Salvador, Brazil Day 4

Friday February 8th

This morning's visit to the Calabar Community, a favela located in the middle of Salvador, was pretty eye-opening. It's location is surrounded by two very wealthy communities so first they gave us a bus tour of those rich communities surrounding it then we went into the actual favela. We walked in for a couple blocks on very narrow streets to find the school. All of the buildings are right next to each other, so there is no grass or anything like that. The small area between the buildings, if any, is often filled with garbage. During election years politicians always make promises to help better these poor communities but once elected, they seem to only help out the rich people. The teacher that we met at the school only gets $1200R three times a year from the government. She said that if a kid doesn't go to school for 2 days in a row that she will visit their home and make sure everything is alright. So the school doesn't only teach but it also keeps track of the well being of each student. Many of the people who work at the school are only volunteers in and around the community. They have 2 sessions of school a day, each for 4 hours. The school isn't big as you'll be able to see in my pictures but it seemed to be a well respected place in the area. The kids didn't have school today because it's still considered a holiday because of Carnaval. The school actually rented out part of its courtyard for storage of Carnaval stuff so they could make a little extra money. After the teacher was finished answering our questions some students showed up and we got to give them some small presents such as stickers, sunglasses, and a stuffed basketball among other things. They really seemed to enjoy all of the stuff while we stuck around to play with them for a bit. Once we were done there David mentioned that this was nothing like the school he visited in Uganda last summer, I couldn't even imagine what that must have been like then.

In favela's in Brazil families tend to stay really close. Some parents may have kids, so they add another floor on the top of their house, then their kids have kids and they add another floor so they all stay in the same place. The streets are narrow but people still set up stands to sell things such as fresh fruit.After the school visit we headed back to the ship for some lunch, then back out to the market to get some souvenirs. I got a nice Brazil soccer jersey for 35R, or about $20 US. We actually ended up getting lost while walking around and wound up in a really shady neighborhood. Luckily we were able to find out way out of there quickly and back to the ship.