Brazilian Dodges Bombs in Angola and Iraq
An ADRA worker finds life in Brazil too comfortable for an Adventist.
Dismayed by news reports of starving people in Africa, Marcelo Dornelles left a comfortable life in Brazil to provide ADRA-backed relief in the war-torn countries of Mozambique, Angola, and Iraq.
Although only 48, Marcelo has white hair and a well-lined face that testify to years of arduous humanitarian work amid bomb explosions, intense sun, severe cold, and pounding rain.
He wouldn’t change a thing.
"I was very dissatisfied in 1990, even though I had a comfortable life,” Marcelo said in an interview in the Iraqi city of Erbil, where he works as director of ADRA Kurdistan. “I felt a desire to help when I saw television images of people dying of hunger in Ethiopia and Somalia, where there was war at the time. I knew God was calling me.”
So, he embarked on a long journey from South America to southern Africa in September 1990. He was 21, and his first assignment was to help the Adventist Development and Relief Agency establish food programs for people displaced by conflict and drought in 100 villages in Mozambique. The country had been mired in civil war since 1977, killing an estimated 1 million people, including from famine, and displacing more than 3.5 million others. A peace agreement would only be reached in 1992.
"When I arrived, I realized that the situation was more complicated than I had thought,” Marcelo said. “But I could not turn back. Much help was needed.”
He worked in Mozambique for eight months, and he said his desire to help others only grew stronger. But a medical emergency involving his mother prompted him to cut short his work and return to Brazil to care for her.
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Marcelo Dornelles, wearing an ADRA cap, poses with children in Angola in the early 1990s. (Marcelo Dornelles)
Children gathering grain that fell under an airplane as humanitarian aid was unloaded in Malanje, Angola, circa 1993. (Marcelo Dornelles)
Pedrito, an orphaned street child, being placed with an adoptive Adventist father in Angola. (Marcelo Dornelles)
Orphaned street children sleeping in ADRA's office in Malanje, Angola, in 1993. (Marcelo Dornelles)
Marcelo Dornelles standing near a clinic built by ADRA and Adventist Help in Mosul, Iraq. (Carolyn Azo)
His next assignment, to Angola, brought him to a country in the midst of what would be a 27-year civil war. He said his first years were horrific as he saw people desperately eating anything that they could find, including shoes and dead dogs. During a military offensive in 1993, he saved 20 children from starvation and bomb blasts by sheltering them in his home in the provincial capital of Malanje in northern Angola.
"What I saw in the streets was terrible, dozens of children who were only skin and bones dying of hunger,” he said. “I could not bear such misery. So, I gathered the children whom I met, brought them to my house, and fed them.”
Complicating matters, Marcelo fell ill with malaria, but he continued to feed the children every day. For days at a time, he and the children could not leave the house because of the bombings. He wondered how they could escape.
“So, I began to pray for God to just protect us from the bombs and to keep us alive," he said.
In addition to the 20 children sheltered in his house, he worked with ADRA to place more than 200 orphaned children with Adventist families in Malanje.
Later, in 1995, he joined a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Angola to distribute humanitarian aid in Quibaxe and Quibala. He oversaw aid deliveries to the eastern provinces of Lunda North and Lunda South in 1997 and 1998 and to Huambo in 2001.
About a year ago, Marcelo became director of ADRA Kurdistan and began distributing winter clothes to people displaced by Iraq’s war against the jihadist group Islamic State. In May 2017, he and ADRA teamed up with Adventist Help, a group of Adventist medical volunteers, to assist displaced people from Mosul at the Hasan Sham U2 camp. ADRA and Adventist Help built a clinic as well as a hospital to provide emergency healthcare to more than 80,000 displaced people in Iraq’s Nineveh Province.
Coworkers described Marcelo as kind and humble.
"He's a guy with a big heart,” said Liander Reis, a Brazilian who works as chief financial officer for ADRA Kurdistan. “He is here for ADRA and the people.”