When I Was Eight, I lived in Angola, where the war for independence was about to begin. I studied in a religious school, and had a great spiritual hunger. Every month I would buy a religious magazine, which I read from cover to cover. But one day, I realized I wanted something more. I closed that magazine and said, "Someday I'll find a magazine that will satisfy my desire for peace." That was in 1960.
In 1976, I was living in Belgium, where I was doing an internship. The weather was gloomy, very cold, and everything was very different from the environment to which I was accustomed. One day, when I was particularly sad and upset, a woman who worked in the same department as I did gave me some copies of The Herald of Christian Science. She said she had gone by a church and had seen those magazines in Portuguese. She thought that I might like to read them. They looked interesting, but I didn't read them right away.
A week or two before I left Belgium, I became ill with respiratory problems. Since I had already sent everything ahead to Portugal, I only had those magazines to read at home. So I leafed through them and started to read the testimonies of spiritual healing. At last I had found the kind of healing I believed should be possible, but which I didn't know was actually being put into practice. And my respiratory problems were cured.
