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experience that every young person should go through. If you can’t communicate, you are forced to be uncomfortable and go through that tough learning process.” Devin was ever in possession of a dictionary and notepaper, listened intently to Brazilian music and watched local television, and over time he learned not only the language but also the culture, from food to music. “I learned more in that year than in all of college. That was my education.” While there, he also encountered beans for the first time. They aren’t a South Carolina staple, but in Brazil, they’re served twice a day, every day. In the university cafeteria, they served rice and beans with a protein like chicken on the side. On Sundays, he would eat feijoada (a black bean dish made in large batches and served at home or at bars, where everyone watched football) with everyone else. Beans were a culinary

study Latin American history at the College of Charleston. He came from a family of lawyers, and the idea was to go to Brazil and learn Portuguese, and to Mexico to learn Spanish, and on the other side of his degree, he could enroll in law school and become an immigration lawyer. He studied abroad “like a fiend,” he says, and would take extra courses each semester to maximize the time he could spend in other countries. He developed a deep appreciation for other cultures and peoples, and he would eventually spend a year as an exchange student at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. It changed his life. “Not being able to communicate is an interesting process, because you lose your personality,” he says. You can’t make jokes or do even the simplest things, and only over time, with great effort, can you slowly rebuild yourself and your abilities. “It’s a really good

revelation for him, and his new favorite food. Not long before his residency in Brazil ended, he watched in horror as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. When he returned to the United States, he decided to volunteer in New Orleans as a photographer. He would take photographs for nonprofit organizations, and give them the prints for use in fundraising, marketing and archiving. “I was here for a week with a couple of friends who came too, and we were idiots exploring a city we knew nothing about,” he says. He was struck by the New Orleanian sense of resilience. In the terrible aftermath of the flood, the people, he noticed, didn’t complain. That feeling of coming back from the brink created a sense of civic pride unlike anything he had ever experienced before, and he saw vividly that the people of New

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