Hello from São Paulo, Brasil

I'm in São Paulo, Brasil for a (far too) short stay. I'm here for meetings with an organization called INMED Partnerships for Children.

I'm here alone, which is unusual for these trips. I usually have another team member with me. Knowing I would coming here alone, I spent a couple weeks trying to turn my awful Spanish and passable French into a rudimentary grip of Portuguese. Or, at least enough Portuguese so that I could greet people warmly, feed myself, get around, and find a bathroom. It's amazing how you can boil interaction down when you have to.

My resultant Portuguese is not terribly effective in complicated situations, but I have found I learned enough to not be lost. I go to the restaurant, and I can ask for coffee with milk, water without bubbles, tomato sauce on my ravioli, and thank the waiter for a delicious meal. I can get in a taxi and be taken to my hotel, and I can tell the driver that I am from Washington, DC, that I like Brasil, and that SP is bloody massive. Well, muito grande, anyway.

I've never been good at languages, but even a few words are enough to be empowering. In the classroom, or with Very Important People, I tend to freeze up, and be embarassed at my silly accent or grammatical mistakes. On my own, it's such an amazing feeling to say something in another language and be understood. More often than not, the person is just excited you've tried (particularly if you're American).

It makes me want to learn more.

But let's get back to what I am doing here, which is far more interesting than my attempts at being a polyglot.  I'm finishing up some work researching a number of programs in primary schools in India, China, and Brasil that are funded by the same multinational corporation. The Brazilian partner is the aforementioned INMED.

INMED Brasil undertakes work in the poorest and most underserved parts of the country to improve the health and lives of children and families. The project I've been privileged to observe is called Rede In-Formação,

Favela

an effort to provide trained, skilled Master Teachers in every school who can serve as mentors, troubleshooters, and sounding boards for teachers who teach 1-4 grades in the community of Fransisco Morato, one of the many favelas for which cities in Brasil are becoming increasingly notorious.

Francisco Morato doesn't feel like a favela to me, but then, my experience is admittedly pretty limited. There can be no doubt that it is a relatively impoverished community, and I know that violence, crime, drugs, and a dissolving family structure make it a challenging place to work. At the same time, it doesn't have the dire feeling of a shanty town or a series of mud and jute-bag dwellings of the sort one finds in Johannesburg, or Mumbai, or, indeed, Rio de Janeiro. 

One of the executives with whom I met today described the fear some have of even going to Francisco Morato to visit, and I have to admit I was a little shocked. As a stranger, maybe I see it differently? Maybe I have gotten desensitized to poverty, after spending time in India, in Africa, in China, in Sri Lanka, in the Mississippi Delta and in Southwest DC. Maybe I am just naive. Or maybe my own background, growing up "working poor," causes me to look past all of this and just relate to the people without noticing it is a place one might feel afraid. I've felt more afraid meeting Ambassadors, but then, maybe that just shows where I come from.

My hotel, the wonderful George V, has CNN International. The other day, during a special on African tourism, they explored the rising demand for "slum tourism." In South Africa and Kenya, residents of some of the poorest neighborhoods in the world have developed tours for curious foreigners looking to gain a window into how the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" live. I took one of these tours, myself, of the townships of Johannesburg, a few years back. I went to see Mandela's house, the churches that housed those who resisted apartheid, and the museums and monuments to those killed in the fight. However, we also went into shanty towns, where a guide took us through the camp, showed us the latrines donated by Oprah Winfrey, and showed us his own home that he shared with his sister and father, who kindly demonstrated the kerosene lamp.

I've kept a journal through all of my travels, and my writing that evening spoke of how uncomfortable I felt, touring this community as if it were a zoo and not the home of people who deserve to live with dignity, not be gawked at. At the same time, the photos I have taken there, and in India, and Niamey, and Hechi, and São Paulo have shown my friends, family, and colleagues a side of life they live in ignorance of. Does that amount to a greater good? I'm not sure. Does the small amount of money that slum tourism can bring to a community make it worthwhile? Again, I don't know.

I go to visit some classrooms tomorrow, which I always get the greatest charge from. I'll write more about INMED and the work they do here tomorrow. And then I will head back to the US, and back to reality, in which I need to visit a dying mother and pick up the ashes of my poor Ritz who I had to put down last week and deal with competing demands for my time from my two jobs and the ongoing attempts to diagnose and treat my sleep and endocrine disorders. Good times. I think I might rather stay here.