Brazil in the seventies was a booming economy and US companies wanted to get a piece of the action. Starting in 1975, Melissa’s role as Commercial Counselor at the US Consulate in Rio was to help promote trade between the two countries. She spoke at business events and came out in the press, as part of her work.
Most of her job was, of course, promoting US exports. Occasionally, data sheets about projects would cross her desk that had nothing to do with Brazil. One such case was a request for proposals by the government of Mauritania to build that country’s first major paved road, from the capital, Nouakchott, to a town 600 km east through the Sahara Desert. No American construction company was interested, and Mauritania did not want the project to go to a company from France, the former colonial power. Somebody at the Department of Commerce in Washington asked Melissa if a Brazilian company would be interested.
She passed the tip on to Paulo Tarso Flecha de Lima, the head of Brazilian export promotion at Itamaraty, the Foreign Ministry. He was very interested and within a few months Mendes Junior, then a big construction firm, landed one of Brazil’s first major building contract overseas. Legend has it that one of the challenges of building this road, called the Highway of Hope, was that there weren’t any rocks to grind up and make cement. The solution was to bring in seashells. Mendes Junior and other Brazilian construction heavyweights went on to build projects in Iraq, Angola, Ecuador and many other countries.
Inflation in Brazil was running at about 50% a year, and Melissa used this situation to teach her sons about economics. She started paying their monthly allowance in cruzeiros, the local currency. After several months, they complained that their allowance couldn’t buy the same amount and asked her to have it indexed to dollars.
She also warned her sons that the phone lines were probably being bugged by the Brazilian government, so she counseled them to be careful what to say.
Melissa took the family on one of their first real adventure trips, to Iguaçu Falls, Sete Quedas Falls (which now is a hydroelectric dam) and hitching a ride on a barge carrying soy up the Paraná River.
Her time in Rio was cut short when in 1976 she was named ambassador to two newly independent African countries. There was no high school in Guinea-Bissau or Cape Verde for her son Christopher, 15, who was attending the American school in Rio. After a debate about whether to go to high school in the US or in Spain, the family agreed to have him stay on in Rio. Melissa then found a family with whom he could live another year.