5 de Junho de 2007
Just an update on the everything situation...
A meeting was held a couple of days ago with Bueno Sensie, Janiena (manager of Casa da Criança) and some friends from aikido and other circles, who want to help find the funds to get CdC running sustainably again. It was a room of very intellegent and capable people. Although the meeting was in Portuguese, we could understand that there were some strong ideas and that the meeting was generally positive. Some emergency funds have been raised and at present whether it will be open or closed is a decision made week by week. We will meet again in 10 days to follow up on how the plans are working out.
For our part, we are somewhat limited to avenues outside of Brasil because of the language barrier so Dan and Gab have been burning the midnight cheese working on on a new web page to help raise emergency cash. We have received lots of good suggestions from people we know and spend much of our time persuing those leads. Hopefully we'1l soon have some more complete news of how things are going. For the moment we're just trying different things to see which ones will work.
Oh yeah, and now is probably a good time to go back to something I said earlier about the favela. In our first month or so here, we had only been up and down the street CdC is on, which is the nicest street in the community. I think I said that you would be hard pressed to call it a slum. Actually, I was wrong. As it turns out, it would'nt take much pressing at all. It's a slum. I feel a bit funny saying publicly that the home of I dont know how many people is a bad place. I dont want to be shitting on anyone's dignity. But it is important to know that the living conditions at the favela are very poor.
Outside of the CdC project, life goes on. I realise there is a detatched luxury in saying this because for some, CdC is the life that goes on.&nbs ; ot. But for us, we are still training, eating and wondering at Sâo Paulo's endless suply of tall buildings. Sâo Paulo seems to have forgotten it's almost right on the Tropic of Capricorn and has decided to be really cold. Some nights the slightly crazy, but generally pretty cool, guy who lives on our street (as in, not in a house) builds a big fire to keep warm and the smell of burning plastic permeates the dojo. Soon we will cruise down to Argentina for a few days because of visa issues and hopefully we will be let back in for the last remaining month in Brasil. But thats not for a little while yet.
Paul
Comments