Tricia Perry’s Blog

Okay, let’s see…weekend was low-key and awesome, hung out largely in an artsy hill neighborhood called Santa Teresa. Even hung off the side of a streetcar on our way up on Sunday, was quite adventurous and the views were great. My apologies that these posts aren’t particularly illustrated…I haven’t been wandering around with a camera for various reasons.

Back in class on Monday, we started the day with a rare visit to the Brazil branch of the Ford Foundation. I’m definitely interested to learn more about the operations of their New York flagship office, but seems their name is on most things human-rights-related down here, so it was nice to learn a bit about their agenda.

In the afternoon we ran back to PUC for a presentation about Olhares de Morro. The guy who runs the organization is a French art photographeur who has organized various young photographers living within the favelas to sell their work and exhibit internationally. Vincent made it clear that he is not an ‘educator’ but a professional working among other professionals, which was a refreshing take on the youth media model. Their work was pretty impressive, too….we even stopped by their studio in Lapa on Wednesday afternoon.

Monday night saw the first of our sangria episodes, at a chill outdoor bar in Ipanema. We’ve got a fun crew of people around here, for sure.

Tuesday saw us back at VivaRio for a talk on ‘Digital Inclusion’ – it seems my initial research on web access in Brazil was optimistic at best (I should hopefully have better numbers sometime soon, the woman speaking offered to send us the presentation). She also spoke about the intensely concentrated media conglomerates in this country, and the amount of media outlets owned by politicians and their families…a recipe for badness, essentially. I’ve been watching the nightly TV news since that talk, and picking up another paper periodically.

Wednesday we spent the morning at the Museo do Indio for a neat exhibit on the Tisakisu group in the Amazon. It was their wish to use various media (video, audio, photo, print) to preserve elements of their culture in a time in which mainstream Brazilian TV is occupying the attention of their youth.

After sangria episode number two, that afternoon in the Cinelandia area (nothing quite like plastic tables in a plaza), we took our drunken posse to an excellent multilingual bookstore in Centro. We then had an opening that evening for a photo exhibit done by our professor. I had the long-awaited pleasure of meeting Graziela of Avaaz, as well, along with a very cool friend of hers from South Dakota.

Thursday morning we headed out to Cidade de Deus to visit a program run by CUFA. The presentation was unfortunately quite disjointed for an organization that sounds supercool (mission has to do with using hip-hop culture to build critical consciousness and self-esteem among youth) but I did come out with a much greater appreciation for grafitti in this country.

In the afternoon we were back at Nos do Cinema for a presentation on the youth (multi)media work being done there, which was superdynamic. The kids were a really fun and inspiring bunch. It was at this point also that I realized that a bunch of the ideas I’d had for my Fulbright project were just dead wrong (I’ll explain in a later entry)…but I think I’ve a much better idea of how to re-route the issues effectively, so hooray for that knowledge.

So much exciting stuff, still…

Today we spent the morning with CDI at their main office in Laranjeiras. I’d seen their CEO Rodrigo Baggio speak at NYU last fall; he’s amazing and very charismatic. Sadly we missed him today but we got a rundown on his NGO’s history: Twelve years ago, Rodrigo had a classic corporate breakdown, decided he was doing nothing with his life, and started gathering old donated computers, putting them in low-income communities in Rio, and started a fourth-month technical literacy program to go with them. Now, CDI has hundreds of educational ‘telecenters’ all over South America, even in South Africa, with offices in NYC and Boston to work on fundraising. We then visited their center in the Providencia neighborhood.

And this afternoon we had the good fortune of meeting the celebrated documentary filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, talking with him, and screening his film Babilonia 2000. Coutinho was terribly sharp and entertaining, and I took a lot away from his discussion of the way he does documentaries.

Another great week.