Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * Now, he’s teaching himself to play for a second time — but this time without seeing. Neto hunched over a Godin guitar at a Calgary music store Saturday, his dancing fingers picking out a reggae tune. The song he crooned — roughly translated as Healthy Mind — is one he wrote with a friend when their band performed in Brazil’s open-air clubs years ago. “It’s about the music. Music is my solution,” Neto said of the tune’s words.

The 24-year-old is wading through myriad issues thrust upon him by the careless gunfire of a criminal that stole his sight last month. Music has become his solace. “When I play, I don’t think that I’m blind,” said Neto on Saturday at Long & McQuade, where he picked out a new guitar donated by a generous Calgarian. The instrument is one of many ways the community has rallied around the good-natured Brazilian, whose full name is Jose Ribamar Ribeiro Neto. On Nov.

5, Calgary’s Brazilian Community Association is hosting a concert fundraiser at the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Neto’s honour. The gala event will feature two of Brazil’s most celebrated jazz musicians — Latin superstars Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, said the association’s president, Elisia Teixeira. They hope to raise enough funds to ensure Neto has the smoothest possible transition to his new life, she said.

Various medical bills, living expenses and equipment associated with his new blindness will tally to a large bill, she said. “We are working on a plan for all his needs in terms of short-term, five-year and 10-year,” said Teixeira. “We want all the options in place for when he wants to make a decision.” For now, Neto said the demands of the present are all-consuming. A gunshot meant for someone else struck Neto while out for dinner with his girlfriend, Roberta Porto, and left him blind.