Phillip Wagner's story:
After covering the fortunes of Brazilians competing at the Indianapolis 500, I spent my summer working with individuals, programs, and communities undertaking efforts to improve the lives of the poor in the Afro-Brazilian cultural epicenter of Bahia. Here are a few highlights:
A University of Nevada at Reno Engineers Without Borders team, responding to a request from Dr. Wilson Matta, a member of my NGO Rhythm of Hope in Brazil, and myself, arrived to assess the needs of a rural community on the island of Itaparica. The team will return early next year to begin addressing clean-water and sanitation issues, building on the work of Dr. Matta, who works a clinic on the island. A group of 20 from the University of Maryland – mostly African-Americans and mostly women – is also planning to participate in our project. They have pre-committed to a $4,500 donation to purchase materials for construction. Ninety percent of the homes in the target community do not even have outhouses, and there are virtually no toilets or septic systems the local school has two toilets, one for boys/men and another for girls/women. Local community leaders showed us around the area.
A man makes charcoal, which will be bagged for storage and sale. John Thornley, who founded the University of Nevada at Reno Engineers Without Borders chapter, and I sample freshly cut sugar cane. John is a former Peace Corps volunteer who worked for two years in southern Africa.
A woman displays the leaves and edible tubers of aipim, a popular root vegetable; another draws water from a well with a "bucket" fashioned from a commercial tin. Most kitchens are outdoors.
The roof on the dwelling in the first photo below may be asbestos; if it is, the residents may be unaware of the cancer threat it poses. Poverty sometimes looks idyllic, but romantic interpretations that are easy to arrive at when the personal warmth of these people is encountered are naive and foolish. People here are barely surviving; they lose children at an early age; and even in torrential downpours on the darkest nights they must typically go out to squat in the mud among wild growth (where a variety of boa constrictor is very common) to relieve themselves.
I spent more time working in an inner-city favela, or slum, called Saramandaia than in the rural community on Itaparica Island. This is work I began after being introduced in 2005 to Arte Consciente, a program that five resident young men in Saramandaia started to stop the violence there. In this one-square-kilometer slum 43 children were assassinated over a six-year period. When I first encountered the program, it was working with 160 children in the streets – children who had no place. I invited a pay-for-placement volunteer service to send paying volunteers, mostly from Europe. Their funds and physical effort supplement donations I have been raising. See here the work on a two-story community center behind the small casa of one of the program founders. Some funds from the paying volunteers were used to purchase a little adjacent land because there was not enough property for a building this size. When I arrived this year, eight volunteers from Ireland, one from New Zealand, and one from the U.S. were there. I introduced a volunteer from Switzerland (who was working at another program), and we brought with us a young woman from Holland who may volunteer next year. Gary, from Ireland, and a couple of the local youth move blocks and prepare cement. The Irish volunteers put a lot of smiles on the faces of the children.
Alex, one of the founders of Arte Consciente, said that although it was three years before I "discovered" them and helped them begin to receive meaningful help, he never doubted it would happen. Alex teaches the children percussion (drumming). Volunteers prepare to pour concrete into the mold for a stairwell to the second floor that is under construction.
While visiting a second program in another (currently violent) favela, Boca do Rio, I encountered Brazil's four-time WBO boxing champion Popó, who is currently the minister of sport in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, and who also works with such programs. I later met with Popó and his staff in his office on two occasions to discuss our common interest in Arte Consciente and our common desire to secure the interest and support of Brazilian Indianapolis 500 drivers in such programs. Here I am with Popó.