicate in Portuguese, and I couldn’t either.”

The kids got through the first two weeks of classes because they were promised they’d get ice cream after school. The third week, ice cream rewards weren’t necessary anymore, since the boys had started making new friends and understood Portuguese better. “Now, when we go to school they both say ‘bye mamma, you can go home now,’” says Bye, clearly relieved.

Challenge number three was learning Portuguese, especially because the children attend an all-Portuguese school. “My 7-year-old son has a lot of homework and the messages the teachers send are in Portuguese,” she says. “I sit there with Google translate, and sometimes I can’t even help him. In fact, it feels like he’s helping me.”

Bye and her family live in Barra, and though she finds the neighborhood very pleasant, it’s likely that they’ll move to Ipanema or Leblon. For one, her husband Torgeir works in Botafogo and because of traffic it sometimes takes him two hours to drive back home. “If we move he’ll be able to work longer hours and spend more time with the children,” she says.

Plus, in Rio’s south zone the children will attend an English language school. “That way, I’ll be able to speak with the teachers and understand my son’s homework,” she adds. In fact, Bye advises other Norwegians moving to Brazil to speak to others who’ve recently moved to the country, to get an idea of what’s worked for them.

“It’s also good to take some Portuguese classes beforehand and – perhaps most importantly – to know that despite the negative media coverage, you’ll be safe here,” Bye says.

She now goes bicycling and running along the beach, all by herself. She is also building a network of friends and is very happy to be in Rio, because she gets to spend more time with the children. As for the kids, they’re now fully adapted and very much enjoying their football, ‘capoeira’ and swimming lessons.

“Moving to Brazil has made our family stronger,” Bye says. “We’ve learned to support each other more, communicate better and be closer to one other – and we will take this back to Norway.”