A YOUNG MAN'S HOMECOMING TO A BRAZIL HE DOES NOT KNOW

CAMPINAS, Brazil - The woman gently touched Joao Herbert's forearm as he
stepped off the crowded sidewalk and into an appliance store.

"Aren't you the boy who just arrived here from America?" asked Maria Leonar
Vieira de Moraes, 60.

Herbert smiled and nodded yes.

"Welcome to your home," she said. Then she reached up and hugged him.

Hers was an oft-expressed sentiment during Herbert's first week here. But
it masked the brutal, if sometimes poignant, complexities of the
22-year-old's arrival in a homeland that is as alien to him as landing on
the moon.

Herbert had not been in Brazil since he was 8, when an Ohio couple adopted
him from a Sao Paulo orphanage. He was ordered to leave the United States
in June under a controversial 1996 law that requires deportation of any
immigrant who has not been naturalized and is convicted of what the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service terms an "aggravated felony."

Herbert was expelled after being convicted of selling less than eight
ounces of marijuana--his first and only drug charge.

Herbert does not speak Portuguese, the Brazilian language. He came alone,
knowing no one. He is a stranger to the culture. He retains snatches of his
childhood here, but otherwise his memory of the people, landscape and
rhythms of Brazilian life is a virtual blank.

Yet because of the circumstances of his return, of his highly publicized
forced exile from America, Brazilians know him. They see him as a guy who
made a mistake but deserved a second chance, a real-life victim of an
unbending American attitude toward drugs. For months before his deportation
by the INS, the story of this burly, bespectacled young man played on
television and in newspapers, and the Sao Paulo airport was aswarm with
reporters when Herbert landed late on Nov. 16.

After 20 months of INS detention in Ohio jails, Herbert's first week here
gyrated between rage and relief. He exulted in his freedom, savoring his
first home-cooked meal in Brazil and gazing at the graceful, sun-dappled
mountains along the highway that runs into this prosperous city 80 miles
west of Sao Paulo. He basked in the care of an American expatriate from
Akron, Ohio, who has adopted three Brazilian children. He enjoyed the
company of a Brazilian family whose son's own struggle with drugs gave them
a special compassion for him.

Still it was a week full of difficult moments, when his lack of Portuguese
paralyzed him, when stares on the street sometimes made him want to
disappear, when the myriad decisions in his path overwhelmed him, when his
bitterness toward the U.S. government revealed itself in waves of angry
words and tears.

Time after time his new friend, Mike Miller, the Akron man who moved to
Brazil as a missionary 12 years ago, tried to keep Herbert from despairing.
"The past is the past, and there's nothing we can do about that," the
Baptist pastor told the young man. "The only thing we can do something
about is the future."

Herbert's journey back to Brazil began in 1997 with his arrest for selling
7 1/2 ounces of marijuana to a police informant. He was sentenced to two
years' probation and six months in drug rehabilitation. While in rehab, he
learned that because his parents had never had him naturalized after his
adoption, the INS could begin deportation proceedings against him.
Terrified, he fled. He was caught a year later when he came home to his
mother and remained in detention thereafter.

Immigrant rights activists were outraged by Herbert's case. A state parole
board unanimously recommended clemency, which Ohio Gov. Bob Taft (R)
rejected. Finally, Herbert decided to stop fighting and return to Brazil.
His parents, Nancy Saunders and Jim Herbert, struggling with anger and
grief and guilt over the consequences of their inaction years ago,
supported the decision. Herbert's limbo status could have kept him in jail
as an immigrant detainee indefinitely. He said he felt his life slipping away.

And so, days after a 20-minute goodbye visit with his parents--"20 minutes
for 14 years," Herbert fumed last week--he flew back to Brazil on travel
documents provided by the embassy in Washington.

If he worried that Brazilians would reject him, those fears fell away
immediately upon his arrival. On the subway, passengers waved at him. On
the street, passersby wished him good luck. One 22-year-old woman walked a
mile through pelting rain to deliver a "welcome to Brazil" letter to the
Arsenal of Hope homeless shelter, where the embassy in Washington had
arranged for him to spend his first weekend. A couple sent him flowers. A
Rio de Janeiro man offered him a place to live.

People here were forgiving. "What he did was wrong, but I was a
schoolteacher for 30 years, and I saw so many of my students get into
trouble with drugs. It's an almost irresistible temptation," said Vieira de
Moraes, the woman who hugged Herbert in the street. "Now, he has another
chance. It's up to him to make the right choices."

Soon, however, the attention started to weary him. He was enraged when he
awoke one morning to learn that a newspaper had gone to the orphanage where
he had once lived, obtained a photograph of him as a young boy and
published it. "It was a picture of myself I'd never even seen," he said.

Last Wednesday afternoon, he walked up to a newsstand with Miller, who knew
the manager. After being introduced to Herbert, the manager said, "I've
seen you on TV, haven't I?"

Herbert left quietly. "I don't want to be the center of attention," he
said. "I just want to be out of the way."

As the days passed, he was surprised by how Brazil felt both strange and
familiar. He was taken by the new cars, by the stylish restaurants and the
American fast-food joints, by the well-stocked grocery stores. He kept
seeing well-known brands such as Hellmannn's, Johnson's and Ajax. He kept
hearing American music.

Those comforting moments, however, were juxtaposed against numerous awkward
episodes, the worst of which had to do with his not knowing Portuguese.

Last Tuesday, he walked into a restaurant, and strode up to the counter to
order.

"I'd like a mini-pizza," he said, trying to communicate in halting Spanish.

"We've got plain cheese, or ham and tomato," the waiter behind the counter
said in Portuguese.

"I'll take pepperoni," Herbert said, not having understood the waiter's
response.

The puzzled waiter returned with a ham-and-tomato pizza.

Herbert goes everywhere with his dictionary. The little Spanish he speaks
is not much help, as he has come to realize. When he hears new words in
Portuguese, he tries to repeat them, trying to commit them to memory.

"I feel like Portuguese is way down deep in my brain," he said, "and I've
just got to figure out how to get it out."

His frustration over the language has only compounded his overall anger. He
is angry at what he described as the callousness with which the INS treats
immigrant detainees. He is angry at the U.S. government for crafting the
law that ripped him away from his family.

He takes no comfort in legislation--in part a response to cases such as
his--that now grants automatic citizenship to virtually every foreign-born
child adopted by an American. The law, which will be implemented fully
within months, applies to adoptees under 18.

"I made a mistake, and I'm remorseful for what I did, but I don't think I
was treated fairly," he said. "If the Brazilians did to an American what
America did to me, Americans would be up in arms. . . .

"What am I supposed to do if my father--my father is a paraplegic--if
something happens to him?" he continued, nearly shouting. "What if my
mother got sick? I couldn't go back to see her without going to prison."

His parents fear they may never see their son again, because of the cost
and difficulty of traveling to Brazil.

"I barely had time to give them a hug before I left," Herbert said, tears
spilling down his cheeks. "It hurt, it hurt, it hurt."

People such as Mike Miller hope to help dull that pain. Miller, 42, an
easygoing missionary who leads a small church in Campinas, heard about
Herbert when Miller was in Akron last summer. He was familiar with the
restless yearnings of a teenager living in Middle America; he, too, had
gotten into trouble over drugs as a youth. Miller was also familiar with
orphaned Brazilian children: He and his wife, Deanna, adopted three of them.

The Millers served Herbert his first home-cooked meal in Brazil--barbecued
beef, potato salad, baked beans and iced tea. They showed him around
Campinas. They helped him set up an e-mail address. They shared
Thanksgiving dinner with him.

The Millers arranged for Herbert to stay in the spacious home of a
Brazilian couple in the church, Lidia and Donizette Tarifa. They said they
did not hesitate to take him in because they have a 25-year-old son
addicted to crack cocaine who does not live with them.

"We understand the pain," Lidia Tarifa said. "We had to help."

Herbert is still roiled with uncertainty: Where will he find a job? Where
will he go after he leaves the Tarifas at the end of the year? Will he make
friends? How will he adjust to Brazilian ways?

Yet for a few minutes last week, those questions gave way to Thanksgiving,
as he stood up in church and recognized the efforts of the Millers and the
Tarifas and his mother and father and friends in America. As he spoke,
Miller's arm looped over his shoulder, Herbert wept.

A few minutes later, the pastor asked visitors to stand and introduce
themselves. The young man stood up.

"My name is Joao," he said. "I live in Campinas."

They were his first public words in Portuguese.

Levine reported from Washington.