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.