Today was the first day of official orientation. After a brief morning jog towards Ipanema with Hillary we had some platanitos (perdao - plataninhos) and met the group and Prof. Lucas to go to PUC (fondly referred to as "pooky" OOOOOOCHI- so cuuute). Our classroom had a wonderful view, and the campus is filled with wonderful trees, wraps around the hill and has a small river at the center. At PUC we covered the basics, safety, transportation and discussed the various projects that we would be working on.The majority of the students will be doing some combination of human rights work with creating media. Hillary and I will be working with CDI - (Comitê para Democratização da Informação - esto para ser su blog). Where we will be helping to run a workshop with children using the FlipCams (the wonderful little camera with which I uploaded the video of Tucho and Naki.
After a delicious lunch (I have to learn to think ahead at the kilo-restaurants bc I always end up with a tremendously heavy plate and a huuuuge meal), Prof. Florian Hoffman of PUC spoke to us about the human rights and NGO situation in Rio.
Human rights issues in Rio are mainly divided between the urban and the rural however, it is impossible to look at the urban favelas without considering what the land distribution policies have done for the people who live in the rural areas of the country. Many of these people are forced to leave an agrarian lifestyle and try to eek out a living in the outskirts of the major cities. This of course leads to overcrowding.The situation is complicated when it comes to working with human rights. As in many Latin American nations there are problems with corruption ranging from the police force up to government officials.
Nevertheless I know it is going to be an exciting project getting to work with CDI which has such a great history of work with information distribution and working to teach the public about human rights. This whole week the group will be meeting a new NGO every day. It's going to be a long, but very eventful week. Hopefully I will have more time to check in.
Un ABRAZOOOOOOOTE a todos!
PS -- Jayar how do I make the pictures smaller?
2 comments:
This is so cool. The migration problem you are witnessing in Rio is very typical for South America and generally all of the Third World. An agrarian life means hardship and poverty, because people get very low prices for their goods and have to live from what they grow. Global Warming also presents a major issue, because if it doesn't rain for one season...there will be no money and no food. Centralized governments are a huge problem, because all the money goes to the big cities and rural areas are forgotten...Adding corruption and classism to the equation just makes it incredibly hard for poor people to move up. Cool that you get to see all this!
Yeah, I mean Global Warming aside small scale farming is simply being pushed out by huge agribusinnessess which are usually welcomed by the state because it means a larger influx of foreign direct investment. Unfortunately until there are some major policy shifts in agriculture towards subsistance farming (which, of course would help combat global warming in itself) there isn't a real possibility for an end to rural to urban migration.
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