Guilherme Henrique Raulino Brasil learned to earn a living before he learned to shave.
In Barra do Aririú, a fishing village in Palhoça, he would go fishing at night with his stepfather and sell ice cream on the street the next day. From there, he built a career as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, along with a project to reconstruct the faces of people with no resources, tumors, accident aftereffects, and cases of neurofibromatosis. All for free.
Until other doctors and dentists reported him to the Regional Dentistry Council of Santa Catarina. The reason: Brazilian law prohibits charging zero for a procedure. His response was as simple as it was sharp: he began charging 1 real per surgery, and if the patient did not have it, he accepted a dozen eggs or bread. A 75-year-old woman paid for the removal of a tumor that way.
The ethics case was ultimately shelved: the Council itself determined that there had been no violation. While his colleagues debated regulations, he was already preparing for his next trip, this time to Angola, to operate on 80 more people for free in just six days.
