Lula Da Silva

Lula Da Silva

Imagine you were so poor you didn’t know what bread was until you were seven. Imagine not having a father growing up because he claimed he was working in another town and it turned out he had another family and left your mother and six siblings behind. Imagine hoping on the back of a truck with your family to make a 1,900-mile journey across your country to find a job; becoming a shoeshine boy. Imagine dropping out of school in fifth grade to go work at a factory to help provide for your family. Imagine losing your brother to a regime who tortured him to death. Could you imagine yourself then leading a country buried in debt and high unemployment and turning it into a world powerhouse with approval ratings of over 80 percent?

People are “predisposed toward certain attributes and behaviors based upon their early ideas about and experiences with power, influence, trust, and hierarchy” (Defining). It is these experiences that may lead to “defining moments” that affect a person’s life whether it is for good or bad (better way to say that?). Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, usually referred to as Lula, was born on October 27, 1945 in Caetes, Pernambucano, Brazil and had a childhood saturated by defining moments. The seventh of eight children of two farmworkers, Lula was destined for a life of poverty either working in the fields or in a factory. After moving to Sao Paolo and discovering along with the rest of his family that his father had made a new family, Lula and his siblings took up jobs in the streets to help maintain the family. Their standard of living was so low that they had to accept settling down with the new family because they had nowhere else to go in the dangerous city streets of Sao Paolo. First a shoeshine boy in the afternoons, Lula eventually dropped out of school and took a job in a factory as a lathe operator. It was when he lost a finger in an accident during work and several hospitals turned him down that Lula realized that...