Sunday 25 May 2008

Of turtles, and death, and gold

This is the turtle that the kids found on the beach near the school, tangled in a fishing net, a few months ago. The poor thing's got a big tumour (you can see it if you look closely) on its left forelimb, probably due to water pollution...

Many things land on the dirty strip of sand that runs along the school... most of them sad reminders of the brutal and dirty reality our students live in.

The day when the body of a young teenager, dead, strangled, landed on that beach, I stopped, horrified, to think. What a violent, brutal world these kids live in. How close to death do they live! And what kind of a person does living so close to death and dirt make you? What becomes of your perception of life, of people, of good and bad? Every time I go to the school I hear a new story, the terrible life story of one of our students. Many lost their parents to drug trafficking, killed, assassinated. Many live very close to drug trafficking and are probably directly involved in it, maybe acting as couriers or sentry: they're the ones who crack fireworks when the police arrives in the favela, to warn the dealers. (The noise of these fireworks regularly wakes me up at night, coming from all surrounding favelas.) Many of the kids also live far away from their parents, who had to leave them with an aunt or neighbour to go and look for work far away.

What a hard, unforgiving life. I wonder then: how do these kids even manage to come to school, to sit and listen, even undisciplined as they are, to our lessons? If this is the only world they know, what can they expect from school? Surely, nothing. Least of all, that it should help them get out of that world of theirs. They know they're bound to remain in the favela, and perpetuate the situation... Who cares about school then....

But no, we cannot think like that. And many students are there to remind us that there is hope, that there is gold among all this dirt. The bright, the curious, the avid students, they're gold. And there are some in this school. They're the ones we have to work for.

Tuesday 20 May 2008

French connection



In Macae, I have started giving French classes to a group of really keen students who asked me to. So after classes on Fridays, we sit down in the refectory with Uelinton, Aurelio, Felipe, and talk about France and learn a bit of French. Our last class was about French culture, French food to be more specific. So we talked (dreamt!) about French bread, crêpes and croissants, about cheese and wine... Things that these kids have never seen or tasted but that most of them had heard of - like Uelinton, who'd heard about the Brie in a local TV series (telenovela) and about the crêpe suzette in a cartoon... I'd love to make them taste all these things, but they're, obviously, really expensive here. I'll try and organise a crêpe cooking class with them...

Room with a view



The view (nearly) from my window here in Santa Teresa. This picture's not very good, but I like the sky in it...

No, Rio's not always sunny... It's been really cold and rainy recently, 'winter' is coming!

Rio Graffitis



Dreams of a canal that's clean and blue...


The canal near the school in Macae - it's very, very dirty, more like an open air sewer than a canal ...

Sunday 11 May 2008

Um dia...

This week we worked with a poem by Arnaldo Antunes with one of our classes of 10-11 year-olds:

Um dia

1) sujar o pé de areia pra depois lavar na água
2) esperar o vaga-lume piscar outra vez
3) ouvir a onda mais distante po trás da mais próxima
4) não esperar nada acontecer
5) se chover, tomar chuva
6) caminhar
7) sentir o sabor do que comer
8) ser gentil com qualquer pessoa
9) barbear-se no final da tarde
10) ao se deitar para dormir, dormir

(Arnaldo Antunes is a poet but also a musician and artist, he worked with Marisa Monte and Carlinhos Brown as the Tribalistas...)

So we asked the kids to do the same thing as him: list 10 things that they would like to do one day, 10 desires.... The result was great, here are some of their sentences:

One day....

Walk on top of an elephant
Ride a giraffe
Have a strawberry milkshake
Go to the cinema
Jump into a river that's clean and blue*
Know how to sing in French
Go to Paris to have fun
Buy a country house for my mum and dad
Swim in a sea of chocolate
Take my girlfriend to have an ice-cream

*See picture above for explanation