Meet our fearless tour guide,
Paulo Mota.
Paulo, whose mission in life is to help kids in Sao Paulo, took it upon himself to give us a grand tour of the city and what he does here. We decided we could trust him to take us to safe places. We took Cuyler with us; at 5 months you can put a baby in a sling and carry him all over the place. You can’t do that with a 2 1/2 year old and that’s why we left Tannah with Grandparents in Nebraska!
It began to a trip downtown where we saw the city’s central square.Paulo met his wife, Ireni, while they were both working with street kids there. Paulo tookus into a humongous Catholic Church that’s right next to the water fountains and statues etc., then took us to the observatory in a tall building so we could have a good look at the whole city.
Culinary Delight For $7
Paulo took us to a restaurant that could best be described as a Brazilian Meat Buffet. For $7 you help yourself to a banquet of assorted native foods (all very good) and every 5 minutes, a waiter shows up at your table with a 2′ long skewer of some exotically spiced
meat and offers to slice off a hunk of it and pile it on your plate. They served every imaginable kind of meat, and let me tell you what, these guys have cornered the market on spicy meat. This stuff was awesome! I think I got enough protein to last me through April.
We had exotic fruit juices to drink, delicious pastries and desserts. The restaurant had a large white sunlit interior with beautiful paintings on the walls. When we were done, the owner took us on a tour of the kitchen area and we saw how they roast the meats in their own juices. We were impressed at how clean and spacious it was. Paulo explained to us that the waiters come mostly from South Brazil, where cooking meat this way is a tradition.
After that Paulo took us to see what he does every day, and who he works with. His passion is for the children and teenagers that live in the favellas, or slums, of Sao Paulo. We went to meet some of those kids.
Not an uncommon scene in Sao Paulo: Near the center of Downtown, across the street from an AlphaGraphics copy shop at 10:30 am on a Tuesday morning, a homeless boy, perhaps 10 years old, sleeps in a doorway with his dog.
There are about 500,000 homeless street kids in Brazil like this boy. They are considered a nuisance by most people, and live in a desperate, violent world of hunger, prostitution and drugs.
Several years ago, Brazil’s equivalent of Time Magazine published an expose on the street kid problem, and the government, embarrassed by the publicity, decided to take action. Their solution: Police officers were sent out to shoot them.
Paulo originally started working with street kids, looking for ways to put them in safe homes or orphanages and get them off drugs. But Paulo explains that once kids have been on the streets for a year or two, they have becomes so unloved, so hardened, so distrusting, and so enmeshed in the reality of surviving on the streets, that it is very difficult to redeem them from that lifestyle.
So he turned his attention to kids who weren’t homeless, but who were at risk. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say. His ministry with these kids is powerful and is making a real difference for real kids, who won’t end up like the boy you see in this picture because Paulo cares.
“Several years ago, Brazil’s equivalent of Time Magazine published an expose on the street kid problem, and the government, embarrassed by the publicity, decided to take action. Their solution: Police officers were sent out to shoot them.”
Hey Perry, your fan from Brazil living in Shanghai. I think that what Paulo said wasn’t well translated. What actually happened is that small business owners in specific regions affected by petty theft by homeless kids hired off duty cops willing to virtually “eliminate” the problem.
It was more of a localized problem not a “government” problem. The mere concept of “government” as this one far reaching omnipresent thing doesn’t exist in Brazil, in the US or even less in China (despite what the media would like you to believe).
The way you worded the phrase it sounds like “the government” suddenly started systematically killing kids to “solve” the problem Heinrich Himmler style. Not the case.
In fact, I am reading this post because I noticed the link in your latest blog post about TV being the opium of the people. Didn’t know you visited Brazil until today, and also, very glad to notice you have a pretty optimistic view of it. Also, funny that you’ve been to Guaruja, I spent a lot of summers there during my childhood (I am from middle-high class Sao Paulo).
Also, going on a tangent, but perhaps a topic for a marketing lesson: Guaruja is the city where Santos Dummont, the inventor of the airplane (according to Brazilians) committed suicide (he went nuts when he realized that his invention was being used for war purposes)! Even though Santos Dummont invented a plane that actually took off by itself (without the help of catapults) he never managed to get the label of Inventor of the Airplane, mostly because of a lack of action and drive to push his invention as a tool for transforming life, differently from the Wright Brothers who from the get go understood the massive (military) implication of their invention and right from the get go had a vision and a plan (great ideas mean little without a plan / vision).
If you ask Brazilian poor kids they hardly know who Santos Dummont was, a classic symptom of the too much TV syndrome. That’s the tragedy of the country: lack of culture. Lots of it derived from the form of colonization.
Great series of posts and very happy to see someone going deeper than the Time and Economists of this world to understand what it is really like to be an ordinary Joao in a place like Brazil.
Indeed a very sad reality about Brazil. The thing most people don’t get is that many people in the favelas are kind and wonderful people. And many police officers care more about getting paid off than upholding the law. They don’t pay the cops enough here and I think that’s a big part of the problem. I hate to think of what America would become if we couldn’t pay our police officers a living wage.
I want to visit there. I worked with a company to set up telemarketing call centers in Lima Peru. I wonder if Sao Paulo would be a good city to set up outsourced services.