In 1998 I was working at The Natural History Museum in London. I liked the job very very much and was entirely content to work there and indeed, things were going well.

Then out of the blue, I got an invitation to go to teach a course in South America. I was asked if I thought I wanted to go there.

It took less than a heartbeat to say yes. There was need for a computer-literate person to run the practical component of the course and I was the resident computer person.

The course was to run in Rio de Janeiro.

Now all I knew about Rio was what I saw every year in February or thereabouts where those near-naked girls were shaking like they had just taken some kind of speed overdose - Carnival - and what I knew about Brazilian soccer and what I knew about Bond baddies trying to kill poor James on that cable car thing.

That was enough though. Less than a heartbeat after being asked, I replied in the affirmative.

This was going to be great. The course was in October or thereabouts and it was getting cold in London, but Summer was coming to the Southern Hemisphere.

Indeed, it was going to be great.

I remember going to Heathrow. I remember the mayhem in Terminal 4 in Heathrow. Standing in line.

I have lower back pain and queuing really kills me. I minded much less because I was going to Rio.

Yes, Rio you plebs that have to stay here in freezing London.

I was going to Rio.

And somebody else was paying for it.

We got there about 12 hours after leaving London and it was exactly like I expected it. Well almost.

The first thing that hits you is the humidity. There is a sticky sweetness to the air.

It was 42 degrees centigrade that day and that was the hottest temperature I had ever experienced. Our host met us at the Airport and all was good.

She asked were we hungry and indeed we were. So, we headed for Copcabana beach to a little restaurant for some food. Our host talked to us about her family and all I could think was “WOW, I’m in Rio”.

We passed Pao de Acucar with the bondinho (that’s the little cable car made famous in the bond movie) and we passed all the transexual hookers on Copacabana beach (it was late in the evening, they were usually only there late in the evening).

We went for food. Then we went to our lodgings.

Casa Amarela was the name of the residence. It was pretty crap and the mosquitos were unbelievable. We were minded by a woman called Rosalena.

She was a 54 year old grandmother that tried to teach me how to dance samba (I like to think she had some modicum of success and indeed my Samba dancing is often remarked on….ahem). Rosalena made our breakfast every morning, did our laundry and cleaned up after us. The dance lessons were a no-cost extra.

We taught the course and the reason for this post is that two things happened on that trip that I still think about, maybe once a month.

The first was when I was walking down Copacabana beach one day with some students from the course. I noticed that there were more amputees than I thought was normal on the beach.

I asked if this was the result of the military regime that had been ruling the country in the past - were these people the victims of some kind of violence?

I was told it was Leprosy.

Leprosy? I asked.

The biblical disease?

Today in Rio?

I was told yes. It was endemic to Brazil.

I suddenly felt naiive. I was a trained microbiologist. Ph and D.

For me this was the best trip of my life. For them it was the bastard country that gave them leprosy and now couldn’t provide a cure.

The second thing that I still think about from that trip?

I stepped out of the class one day for a cigarette with one of the students. He was a PhD student. He had previously been a medical doctor working in a nice healthy practice in Ipanema and one day he said he couldn’t take it any more.

He was treating Leprosy every day and the only thing he could do for people without the money for a proper course of treatment (takes about a year) was to give them the equivalent of a sticking plaster and send them off.

As we had the cigarette he got a little emotional. He told me he gave up his job and took up a poorly-paid research position working on an early detection system for leprosy so that maybe, just maybe he might develop something that would catch the infection at an early stage.

Before it did damage.

While it was still cheap and relatively easy to treat.

He gave me a copy of the CD that his samba band had recorded.

I still have the CD, it has four traditional samba songs on it.

We left Brazil having taught a course. I gave Rosalena a tip of 50 US dollars for looking after me for the week. The rest of the guys did the same. We doubled her salary for that month.

Brazil has improved enormously in the past decade.

It is a country I love very much and I am going there to teach for the 9th time in March 2008. The funding is raised by us in Europe (thank you EMBO), so it costs Brazil nothing.

Somehow tonight I was thinking of Brazil and the words we use that have lost meaning from over use: war on terror, centres of excellence, developing country.

We have got to give these things these titles otherwise we have to give them names such as Rosalena and Leprosy and we have to think about legless poverty-stricken poor bastards hobbling along the beach in Copacabana.

So, yeah, developing country is a much better title for a place.

Brazil is not in the list of the most unfortuate countries in the world, but it still has leprosy.

We don’t.

If you go to Brazil you will meet the most excellent people on this planet. People with real empathy and a fondness for one another and if I think about it some days, this empathy and fondness, in 2007, seems as anachronistic…well, as leprosy.

*the photo is of the museum of modern art across the river from Rio.
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