FLORIANOPOLIS - Naughty Teenagers and Santa´s Scary Chistmas

I realised that I couldn´t possibly leave Florianopolis without reporting on a final couple of Phworld worthy occurances. Firstly, Harry Potter. This weekend was basically National Potter Craziness here in Brazil. Not only was Half Blood Prince finally published in Portuguese, but also Goblet of Fire arrived at cinemas. The crazy people were out in force. I queued behind some delightfully scary people dressed in full Hogwarts school uniforms (cloaks, hood, ties etc. etc.) for tickets to the film and got to join in with the pattern of cheering at very bizarre moments during the film (basically, whenever someone died)

Briefly, and because I know I won´t get away without doing it, my review. If you´re not a fan of ponderous prose (although if you´re reading this blog, I can´t see how you´re not) then you´d do best to ignore the next couple of paragraphs and get straight to the pretty pictures.

It´s pretty much fantastic, I´m pleased to say. The script is easily the best adapted of any of the Potter films so far, with most of the redundant plotting from the novel cleanly dispensed with. In fact, there´s serveral things which work *better* than in the original novel including the continued empowerment of Neville Longbottom (something of an underdog hero in the film series) and a much better sense of exactly who´s plotting against whom. But, really, the best thing about it is, like Prisoner of Azkaban, the employing of a director who knows how to make human dramas instead of big fantasy films. Mike Newell may not know much about dragons and broomsticks (although he does well with both) but he knows a heck of a lot about fourteen year olds, school discos and embarassing teenage dating trauma. It´s the series´ greatest strength that it´s taken J.K. Rowling´s edict strictly about having the teens grow up through each entry. Whereas Star Wars and James Bond pump out the same film time after time, the last couple of Potters have given us angst, hormones aplenty and, this time around, our first cuss words and even conversations about underage sex. (Which, when I remembered everyone involved in was meant to be fourteen, I suddenly felt very strange about watching. Kind of like how a parent must feel when their child starts talking about sex at the dinner table) The parental groups probably hate it but I´m more and more impressed how well the series is doing. If it carries on using such interesting directors it might be in danger of redefining the childrens´ movie in the same way the Potter books occassionally redefine the childrens´ book.

That said, it´s not quite as good as Azkaban for a few reasons. The first ten minutes or so are a lesson in how *not* to enduce a headache in your viewing audience. First we´re in one place, then we´re not, then the Quiddich World Cup begins and, then, sort of ends. Very bizarre. Once we get to Hogwarts things slow down a bit and the sparkly dialogue takes over. But, after the Mexican flights of fantasy and big band craziness in the last film, the production and sound design is just a little bit too bland. I´m a big fan of composer Patrick Doyle but the music is all pretty anonymous aside from the odd bit of ´jumpy thumpy´ every so often. And whoever decided that Lord Voldermort´s return should take place on a set designed to look *exactly* like the inside of a studio really needs their head examining. Voldermort prances around his little stage like a pantomime villan (not Ralph Fiennes´ fault given that he´s acting beneath ten inches of bizarre makeup) and that´s not quite right for the lord of all evil. As a result, the high point of the novel becomes a bit silly in the film. But you can´t have everything, I suppose. Other random gripes: (A) The casting of Quddich Goddess Cho Chang as a teeny little girl with a Northern accent. She´s meant to be Harry´s dream girl. Instead, she´s the girl next door. (B) The usual wasting of pretty much every British actor with four seconds of screentime and two lines. Alan Rickman suffers this time around, as does Gary Oldman. But kudos to Mike Newell for finally giving Maggie Smith something to do. (C) Jarvis Cocker´s cameo. Which is every bit as awful as you could possibly imagine.

Basically, it´s great. Really great. Not the greatest kind of great, but much better than bland. And given we´re into the fourth of the series now, when most other franchises start to sink, that´s a big achievement. And there´s swearing in it. What´s not to love?... Okay, I´m done. Now stop asking me about it, okay? (And, before you ask, I won´t see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe until I get to Chile)


Santa´s Christmas Workshop, Brazilian style. Where good taste and commercialism collide. At least the Alfa Gente kids seem to be enjoying it.

The other big trip of the week was taking some of the Alfa Gente kids to meet Santa Claus. Since, you know, it´s the middle of November and so it´s about jolly time we started dragging kids to these things and getting them thoroughly hyped up about them. This being the Brazilian summer, though, it was obviously going to be a bit different than your average hour in a cold shopping centre. Florianopolis, though, has some very bizarre ideas about such things. They took a rather nice nineteenth century pastel coloured building in the historic centre of the city, covered it in fake santas and then inserted a cookie basking factory onto the second floor. For no particular reason. The other rooms are similarly decked out in plastic Santas of all shapes and sizes, and some very bizarrely crafted exhibits combining period furniture and red ribbon. One room, where Santa is working on his sleigh, looked a little bit too much like him performing a bizarre sex act on his lead reindeer for me to be entirely comfortable bringing ten year olds in to see it. There was no sign of what this three floor building was used for the other ten months of the year but I wonder if they just simply strip out the Santas and have it open as some sort of historical piece. If you took out all the plastic and tinsel it would look like your average museum. It´s really interesting what a complete disregard for taste can do for a building.


Gabi, Attiq, Lucy, Sarah and Jess all awaiting Santa Claus´ judgement and free lollies. But do we think they´ve all been good little children this year, boys and girls?

And then, even as I was thinking about registering my disapproval, I discovered that Santa Claus himself was in residence to answer my queries about his curious sense of interior decoration. So I lined up with the ten year olds to get my turn on his knee. Of course, when the moment came I was torn between having an epic Portuguese discourse about the commercialisation of a Christian holiday and posing for silly pictures. Reluctantly, the adult in me had to give way and let my younger self reign. I blame Santa himself in part, though, since as you can see, he truly was one of the most comically dressed Santas I have ever encountered. I realise that getting truly old people to sit in costume for hours at a time can lead to dehydration, overheating, prematue death and other annoyances but, really, couldn´t they at least have found someone old enough to have some facial hair of his own?


Note that whenever one meets Santa, it is customary to adopt the Macauly Culkin facial expression. This applies in other countries too, not just Brazil.

And so as quickly as it had begun, it was over. After our Santa encounter was completed we were hastily led around the back alley and out of his post colonial pink palace. The whole thing had been weird, trippy and perhaps slightly traumatic. But it hadn´t cost a penny, and had given a group of children all the lollies they could suck on. And then I remembered how in shopping centres worldwide, other Santas were doing exactly the same thing, in much less impressive surroundings and charging money for the privildge. They may have defiled a building, but nobody had to feel physcially poorer for the experience. Just emotionally so. And, really, isn´t that what Santa´s grotto and, indeed, the modern Christmas should really be all about?

Merry Christmas, y´all.

FLORIANOPOLIS - A Day in the Life

This will probably be the last Florianopolis post in the blog. There´s only three weeks to go and, as I sit here booking bus trips for New Zealand and researching harvest jobs in Australia, I realise the time is ticking away. So before leaving the ickle costal place where I´ve spent the last eight weeks, I wanted to fill in the gaps of what I´ve been doing, and some important Brazilian observations which need to be made.


The Estreito favella in Florianopolis. We´ve been working somewhere around the base of this hill. Note how the buildings get more shack like as they go up the slope. Some of the ones at the top don´t even have electricity.

This is where we´ve been working. Every day we walk the fifteen minutes from the main road into the favella: a part of town which the Florianopolis authorities are so very proud of that they don´t even put it on their maps. Seriously: there´s just a big white hole where hundreds of people live. And most middle class Brazilians, therefore, know nothing about the favellas except not to go there. Nothing, nada, zip. Which is pretty extrodinary when you consider how many Brazilians live in these places compared to how many Westerners live in US/UK slums. And you can at least get street maps of those.

Alfa Gente´s building is at the base of the hill. Funnily enough, although the whole area looks like slums from a distance there are several well developed, nay, really nice houses. Two reasons: (1) Favellas tend to grow up in spaces between exisiting developments, thus taking advantage of the local infastructure (hacking electricity cables etc.) and (2) Some of the folks who live in the favellas are actually relativly wealthy. That´s drug dealer wealthy, to you and I. But go far enough up the hill and you´re going to find some desperatly poor people in some desperatly shaky shacks. One time, I went up to one of my kid´s houses at the top of the hill and chased chickens around the foundations of two wooden houses for half an hour.


Jess and Sarah on the street to work. Kinda narrow. Kinda smelly.

Most of the area is, though, as cramped and poor as you´d expect. There are some neat little cafes literally dug into the sides of buildings, and as many Coca Cola signs everywhere as you would expect. And there are lots of people. Wandering through the steets, taking their children places but, mostly, just hanging out. Maybe they´re looking for another oppotunity to support their life of crime. Or maybe they´re just hanging around because they have nothing else to do. Or maybe, just maybe, they´re actually doing what we sometimes forget people in poor housing do and that´s have community. There´s an intricate structure of service industries in this favellas: some folks spend their days digging out stones from a local pit, then another group will take them to the latest building project where somebody else will be building or renovating tiny buildings.


Wherever they are in the world, you can guarantee that a camera will make all kids stop what they´re doing and pose.

Alfa Gente as part school and part creche serves, for the mostpart, as a way of keeping the kids away from the hanging around side of life and help them to join the community side / go into schools. It´s not strictly a religious enterprise, but it´s obvious that as with most charity efforts the blood sweat and tears of the founders over the last twenty years or so were inspired by faith (why else would anyone bother, right?) As such, there´s nmot a whole lot of set lessons and whatnot to deal with. Individual classes have individual teachers who devise their own programmes. In some rooms, I get the feeling that they see the job as glorified babysitting. Whereas in my room with the awesome recycling skills of Lucinda, nobody gets through the day without painting, cutting or paper macheing something (or someone) Fights, bites and hair pulling are all par for the course. So there will be a few hours of assorted making and fighting until food.


Feeding time. Rice. Beans. Repeat until bloated.

Ah yes, rice and beans. The staple almoçar (lunch) diet of Brazilans. You may find it with some meat and veg on the side. Maybe even some offcuts of pork in the mix but there isn´t a whole lot of variation on the theme. Thankfully, as something of a rice freak, I´ve found the whole thing delicious. I guess people with other tastes just starve to death or head for the border. The kids have wonderfully developed eating habits. Sadly, eating is something that a lot of them don´t get to do at home. So they do it in spades at Alfa Gente.

The stories of home life vary but range from tales of neglect (some families have five or six kids to try and cope with) to the downright tragic. Some of the kids have been threatened with violence, many have been victims to it. One mother held a knife to the throats of both her kids and when they´re desperatly craving attention, you wonder if they know about it.


Sarah hard at work on the sleeping part of the day. Always a highlight. That´s the concept of sleeping, not necessarily Sarah being asleep.

After lunch, sleep is a necessity for everyone invovled. It´s an exhausting eight hours all in all, even if the kids sometimes sleep for two of them. Actually, the creche opens as early as 8am and closes as late as 6pm for the late leavers. Those are some long hours, and it´s no wonder that there´s a big turnover among the volunteers in the classrooms. Industrial action is a way of life throughout Brazil. It´s often a good idea to map out walking routes to anywhere you go on a daily basis, because you might wake up one morning and find the buses are on strike. Or the schools. Or, indeed, the post office (the latter might just be being incessently slow, though. Difficult to tell sometimes) There was a public holiday for All Souls Day at the beginning of November (interesting day when you find the most full places on the island are the graveyards) which became a six day weekend because of various staff shortages/strikes at school.

We sometimes wonder what the kids are doing with all this time off. When they come in on Mondays they´re usually manic after, we assume, a weekend of running free with little attention. But they´re also more hungry and need to sleep a lot longer, which implies some worrying things. Of course, this isn´t *all* the kids, and having visited quite a few of their homes it´s obvious there is a lot of love in this favella. There are, unfortunatley, a lot of other things lurking around there. And the saddest thing is that it seems the whole of Brazilian middle class society is catered to simply pretend none of them are there. Well, they do. And so there´s a small, but important, consolation that the few of you who will read this now know about them too.


The gappers at Alfa Gente, pre-cast-off, wearing our wonderful "don´t shoot us" T-Shirts. Back row: Moi, Attiq, Phinder. Front row: Nicola, Sarah and Lucy. None of us got shot. The system works.