I Was Invited to Join Rede Brasil Suíça.

Jun 16

Me at the Rede Brasil Suiça event in 2025

Last year I went to a Rede Brasil Suíça event and did not know what to expect.

I knew it would be Brazilians in Switzerland, which already felt like something. But I did not know if I would feel like I belonged there, or like a guest at someone else's table. That particular anxiety is one I have written about at length. Apparently it does not go away just because you wrote the book.

I felt welcomed.

So when Rede Brasil Suíça invited me to join the volunteer team, to help make the events happen, to be part of what sits behind the thing that made me feel that way last year, I said yes immediately.

Rede Brasil Suíça is an interdisciplinary network founded in 2022 that connects Brazilian researchers and professionals who are already in Switzerland or thinking about coming. It organises events, shares job and academic opportunities, and creates a space where people who understand both sides of the Brazil-Switzerland crossing can find each other. It is run entirely by volunteers who believe that the crossing is easier when you do not have to do it alone.

If you are Brazilian in Switzerland, or thinking about coming, this is the bridge. I will now be one of the people helping set up the chairs.

See you there.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

I Was Invited to Join Rede Brasil Suíça.

Nostalgia is everywhere right now.