When CNN broadcasted the 2016 Olympics announcement, an American friend pointed out that there was a single black person in the entire Brazilian delegation, which she thought was odd considering Brazil has the largest population of African descendants outside of Africa, not to mention many black athletes. I explained that this reflected the overall status quo in Brazil, and that black Brazilians, especially lower class blacks, don't have a strong voice or political power. But it doesn't have to stay that way.
I featured CatComm's project proposal two weeks ago, and thanks in part to my readers, they made it to the final round of the Idea Blob contest, and are up against seven other non-profits in competition to win $10,000. CatComm has worked with marginalized communities in Rio for a decade, and hopes to create a project to prevent favelas from being razed to make way for Olympic stadiums. The project would empower community leaders to make sure the world knows what's going on in Rio and to prevent human rights abuses from taking place. The communities in danger of being destroyed are some of the few in Rio with no drug trafficking, militia, or violence that have created their own social projects and their own infrastructure. They are essentially model communities that have achieved rare success on their own, and are at risk of being leveled to make room for a stadium.
That said, please take out a minute to vote for CatComm. The final day for voting is Saturday, and it only takes a minute to do!
Also, CatComm filmed some interesting videos about the project, including messages from community residents and an explanation (in English) about the project. Take it away, Theresa!
Today, I'm going to focus on one particular issue from the Olympics debate: communities under threat from being destroyed.
Though I haven't seen much in the media about the government's plans to raze several favelas to make room for Olympic venues, there has been lots of talk about turning all of the city's favelas into "real" neighborhoods. There's also a little story about how the Rio city mayor wants to construct sound barriers on two of the major highways in the city, including the one that goes to the airport, which happens to be lined by some of the city's worst slums. The structure of the story was interesting, describing how favela residents who live along the highways are up in arms and against the measure, while the city government is arguing that it has to do with actually trapping sound from the highway (they do it in Europe! they said), but the last two paragraphs of the story described how an American athlete who came to Rio for the PanAm Games in 2007 wrote on her blog that it was "the poorest city she'd ever seen." Interesting.
The one story I did actually find about communities under threat was a poorly written tale stuck in the sports section, about favelas which will be destroyed to make room for a new stadium. The residents will be moved to brand new housing, the city claims, where they will be able to pay for their homes in small increments through a new government program. The story makes it seem like everyone is happy about this, since they will become a "model community," despite the fact that the 40 year-old fishing community's few infrastructure achievements, like a park and a soccer field, will be destroyed, along with all of their homes. But since I can't find much more information on it, I'm not really sure how accurate anything is.
Enter CatComm, a highly-respected NGO in Brazil and the US, which has a new project underway to make sure favela residents are heard. (Incidentally, one of their main projects is sharing community-based solutions from around the world, which was a project I'd been thinking about for a new blog, but when I discovered them I realized it's already being done! Anyway..)
The project, which is being featured on IdeaBlob, needs funding to get underway, and you can help with a single click by voting for the project. It's the last day for voting, so please do the quick sign-up to cast your vote (it's free and very easy). Here's the plan for the project:
If we win the $10k, in 2010 Catalytic Communities (CatComm)
will train 200 community organizers across Rio's favelas to use online
networking tools including Twitter, Facebook and WiserEarth, to ensure
their voices are heard by authorities and the global community in the
years leading up to 2016.
An online community will be formed in each of these online spaces
where the general public can "hear" what leaders from the favelas have
to say, support them, and follow their work. Links will be made with
the press and the mayor's office.
We will then develop an online training program and continue face-to-face capacity-building in 2011 and beyond.
In other words, CatComm, which has been working with poor communities in Rio since 2000, will link up with favela leaders (that is, civic leaders, not drug traffickers) to make sure that they take a stand that is not just heard in Rio, but around the world, and is heard by decision-makers, as well. (On a side note, I'm not happy I just found out about CatComm just now, and not two years ago.)
If you have any information on other plans to raze favelas, or on other projects that involve working with these communities during the Olympics preparations, please leave a comment or email riogringaconsult at gmail dot com.
Naturally, I'd find out about this amazing school after moving back from Rio, but I'm glad that it's now at least on my radar. Thanks to Kacie for sending this to me!
UPDATE: The Miami Herald published a second story about the program today with a photo gallery of the kids here.
The Miami City Ballet has a scholarship program for children from the Escola de Dança Alice Arja, a professional dance school near Barra that trains a combination of paying students and favela kids. Alice Arja was trained in Brazil, the US, and Cuba, and has run the school since 1989, producing students who have gone on to join major companies in Brazil and Europe, and to study at professional schools around the world.
Ms. Arja sets aside half of the spots at the school for scholarship students, and has set up a partnership with the Miami City Ballet to send the most talented students to the US to take a summer intensive there. This year, 23 of her students were accepted into the program, a sizable fraction of the 215 total students in the entire summer intensive from all over the US and the world. One of the Brazilian students even won an apprenticeship with the Miami City Ballet, and will stay in the US to dance with them.
While the video feature from the Miami Herald drums away at how "needy" the children are (they live in cardboard boxes! without water! or electricity!), the bottom line is that this is an amazing and unique program that allows kids with no financial resources to have the opportunity of a lifetime to train in another country. [Check out the full story from the Miami Herald here, and watch the accompanying video below.]
The MH video wasn't spectacularly done, but what I really loved was finding videos of one of the Brazilian students dancing at the program this year (with hushed, awed commentary in Portuguese). See parts 2 & 3 of the piece here and here.
As the simple but brilliant title implies, this thirty minute documentary, made at the University of Sao Paulo, discusses the politics of race in Brazil -- coffee and milk, or water and vinegar? Split up into six parts on Youtube, the documentary tries to debunk the notion of "racial democracy" in Brazil, as well as explaining concepts of race, racism, and identity. The truth is that it's difficult to cover such a complex topic in less than an hour, but there is a lot of valuable and valid information, and more importantly, different views and opinions on race in Brazil.
After being deeply affected by They Killed Sister Dorothy, I managed to get in touch with David Stang, Dorothy's younger brother. If you had told me I would have found a kindred spirit in a senior citizen, former Catholic missionary rock gardener, I probably wouldn't have believed you. But David is a wonderfully irreverent man with whom I share many opinions, and who also surprised me with his kindness, honesty, and views about Brazil.
David is 71 and retired. He lived as a missionary in Africa for ten years, and spent five years in Tanzania and another five in Kenya. With the aid and inspiration of his sister Dorothy, he set up successful cooperatives and focused on serving the poor, as well as his religious duties. But one day, an African bishop came to the village where he lived. He accused David of not doing his job and failing to say mass. David explained to him that very few people came to church, since they had to work. He pointed out that helping the villagers survive was like giving mass. The bishop failed to see things his way, and essentially kicked David out. He was heartbroken, but claims the bishop couldn't take away his humanity and his right to have a relationship with the people he had lived with for so long. He returned to the US where he left the church and got married. He spent the last ten years of his career running a psychiatric facility in Colorado. He was a "happy little pig" living the retired life when he got the call that Dorothy had been murdered.
"She knew it was coming," he said. She'd invited him to visit the previous December, when "they had a ball," and she called him the night before her death, as if to say goodbye. David has been to Brazil ten times (before and after Dorothy's death), and has spent around US$25,000 on his travels there. He has been to many of the trials to try to convict Dorothy's killers, and remains in close contact with the Dorothy Stang Committee, a group of friends, supporters, lawyers, and activists dedicated to assuring justice for Dorothy.
I asked David about Dorothy, to fill in some of the blanks from the movie. When Dorothy first moved to Brazil, she considered herself to be a part of the "old church," aligned with the Vatican and the more traditional role of a nun and missionary. But once she got to Brazil, she began analyzing the problems at hand and asking herself what she could do about them. She shed her habit and began dressing simply, and moved into the community she served. She realized that where she was living, the Catholic Church "was in bed with" the powerful and oppressive upper class. In this rural area, the priest said mass at one of the local plantation houses, and the plantation owner was the godfather for all the local children, who are mostly poor--David referred to this system as "religious slavery." Eventually, services were moved to more humble locales and the poor were permitted to be godparents. In the meantime, Dorothy set out to help the people of her community with their basic needs, which helped her win the trust of the villagers.
She decided to start with children and women, who bear the burden of raising a family (due to largely absent fathers). She researched the Constitution and local laws, and discovered that the government was obligated to run a school and pay teachers. Since there was no school in the town, she decided to build one. With the help of the community, they built the first school, a small structure made of wood. When the local ranchers, the traditional oppressors of the region, found out, they arrived at the school in pick-up trucks. They ordered the villagers to tear down the school, piece by piece, and to load the wood in their trucks. The villagers obeyed, and the ranchers left with the remnants of the school.
But Dorothy had a unique advantage, David says, because she was a woman. She would soon learn that the ranchers would be against everything she did, and she'd have to battle them to get anything done, since even the government was afraid of them. But as a nun, she was untouchable--at least for awhile. After the first heartbreaking incident, she built thirty schools in the region, as well as setting up successful cooperatives and setting up social programs. She also managed to carry out an ambitious sustainable development project that even the local government had been incapable of implementing.
David is rightfully critical of Brazil, after dealing with the repercussions of his sister's death. "Corruption is one of the biggest tragedies," he told me. "How can this be called a Catholic country? What happened to the message?" he asked. He also points to the stark social and economic inequalities as a problem, and the exploitation of the poor as a serious injustice. After seeing what happened at the trial to convict Dorothy's killers, he is astounded that Brazil's president could condemn the crime, but yet nothing was done to rectify the situation. At least, he says, it's an embarrassment for the judicial system of Para, which has helped put it in the spotlight. But since the ranchers have connections in Brasilia, the case has shed light on the Brazilian judicial system as a whole. David wondered, "How can you have a civilization with a corrupt judicial system? How can you have law and order?"
He also touched on an issue that I noticed living in Rio. In the big cities, most people see the Amazon as something very far away and unrelated to their day-to-day life. But these people don't feel the Amazon is theirs unless they perceive a threat from foreigners trying to exert influence there. He compared this situation to a husband who neglects his wife but gets jealous if anyone dares to look at her. Yet despite this, the Amazon continues to be ravaged by illegal ranching and loggers, and little is being done to stop them. Global warming is something we all must be concerned with, he urged, and the destruction of the Amazon is "the greatest tragedy there is." Also, on the American side, the US continues to import illegal wood from Brazil, and American consumers continue to buy it.
But despite his criticism, David has a deep love for Brazil. He feels a special affinity for Brazil, since Dorothy was in fact Brazilian by law, which he feels makes him Brazilian, too. "Tell me I'm not Brazilian," he sometimes says to those who accuse him of being a gringo. Plus, "if I can put up with Bush, I can put up with this," he laughed, pointing out that he felt what the US government did in Iraq was an even greater travesty. He told me several times how many good people there were in Brazil that he'd come in contact with, and that Dorothy's murder didn't represent Brazil. He speaks a little Portuguese, and when he talks about the good things in Brazil, his voice brims with love. "The ranchers aren't Brazilian--they're thieves, who have no country," he said. "Why should thugs and thieves control this beautiful country?" He also teased me by telling me I was wrong to say that not all Brazilian women are beautiful. He told me about all the people in Brazil supporting Dorothy's cause, people fighting to maintain the progress she accomplished and people working to bring her justice.
In the end, David admits that "all we have is hope." He's hopeful that there will be justice and Dorothy's death will not be in vain. "Dorothy is a symbol of what we must all try to be," he told me. I couldn't agree more.
I'm going to hold a charity auction on the blog to benefit an NGO based in Rio--and you, the reader, get to decide! Based on some of the responses I got last week and on my own research, I've narrowed it down to four NGOs. Please read each of the descriptions and take a look at the websites before you vote!
1. Vetor Pre-Vestibular Comunitario: Located in Leblon and founded in 2000, this organization seeks to "democratize access to higher education to help needy students get into college." The NGO offers classes in various subjects, extracurricular activities, excursions, psychological support, and a library to help prepare students for the competitive college entrance exams. In 2006, 50% of students passed their college entrance exam, and in 2009, 36 students passed the exam, accepted to some of the best schools in the city.
2. Refazer: Founded in 1995 and located in Botafogo, this organization helps support young patients of the local public hospital, IFF. They help children and teens recover and try to prevent future disease, as well as supporting their families, to give them a better quality of life. The NGO gives patients' families medications, food, medical equipment, wheelchairs, clothing, diapers, water filters, blankets, and other necessary items. They help rebuild patients' homes to accommodate the patient's health. They have panels and classes about nutrition, violence, drugs, domestic violence, and family planning. They provide fun activities for both the children and their parents at the center, and have a jewelery-making class that enables mothers to learn a craft and earn money.
3. Sao Martinho: This organization runs three homes for street children in Rio de Janeiro. The children live at the centers, where they have access to art and dance classes, movie nights, sports, reading, drawing, and toys. The children are enrolled in school and given psychological and moral support at the centers. They receive health care and are registered with the government in order to receive their ID and other paperwork. Staff members attempt to reintegrate the children with their families, when possible.
4. Centro de Estudos e Acao Excola: Founded in 1986 and located in Lapa, this organization seeks to empower and educate marginalized children and teens. They have various educational, cultural, and entrepreneurial projects for vulnerable youth, especially street children. They have a project to support pregnant teens, a radio station run by street kids, an HIV prevention campaign, an entrepreneurial program for young women, and an alternative housing program for youth aged 18-21.
I'm on the look out for a great non-profit based in Rio. Ideally, it wouldn't be huge, like Afro Reggae, and definitely one without a sketchy record. I'm looking for one that does great work and always needs help with funding and supplies.
