For Arlete, Carlow was ‘love at first bite’
Arlete Wilke from Brazil: 'even the rain is paradise'. Photo: Gabriel Ferreira Morais
BRAZILIAN Arlete Wilke’s love for Ireland is such that she doesn’t love it despite the rain, but because of it.
“It has this wonderful weather,” the 58-year-old said. “When my clients come in, they say ‘Oh, what a hell this cold and this rain is.’ Then, I think ‘God, excuse them. They don’t know what they are talking about. This is paradise’.”
In fact, Arlete claimed to have rejected her husband’s attempt to drive her to work. Right before talking to , she had just walked 15 minutes through a drizzling, cold morning to her job in Braza Groceries, a Brazilian store on Carlow’s Dublin Street. “My husband has told me: ‘I will take you, my dear’ and then I replied ‘no, God gave me two legs’.”
She enjoys walking in the rain. “The sound of the rain is the most pleasant thing. You just put on a proper jacket, a hood. The birds are flying. I find it wonderful.”
Born in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, but after spending most of her life in Fortaleza in the north-east, Arlete decided to leave the country at the age of 40, fearing a rising tide of violence. A tourist hotspot with stunning beaches, Fortaleza has been engulfed by criminality over the last few years in one of Brazil’s most violent states, Ceará, according to data from the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety.
Once, Arlete recalled, two robbers put a gun to her son’s head just outside their house, when he was about to get into a friend’s car.
The lack of safety led her to move to Italy â she has an Italian passport through her mother. Two of her sons went with her, while the eldest moved to Dublin with his girlfriend. After some back and forth between Italy and Brazil, she moved to the Irish capital in 2019.
She found security in Ireland, but her professional life was overturned. In her home country, for many years she was a manager in a kids’ clothes shop. “I was a posh woman in Brazil. I had everything – my car, my job, three restaurants, my own house … but I didn’t have security. Now we have security,” she said.
Yet both in Italy and in Carlow, she had taken jobs as a cleaner and childminder. Her English is still basic, which cost her “a lot of slaps on the wrists” when she briefly worked in a bakery in Dublin, decorating cookies.
“There was an old man who was the boss and he asked me to make 26 trays of cookies. It was very hard for me. I looked left and right and found a Brazilian, whom I asked: ‘what is 26?’ and he told me. Then I had to learn it,” she recalled, laughing.
If having Brazilians there was a stroke of luck, in the middle of 2020 she had a bigger one. Arlete was scrolling through her phone when she saw a post on social media about a car-related job. It would not only be a perfect role for her husband, who loves cars, but also because it was in a small, chill town, the kind of place where both of them would love to live.
She reached out to the person to find out more about it. “It was a Brazilian pastor and he told me, ‘Come to Carlow to find out more about it’.” They went to Carlow, but the job didn’t work out for her husband. But they saw the town as “a place to live” and soon the family moved there. “Carlow was love at first bite,” she said.
Around three-and-a-half years ago, Arlete got her current job at Braza Groceries in Carlow, where she works by herself (there are other three units in Drogheda, Naas and Portlaoise). She loves her job, in which she sells different sorts of Brazilian food and ingredients, as well as having the chance to meet her compatriots. Recently, she put up a board on the wall to announce job openings for people looking for work.
Almost all of her clients are Brazilians, who pop into the store to buy Brazilian beef, , flour, tapioca, , powdered milk and other products. Some customers don’t even live in Carlow, coming from other towns, such as Kilkenny and Athy.
There have been different calculations regarding the number of Brazilians living in Ireland. Brazil’s government estimated that, in 2022 there were 80,000 people here. Later, in 2024, a report by the Brazilian Embassy in Dublin and the consultancy Unleashe put the number at 58,500. The study added that 0.3% of them (175 people) were living in Co Carlow.
But some Irish people also visit Braza Groceries, Arlete said, and they have a favourite target, frozen , although they also look for hot sauce. Every weekend, Arlete sells , a Brazilian snack made of shredded chicken meat. “A lot of them would come with Brazilians, sometimes couples, friends, who would insist on them trying . They would have it with (a soft drink) and they would like it. They would like it a lot,” said Arlete.
Asked if her lack of English is a problem when dealing with Irish clients, her answer is a clear ‘no’.
“I ask them for a minute to use Google Translator and they smile. This is so good, right? They could be annoyed because sometimes I don’t understand what they want, but they don’t. They are very kind,” she said, adding that she wants to get back to studying English.
For a Carlow-lover like Arlete, potential problems are larger than the city. When going to the doctor in Ireland, she doesn’t feel the same warmth and attention as she did in Brazil.
Her family, she said, tried for a year to find a place for her grandson in a kindergarten and only found one in Bagenalstown. Now that he’s going to start primary school next year, the struggle has recommenced.
And, for Arlete, “if it wasn’t for the very expensive rents, I would never even think of leaving here”.
