Brazil: A Hopeful Future

For two days this week, we worked at an organization called Criança Esperança. The main objective of Criança Esperança is to improve the lives of children by keeping them out of the streets during non-school hours and providing with supplemental activities such as theater class, English class, and physical education in a safe environment.  

The service learning project I worked on was repainting a small corridor at the Criança Esperança facility and participating in the physical education classes. Although at first I was skeptical about how much learning I would get out of these activities and how helpful my participation would be to the organization, the grateful faces and appreciative handshakes showed me that by doing something that the organization needed, even as simple as painting a wall, can be of great help to a nonprofit organization which has many things it wants to accomplish only to be limited by funding availability.  

Participating in the physical education class benefited me because I was able to practice my Portuguese with the children. It also benefited the physical education teacher because there are often more kids in his class than he could realistically supervise, and the additional help was clearly appreciated. The children also enjoyed having guests as well as the additional competition we provided in basketball and futsal games.  

Throughout this trip to Rio de Janeiro, we have been lucky to stay at one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Brazil, Ipanema. We have visited one of the best public schools in Rio, and we have also visited pacified favelas with established organizations such as Criança Esperança, that are trying to create opportunities for the youth of the favelas. The places we have visited only tell us part of the story however, as a majority of Brazilian schools are of low quality. In our pre-trip lessons we learned that Brazilian education is relatively weak, represented by 88.6% literacy rate, a low literacy rate compared to other countries. We also learned during Pedro Evora’s lecture that there are over 625 favelas in Brazil, but only 25 have been pacified. Although the places we have visited are of higher quality than average, we have been able to see that Brazil is capable of making strides in improving its poverty and education systems. 

It seems that Brazil is pacifying the favelas around Rio de Janeiro in attempt to get ready for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Hopefully, Brazil’s efforts at the favelas will continue even after these events have passed. Brazil has also worked on improving poverty and education which they have also successfully been able to do despite all the corruption and bureaucracy present in the Brazilian government. When talking with our Brazilian lecturer’s and locals, all of them seem to have great hope for Brazil in the future, despite Brazil’s current problems. This hopeful mentality seems to be part of the “Jeitinho Brasileiro”, which is the mentality that by being friendly, creative, and by having a positive outlook, Brazilians can solve all problems.  

As we near the end of this trip, I have seen that Brazil has many difficult social problems it needs to tackle. Throughout this trip I have seen evidence of Brazil making vast improvements in short periods of time, especially in terms of education and safety issues in favelas. Although Brazil still has a lot of work to do to improve these social indicators, I believe that with Brazilian hope and perseverance they will eventually get there.