Her story started long before Empower Her

When life forces us to start over

Five years after moving to São Carlos, my marriage came to an end.

It was the closing of a deeply difficult relationship, marked by conflict, infidelity and psychological violence. I left that relationship emotionally fragile and had to, little by little, rebuild not only my life, but also the woman I was.

One year and three months later, I made another big decision: I moved with my sons to Brasília, where my family was living.

It was another new beginning.

But this time, something started to change.

In Brasília, I continued raising my sons, rebuilt my personal life and also decided to build a professional identity.

I enrolled in Law school and, in 2010, I fulfilled a dream: I became a lawyer.

I practiced law in Brazil until 2019.

During those years, I built a career, acquired knowledge, independence and experience. I also got married again and, after twelve years of relationship and eight years of marriage, I went through another divorce in 2017.

Once again, life was telling me it would be necessary to start over.

I still didn't imagine that the greatest of my new beginnings was yet to come.

A trip that changed everything

In 2019, frustrated with the direction of my personal and professional life, I came to the United States to visit my younger son, who had been living in Cape Cod since 2017.

My first granddaughter was about to be born.

I came for a visit.

There was no big plan. There was no carefully designed strategy to abandon my life in Brazil and start another in America.

And yet, I ended up not returning.

That decision, however, had a very high emotional price.

My older son remained in Brazil. He was studying Dentistry in Brasília and needed to finish college. As a mother, starting a new life in another country while one of my sons stayed alone in Brazil was one of the hardest parts of that process.

A year later, he came to the United States to visit us.

Then the world stopped.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, borders closed and he wasn't able to return to Brazil at that time to continue his studies.

In a completely unexpected way, in 2020 both of my sons were with me in the United States.

Life, once again, had changed all of our plans.

Starting over in America

When I decided to stay in the United States, I was an adult woman, mother of two, a lawyer, with a professional history built in Brazil.

But none of that changed a very simple reality:

I needed to start over.

• I worked as a dishwasher in five restaurants.
• I worked as a house cleaner.
• I also worked as a housekeeper in the hospitals of Falmouth and Plymouth.

And there's something I make a point of saying when I tell this part of my story:

none of these jobs humiliated me.

I never felt smaller for washing dishes after having been a lawyer in Brazil. I never believed that honest work diminished my story, my education or who I was.

I did each of those jobs with responsibility.

Inside me, there was a strong conviction that God had more for my life, but that maybe I needed to go through that process before understanding what He wanted to teach me.

I still didn't understand why.

So I worked. I learned. I waited. And I kept going.

That doesn't mean it was easy.

I cried many times.

Because there are moments when the difficulty is so great that we look ahead and it seems that absolutely everything is out of place.

And then we begin to ask ourselves:

Am I doing the right thing?

Isn't this crazy?

Why did I leave my country, my parents, my profession and everything I knew to face so many hardships?

• There was the language barrier.
• There was the cold.
• There was homesickness.
• There was insecurity.
• And there was also poverty.

Nothing was easy for me.

There were days when we counted coins

That's also part of my story.

There were moments when we counted every coin we had.

There was a period when we needed to go to an organization that helped families going through difficulties to get food.

We lived in a basement.

Money was tight and life was simple.

But there's another thing I never forget:

God never let us go without.

• It was measured, but we didn't fall into debt.
• We needed help, but we never went hungry.
• We lived in very simple conditions, but we never slept in the streets.

Somehow, there was always enough to get through that day.

And the next day, we got through again.

Today I can look at that woman and understand things I couldn't see at the time.

Back then, I could only keep going.

Maybe some of the greatest transformations in our lives happen exactly like this: while we are too busy trying to survive to realize that we are also being prepared.

I'm not ashamed of the places I passed through. They taught me to recognize the woman who is just starting, because one day I was there too.

A meeting in the middle of starting over

Seven months after arriving in the United States, while working as a dishwasher, I met the man who would become my current husband.

We met while working.

Two months later we were living together and, on January 31, 2021, we got married.

And it was together that we began another chapter of this story.

We created Coast Carpentry Home Improvement.

We didn't start in a big office.

Our first office worked in a small, unfinished basement, in the house we were renting.

Once again, we were starting with very little.

From there we built the first steps of a company that initially performed exterior carpentry services and, over the years, grew, expanded its structure and services, and became Coast Carpentry Home Group, working on remodeling and residential construction projects, from foundation to final delivery.

That small improvised office gave way to an office in Osterville and a structure with employees and different departments.

And, once again, I needed to learn something completely new.

I took on responsibility for the company's Marketing Department.

Marketing had never been my area in Brazil. But I identified a need within the company and decided to study, learn and develop the necessary skills to contribute to our growth.

Immigration taught me something I carry with me:

starting over doesn't always mean abandoning who we were. Sometimes it means discovering capabilities we didn't yet know we had.

Some passions cross borders

Although my professional trajectory in the United States has followed different paths, I never abandoned my passion for Law.

I kept studying.

In the United States, I took several courses related to immigration and International Law and also began to help members of the community with services related to Brazilian documentation and consular matters.

And, along this journey, I began to observe the stories of the women around me.

I found extraordinary women everywhere.

• Intelligent women.
• Hardworking women.
• Women who had been professionals in their countries.
• Women who left behind diplomas, careers, businesses, families and entire life stories on the other side of the border.
• Women who were working in restaurants, cleaning houses, caring for children, building businesses or simply trying to figure out how that new world worked.

• Some didn't speak English.
• Others didn't know where to start.
• Some depended financially on their relationships.
• Others were alone, without family or support network.
• There were women wanting to start businesses.
• Others wanted to study.
• Some just needed information.
• Others needed an opportunity.

And many just needed to find someone who would say:

“I understand. I also had to start over.”

I recognized parts of my own story in many of them.

From one story to many stories

Today, when I look back, I realize my life was built from many beginnings.

• Poços de Caldas.
• São Carlos.
• Brasília.
• Cape Cod.

• I was a mother very young.
• I was a homemaker.
• I was a student.
• I became a lawyer.
• I went through divorces.
• I crossed borders.
• I was a dishwasher.
• I was a house cleaner.
• I was a housekeeper.
• I needed help.
• I counted coins.
• I lived in a basement.
• I cried.
• I questioned my own decisions.
• I kept going.
• I built businesses.
• I learned a new profession.
• I went back to studying.
• I helped other people.
• And I founded a community of women.

Today I understand that none of these versions of me needs to be hidden for the woman I am today to exist.

Quite the opposite.

I am also the result of each of them.

• The lawyer is not greater than the dishwasher I was.
• The entrepreneur doesn't erase the woman who once had to get food for her family.
• The founder isn't above the woman who cried without knowing if she had made the right decision.

They are all Andy.

And maybe that's exactly why I believe so strongly that where a woman is today doesn't determine how far she'll be able to go tomorrow.