Monday, May 7, 2012

Emergency Family Aid in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

 

NOTE: SEE VIDEO BELOW

Looking out the window at my brother's apartment in Rio, was one of the first breathtaking views I’ve had the privilege to experience. To the left, you see Ipanema: the richer side of society, where there are nice apartment buildings and expensive cars occupying the streets. And exactly to the right, perched on top of a hill, sits the Cantagalo favela (which is a shanty town in Brazil), where houses are built on top of one another, and poverty is sweeping the streets instead of nice cars.

Most middle or upper-class Brazilians would never step foot in a favela. I was happy to announce that after my fifth day in Rio, I was experiencing the other side of life, the one that most Brazilians have never experienced. A short bus ride away, my brother and I arrived at the base of the largest favela in Latin America: Rocinha, which is known to house somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 people. Perched on top of a hill, Rocinha overlooks the nicest neighborhoods in Rio. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty are separated by nothing more than a road. A lot of attention has been given to Rocinha because within the last 8 months, the police have instituted a new policy. They have forced drug traffickers out of the streets, increasing public security and bringing social services to these neighborhoods. Sadly, despite this new policy, there is  still a big drug trade, along with crime that’s associated with it. The work we were going to be doing was centered in a neighborhood called Ropa Souja, which is the poorest neighborhood in Rocinha.  Within this neighborhood, and all of Rocinha, there are two major problems that need addressing. One of the problems is that most of the mothers are single mothers, making it hard for them to find work when they have to take care of their children. The second problem is that the kids within this neighborhood recieve a very poor education; their school day lasting for only 4 hours each day. Due to the shortage of an adequate education system, these kids spend more time out on the streets than in school, leading many of them down the path of drug gangs, violence and all-too-often, an early death. With those two issues in mind, my brother brought me to a project that he’s been assisting on an institutional level. U.M.P.M.R.S (Uniao de Mulheres Pro Melhoramento de Ropa Souja) has been around for thirty years and has grown to become an integral piece of the community. Over the last three decades, they have grown in size and scope, literally improving the lives of thousands of local families. The main components of the project are:
  • Day care / nursery, which allows those single mothers to go out and work to support their family.
  • Oficina De Saber: An after-school project for kids between the ages of 7-15, providing them with supplemental education, tutoring, and cultural activities.
  • All the families involved with this program recieve free access to doctors, dentists, psychs that volunteer their time to assist these children and their families. ‘
  • The project has it’s own team of social workers that go out and visit the families and find ways of assisting them whenever possible.

Since my brother Adam has worked with this project before (and is already supporting the project with donations), we were able to ask the director if she knew of any afflicted family that was in a particularly rough spot. We explained to the director that we wanted to be able to help out a family with the money I had raised previous to my trip. When she heard this, her eyes lit up as she started to tell us the story of this young single mother and her two children whose house just burnt down. The mother, having been forced to live on the streets after her step-father sexually abused her, has been struggling to feed her two young children without a job. We were able to visit the house that they were living in, a cement made house that still had the lingering smell of smoke. There is one tiny window in the front, but besides that, there is no way for the air inside this house to circulate, leaving it stale and bitter, making it unbelievably hard to breathe. Just after two minutes, I found myself struggling to breathe comfortably. The sight was absolutely disgusting. It didn’t take long for my brother and I to decide that we were going to help this family in any way possible. The task of finding them a new house was already being taken care of, so what we decided to do was go out and buy them some necessary living supplies.


You don’t think a few kitchen supplies, mattresses and pillows will turn someone’s life around, but when you’ve been sleeping on the floor with a flat pillow along side the  bugs, even the tiniest things are enough to make someone happy. We shopped within the street market for about two hours with the mother and her two kids before we were able to make our hike back up to her house. Carrying on our backs, we had a water filter, mattresses, pillows, cleaning supplies, toiletries, food, kitchen supplies and even a few new toys for the kids.
The family will be getting a new house soon and with the help of U.M.P.M.R.S, and we are hoping the mother will be able to get a job. It’s great to donate money to a family, knowing that sometime down the road, that money will be put to use. But when you have the opportunity to interact with that family and get them the things they need at that very moment, it’s even more rewarding. It is amazing how much we were able to buy with only $400. The lives of this family have been seriously improved thanks to this donation, so thank you so much to all of you that contributed to the cause!

PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO: