FLORIANOPOLIS - Alfo Gente

Florianopolis is a lucky city. It´s a beach. It´s an island. It´s a lagoon. Mountains, trees, sand dunes... It´s got them all. It also rains, more than any place south of the Equator should. Seriously heavy rain. It´s the spring here, but you´d be forgiven for thinking it was Britain and not Brazil. Good thing it´s got all the afformentionned attractions or we´d be in real trouble.


The ´From the air´ series continues. Florianopolis. From the air.

I´m staying with a host family and communiacting in a bizarre mixture of Portuguese, English, French and German. The mother of the family, Zelia, has the rudimentry French. Lucinda, the maid of some twenty three years, is fluent in German (and laughs at all my efforts) and Tiago, my new little brother, has a few months English under his belt. Tiago lives in the exciting yellow house at the weekends and, when the summer arrives, plans to be surfing all the time. All sounds rather tiring to me. But I´m indebted to him for making me lots of little notes for differentiating my bedroom furniture. Assuming he didn´t lie, I´ll be awesome in Brazilian Ikea in just a few short weeks.


Tiago on one of the prime surfing beaches of Florianopolis. Not today, you understand.

This morning the six strong Florianopolis volunteer team started our six month stint in the favellas at the project Alfa Gente. It´s a school cum day care centre cum community centre which extends right into the favellas and which helps kids from birth to around twelve years old. The aim being to help them during their formulative years when home life is almost certainly a mixture of physical and verbal abuse and the seeds are sown for the type of life they will lead in the future. It´s a project with some incredible aims and which has been so well established that they´ve seen fruit many times in twenty six years (many of the current staff were former residents)

It´s a rough area, ruled by an uneasy balance of drug money and police intervention. Alfa Gente, though, is in an interesting position since the kids we´re looking after are the kids of the drug runners and everyone else in the favellas. It´s in everyone´s interest to protect the project and us, in our shiny blue T-shirts, get welcomed wherever we go. We could stand and wonder what some of the people we speak to do for a living but, really, that wouldn´t be the point. It´s a lesson in the fact that sometimes the only way to work is without judgement. That´s why Alfa Gente has survived for over two decades in an area which it should, by all rights, have failed in. And they´ve not stopped expanding their vision; they want to hear our input. Which is pretty exciting.

We´ve been split between the kids and Sarah and I will be working with the eight to ten year olds. They´re all lovely and excitable, and we get a long walk right through the favellas every day to see them (don´t worry, we have those funky blue T-shirts...) We´re also being helped by our translator, guide and all round crazy woman Gabby. Gabby works for Experimento Brazil. She is also a singer and a soap opera actress. When she´s not mocking our accents (with, it has to be noted, her bizarre Portuguese/American twangs) or playing with the kids she´s fielding calls from TV chat shows (or so she says...)


Global Adventures volunteers with Gabby, our flame haired woman about town. Spot the actress, everyone...

It´s been an incredible few days getting to know a new country, culture, city and project but we´re all surviving. Trips to the local mall, complete with Makro, C&A and Pizza Hut help to give us a taste of home without betraying our efforts at immersion. Heck, I even have a funky Brazilain SIM in my phone. Text me at on 5548 9613 8706. And give it to all your drug dealing friends; I´d be happy to chat to them about childcare techniques in basic Portuguese. Obrigado.


Florianopolis. Even when it´s night and raining, it´s still real pretty.