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BRBRBR Language Tip

PORTUGUESE LESSONS FOR CHILDREN IN LONDON

‘We are organising a new program to teach Portuguese and Brazilian culture to students of all age ranges, but mainly for children of Brazilians living abroad. The lessons are free but we need to develop our teaching staff with volunteers’, says the coordinator of the project Andre Stefano Debiagi.

I read this comment on the site of the Real Magazine (which by the way is excellent) and I was immediately excited about it! My two kids and I already go to a weekly gathering of Brazilian mums and their children here in Enfield where we live. It is a great opportunity for them to be exposed to Portuguese regularly. But, I was missing the chance to offer them something more formal. Thanks to ABRIR, who are managing this scheme, now they will be able to have formal lessons as the ‘price’ is very accessible (free)! For more information ring 0207 833 4009 and ask to speak to Andre, or email him at asdebiagi@hotmail.com.

‘Copenhagen will not work if Brazil does not work’

The Western media are really waking up to the arrival of Brazil as a heavyweight on the international scene with many reporters speculating about the role the country will play in world politics, climate change and development. The Economist devoted its cover to Brazil last week.

And now, Channel 4 News in the UK ran a series of special reports from all over Brazil in the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Change talks this week. Everyone, it seems, wants the Brazilian view. Channel 4 want the Brazilian view because “Copenhagen will not work if Brazil does not work”. You can read about that here and if in the UK can watch the reports online.

International Inspiration

A love for sport is obviously a unifying factor for Brits and Brazilians alike. And, as we’ve mentioned on this blog, we can expect to some of the world’s best sport in these two countries in the coming few years.

When London won the bid for 2012 they pledged to invest in sport not just within the UK, but within developing countries. The pilot scheme called International Inspiration is presently operating in 5 countries one of which is Brazil. The aims of the project are to use sport as a means for development, unifying communities and providing the means for children to stay healthy, focussed and succeed. Within Brazil this has already spawned projects in Pernambuco, Alagoas, Ceará e Bahia and we can expect more to come as 2012 approaches. Stay informed here.

Here is a promotional video about the project in Portuguese with English.

Aprender

What is Aprender? (Taken from their website)

Aprender is a group of people that are devoted to the sharing of best practice within the field of education. Our vision is to help develop teachers in Brazil and other developing countries to improve the life chances of young people. With better education, students are more able to move out of poverty and reject criminal and drug-related lifestyles. That’s got to be good news! Aprender also works with local, regional, state and national government in the development of educational strategy and organisation.

Phil Hawkins writes a bit for our blog about how this ministry started:

Aprender has been linked with both government and churches in Brazil for the last 5 years. Through a very deliberate policy of getting to know the systems and culture within the education sector in Brazil and prioritising relationships, the time has been well spent and is now bearing fruit. Our number one aim initially was to ask the question “How can we help? How can we serve you?”. It’s an approach that opened doors. Like all foundations, much hard work needs to be done to begin with, and after the building is finished, few remember or can still see the underground evidence of past activity. But, the foundation is absolutely critical to the long-term life of the building. We also were keen to distance ourselves from ’salesmen’, pedaling educational resources and CD ROM sets or textbook launches. In a culture where bribery is commonplace, our non-commercial base was surprising and disarming and paved the way to genuine openness. The major challenge has been communication – isn’t it always?! Brazilians tend not to look at the inbox on their email too often, and certainly take a while to respond (sometimes up to 4 months). Frustrating at first, we have learned that this is the way things happen. Finding a Brazilian who spoke and was able to write a good standard of English was a massive breakthrough. 

The strengths of the partnership is that, although the project is very much ‘our idea’, it has been adopted and enhanced by the networks we have linked with. Government have been very interested, however, moving from polite interest to affirmative action has been more prolonged than we had anticipated. The Brazilian’s warmth, hospitality and readiness to support has been a major plus. The weaknesses of setting up a project ‘long distance’ is just that. The long distance has meant that having people on the ground, ready and able to volunteer has been a challenge. Again, through quiet determination and a bucket full of patience and faith, the passionate, life-loving Brazilian culture has been intertwined with the level headed, planned and methodical British culture. The result is so much better then the sum of the individual parts. For more information, please visit our website at aprender.co.uk.

by Phil Hawkins

BRBRBR Language Tip

The British Council

Have you heard of the British Council*? The British Council operates in 109 different cultures, seeking to strengthen educational and cultural links between host nations and Great Britain.  Some areas they are particularly interested in are: Science, Art, Governance, Human Right and English Language Teaching. In the case of the Britain Brasil Bridge, all areas are worth noting, however, the latter is probably of immediate benefit to our readers. If you are trying to learn English in Brazil, or in your home anywhere in the world, keep checking their website.

With respect to Brazil, the British Council host events often in English and Portuguese, provide advice on what schools/universities to go to in the UK and can offer some guidance on how best to learn (and teach!) English. We recommend you start here: the 10 most useful websites on English Language learning. Then, by all means, explore all the excellent  British Brazilian links you can find on there!

(*Please note, we now have a links column on the right hand side of our blog for websites which transit across the BRBRBRidge)

Brazilian Parties – The Follow-Up

Let’s play the association game. Street kids – poverty and need, England – wealth and charity, Carmem Mackle – organiser and visionary, November in England – grey and miserable, friends – helpers and givers. Put that all in a box, shake it together and what do you have? An incredible Brazilian Party organised in Aid of My Father’s House and the Good Shepherd Project.

Ok, so it takes more than just shaking a box to put together a high quality fundraising event. For about 3 months, Carmem Mackle and Sue Hanley have been planning the evening which was held on November 14^th in York at the Gateway Centre and we were there on the final day to help put the icing on the cake. We were all rushed off our feet as we aimed for the best  – high quality food, unique decor, authentic Brazilian music and dancing, and to raise as much money as we could for the causes. The results are out: each charity will be awarded about £1000 which translated into Brazilian Real goes quite a long way. With those figures, we all left feeling like the effort put in was worth every minute!

I would like to do a quick plug about the a music group which were the highlight of the evening: Samba York. Made up of students from York’s university, this group have an impressive set list. They donated their fees for charity but they are an EXCELLENT option if you are ever organising a Brazilian party.

You can see some photos of the event here.

Gilberto Freyre – BR BR BR pioneer

If you are Brazilian or if you have studied something about Brazilian history, you will have come across the name Gilberto Freyre. His background was as a sociologist but, really, he was simply a thinker, someone curious about life and making sense of it. He was born and bred in my home town, Recife, but what few people know is that he really felt quite ‘English’, choosing to wear a tweed jacket almost every day of his life. Because of this personal interest and what he saw around him – that is, an influx of white traders, missionaries, scientists, etc – he perceived the British were having an enormous impact on his Brazilian surroundings in the mid 1900s. Not in the traditional way – there were no major characters or big, extravagant landmarks. What he saw was in the everyday; people meeting, working and living with the British. His first source of evidence was in publications. Almost compulsively, he collected newspaper clippings of anything with a hint of Britishness. He collected so many that he published his observations on the material in a book entitled ‘Os Ingleses no Brasil’ (the English in Brazil), a book largely forgotten and not even translated into English.

However, the title has enjoyed a mini revival of late. TopBooks in Rio de Janeiro have reprinted it, with a modern cover. Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares-Burke, a Brazilian historian and expert of Freyre’s work, gave a lecture about ‘Os Ingleses no Brasil’ last week in London terming the book a ‘forgotten jewel’. Incidentally, Maria Lucia is married to a British Historian and lives in Cambridge.

Unfortunately, I missed the lecture but was happy to find this summary online. It is in Portuguese but I will (loosely) translate the last paragraph as it gives a good flavour of what the book concludes:

‘…a history aware of the blacks and whites of relationships between cultures, that the seemingly insignificant minor acts reveal, will see that not only does the richer and more dominant culture penetrate the poorer, more submissive culture,  but that there is an interchange of culture, which you must look carefully to see. After all, if you can say that the British in Brazil created a white, suave revolution (as Freyre says), then it was also met with some resistance, it also had to accommodate to the local culture, and to some degree be penetrated by the culture it invaded. For Freyre, there is no doubt that as Brazil was being extensively anglicised, the British were also becoming more Brazilian. It remains to be seen what exactly they took back with them in their luggage other than the exotic butterflies, parrots and monkeys, a taste for sweet guava and cheese, and the feminine furniture with more curvilinear designs (as opposed to the geometric, ‘dry and anglicised’ designs). Amongst many of the other studies Freyre suggested in his lifetime, this one also remains to be completed.’

Brazil is the 21st Century Power to Watch

Thanks to a Brazilian friend, I read my first article in the UK edition of the Financial Times today. On October 20^th, Michael Skapinker announced that his top story for the next year would be Brazil. In his article, which you can read here, he lists the many reasons for this conclusion and shares about his first experience in Rio and Sao Paulo. Unfortunately, although the piece provides glimmers of hope for the Brazil of tomorrow, the FT journalist has a lot to say about the violence in the Brazil of today. Rightly, he points out that if this issue is not tackled, violence could be a huge impediment in fulfilling the country’s dreams of economic power.

Regardless, the Financial Times are hosting an Investing in Brazil Summit on November 5^th 2009 in which President Lula himself and a strong delegation of Brazilian economic leaders are coming to an invitation only event in the London Marriott, Grosvenor Square. It seems like Skapinker has managed to convince at least a few dignitaries that ‘Brazil is the 21^st Century power to watch’.

BRBRBR: Language Tip

LOCAL LIBRARIES

On my first trip to the library in England, someone saw me pick up some books in English and ‘read’ them to my children in Portuguese. I was obviously struggling to simultaneously translate the words because a fellow mum said ‘Did you know you can get bilingual books here?’. To which I replied ‘Oh, its OK, we speak Portuguese’, expecting there to only be bilingual books in Urdu, Chinese, Spanish, French - the more likely candidates. The persistent mother, however, did not listen to my reply and went to the appropriate shelf coming back with two children’s books in both English AND Portuguese. I was astonished. This was a small library, round the corner from our house with an incredible selection of bilingual books!

I have since visited many other libraries and discovered that at almost every one, you can find bilingual books in one of two places: the children’s section and the ‘community languages’ section. Additionally, you can borrow many ‘teach yourself’ books to get you started in any language, including Portuguese. This is a good suggestion for someone who cannot afford expensive courses or textbooks as this is all FREE! It is fairly easy to join a local library in England, just walk in with some proof of address. To find a library near you visit this site.

It is a shame that, in our experience, we have not found Brazilian cities to be as well equipped when it comes to libraries. If they do exist, they are pretty miserable places with a limited selection. If anyone knows of good libraries in Brazil, with a good selection of English books, let us know!

My Father’s House

Recent statistics have shown that in Brazil there are over 25 million children who live in extremely deprived conditions, a vast majority of them living upon ‘favelas’ (shanty towns). Eight million of those 25 million children live rough on the streets and a third of those eight million children will be killed before they reach the age of 18 through gang violence.

‘My Father’s House’ is an NGO project working with these children in the north east of Brazil in a city called Olinda, just north of Recife. The project is part of the Anglican Church of Living Waters which is situated in a favela at the side of the city’s huge open air rubbish dump. Many of the people who live in this favela find their food and material to build their shacks from the actual rubbish dump. Many children are sent to work on the dump by their families instead of going to school. Some of the children have had to leave their families due to abuse (both physical and sexual) or simply because their parents can’t, or don’t want to, look after them. Fairly quickly these young children realise that selling cocaine is a better ‘career’ than picking through rubbish for a living and so join the drug trafficking gangs of which there are many on the favelas. Obviously a career in a gang is a very dangerous one (boys as young as 10 carry guns) and eventually their lives become endangered either from rival gangs or from their own gang if they have done something wrong. This is a very serious situation since statistics from just our favela alone show that, on average; four young people are killed each week from gang violence.

My Father’s House works in 3 main ways to prevent this from happening:

1)  The Safe House – This is a big house in the city of Olinda which can house up to 12 boys at a time. Some boys need to leave the favela due to various reasons, either their lives are in danger or due to family issues. Currently there are 10 boys (aged between 8 – 16) who live full time in the house. Here they have the opportunity of education and to change their lives. We try to work closely with their families in the hope that one day the family might be reunited. Basically, the project tries to save the boys both physically, from their surroundings and dangers, and spiritually through faith in Jesus Christ.

2)  The Christian Centre of Family Support – Is the first point of call for many children on the favela. This is a school which provides education support for over 150 children a day and which also provides activities to keep the kids off the streets. Relationships are built with the children and the families which enables us to recognize which children need the most help.

3)  The Living Waters Institute – usually referred to as ‘the Farm’.  This is a converted farm which currently is used for camps for the children. We’d like to use it full time, perhaps for older teenagers (16+) who are seriously in danger from the gangs, i.e. gang members who have decided to try and leave the gangs and change their lives.

Over the years we have relied on English short term volunteers and teams who come over and spend some time with us in Brazil helping us in this work. It’s a fantastic experience for both sides; for the boys to realise that someone cares for them so much that they’re prepared to travel half of the globe to be with them; and for the volunteer whose eyes are opened to the need, not just in Brazil, but the entire world. Some English people have decided to stay – Ian Meldrum, who first began the project, has been here for over 30 years and I, myself, first came as a short term volunteer 5 years ago and stayed ever since.

The work in Brazil is hard but is very rewarding as we see changes and renewed hope in the lives of the children. It is these changes that encourage us daily in the battles that we face. Perhaps an example which sums this up is the following; Jonathan was one of our boys who spent 10 months with us in the project. He was involved with the gangs and was eventually shot and killed by the gangs when he ran away from the project – he was just 13 years old. The Bible says that the Devil comes to steal, destroy and to kill and that is exactly what he is doing to the lives of these children; he steals their lives, destroys their lives and ultimately kills them; and the children steal, destroy and kill in return. But Jesus says, in John’s gospel, that he came ‘so that they might have life – and life to the full.’ This is why My Father’s House and Living Waters Church exists – to try and show this great truth to the families and children that we meet.

In York, on the 14^th of November, there will be an event to raise funds for this project. See the flyer on the side and if you would like to come, please get in touch.

Written by Andy Roberts