People Power

World's 'first eco nightclub' to open

ITN - 2 hours 45 minutes ago

The "world's first eco nightclub" is due to open later in London with a high-tech danceflooor that generates electricity when danced on.

Surya - Sanskrit for Sun God - which admits cyclists and walkers for free, is the brainchild of property developer Andrew Charalambous, aka Dr Earth, who has invested £1 million of his own cash.

The club in Pentonville Road, Islington, north London, has its own wind turbine and solar energy system and there are plans to donate any surplus electricity to local residents....

You can read the rest of the story here.

It would be great if this were serious... It seems so simple, why not use people to produce energy? All clubs, and gyms, and schools, and dance studios should be like this. I support People Power.

I'm in Holland!

I've been in Europe for 10 days, filming the Frisian Solar Challenge, a solar boat race taking place in Friesland in the North of Holland. You can watch our films and read about the race on our team's blog.

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.

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 ...