A different racism

White, yellow, brown, black, red, green, doesn't matter very much in a country that have all of them, everywhere. They actually have 134 differt colors among them, so it's not exactly easy to find friends if you only want those with the exact same color as you. Brazil is a very big and diverse country that has collected people from all around the world. And even though they have had african slaves and portuguese rulers it's very hard to see any kind of racism between the Brazilian people. I've actually never met a more open nation of people. They actually likes the different colors and the variation. But of course it's not always like this, always perfect and nobody is being racial, but in general, it's not a big problem.
Brazil actually has a different kind of racism; money! They are a country with grate economical irregularities. It is in other words, the country of contrasts. When you
walk down a street in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, is it not unusual to pass mansions and up scaled buildings, right before passing a neighborhood of crumbling houses made of clay blocks. The people living in their small unfinished houses in the hills can just look out the window and see right into a luxury house. Dubai and Haiti side by side in the same field of view. This deffenetly comes with grate social racism. The majority of the people that have a lot of money, looks down on the people that have less. The girls looks for the boys' wallet rather than the person himself. The family often dislikes and refuses marrige with a poor. They are afraid that Often they even notice it between friends.
I talked with a Brazilian friend and he told me that he just went to a friends house. All the way to the house, all the girls talked about how little they liked the guy they were going to. They arrived to this big mansion with beautiful cars, pool and all the stuff you could wish for. So then the girls got a different sound. The guy they had talked so much bad about, just became the coolest, nicest guy in the world and all of them wanted to be his friend.
It's awful and it doesn't exactly help the poor. I think this is one of the things the people stuggle with in Brazil, but as the wealth in the country rises, the problem actually becomes smaller.

Bando de louco!

Yesterday, I got to hear the sound and smell the sweat of 31 000 Brazilians jumping up and down cheering for my favorite football team; Corinthians. I got to see the tattos all over the backs of the faithful fans and learn a lot of "beutifull" words that I haven't learned from my Christian friends in ABUB. We stood behind the goal where all the screaming fans are, with their HOUGE flags that covers the whole crowd!! It was LEGEN.. wait for it..... DARY!



The beatifull enterence


Under the HOUGE poster! It was like a tunnel.

Also under the HOUGE poster!


The sight from our place


The football field obviously.

No place like "home"!

I have almost been travelling since 22th of december now. I've seen, learned and done a lot of things and gotten many friends from all over Brazil, that I most likely won't see again. It's both fun and sad on the same time. You really invest your time and energy in getting to know people for only a short period of time. Sharing stories, laughing and become friends for than to leave again. It was especially hard after a camp that lasted for 20 days and we all lived, ate, played and prayed together. Leaving was just a taste of how it will be, leaving Brazil 12th of april. But still, I wouldn't be without any of the people I've invested my time and energy in!

Goood friends from the three weeks camp!


Friends from a camp with my church


My host-family for three days! Peace

I've learned so much! Especially about my self, the amazing Brazilian hospitality, their love and interest for foreigners and the art of smalltalk! I've stayed in a lot of different houses, families and really been invited into their lives. I've gotten to know them, become friends with them, for so having to leave for a new place, with new people. Julianne and I started to get tired of the normal smalltalk and desided to make the best of it. To really use the art of smalltalk. We started to make up things about Norway to spice up the boring conversations and then faster getting to know people. The funny part was actually to see how much people believe.

Some of the things Brazilians believe:
- That we have polar bears in our garden.
- Norther'n light is like every night.
- We only take showers once a week because all the water i frozen and we have to melt the water before we use it.
- We don't have facebook, because we don't have internet in Norway.

But I also learned how much I love having time to really getting to know people. Having close friends and not only travelling around talking to different people every day. Having good friends and family to come back to. I spent one whole month away from Campinas and I really missed the place and people that I've become so found of. So now I'm just going to enjoy my last month here and my thoughts when I sit on the plain to Norway will be that I did everything I wanted and more.


My lovely Brazilian host-family, that's totally spoiling me.!


My dear friends in Campinas


Also my dear friends in Campinas watching to football games at the same time.


Left: Pedro (Steinar in Norwegian) my "dad" that always helps the lost Norwegian girls. Right: Me....


Me and my Brazilian sister, Raphaela, when I went skydiving.




The sticks are a sign of us playing snooker...


Normal day at Casa Douglas, playing Troco!
"Brazilians are niiiice"

Brazilian food

If you don't recognize me when I come back to Norway, it's because of the amazing food here! A mom that is spoiling me and serving me food all day long, the cheap resturants, and all the sugar and fat that Brazilians use to make their lovely tamptations. It have to be the best food in the world and it actually diserves a whole post! The Brazilians even make the Hot-Dog's taste like gourmet. The Hot-Dog's goes from this:


To this:



And for not to talk about the BBQ (Churrasco). If you ever travel to Brazil, you have to experience the Churrasco. You can eat as much meat as you want, and they have all types. Nobody eats anything else than meat, even though they have a whole buffet of other things.

And the sweets! My "mom" makes a cake every weekend, so I eat cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Their most used ingredience is condensed milk, they use it in everything. It's their secret ingredience that makes all sweets delicius. And I have found out that they sell it on the immigrant stores in norway! Yey!

Their pizza is also the best. I don't understand why everyone talks about the Italian pizza, when it exists Brazilian pizza! Ice-cream pizza, chocolate pizza, pizza churrasco etc..

But they all live on rice and beans in the daily life. Like my friend's mom says "you need rice and beans at least once a day!

STOP, THINK, do different!

Sometimes I just want to shout "STOOOOP" to the world!

Make the whole world just stop and think about what they are actually doing and what are the consequences of what we are doing? Stooop and think, maybe we can do something different, something better?


Think;
are you one of them who's helping,
supporting the deforestation
even though you know it's the
loungs(holding 28% of the
oxygen turnover)of the earth
and you know that at this speed
(36 football fields a minute),
the forrest will be turned in to a
dessert in matter of decades and
over 1/4 of the species
will die out in 50 years.
- Read more about zero desforestation here: http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/how_we_work/conservation/forests/zeronetdeforestation/)

Think; are you one of them who always takes the car, even though it's easy to take the bike, walk or use the public transport? Or always driving alone to work when you know your neighbor works at the same place at the same time?

Think; are you one of them who just threw trash out of the window of your car or right beside a trash can.

Think; Have you done something or thought about someone else than yourself today?

Think; How is your relationship to your family? Is it as it should, is there something you can make better?

Think; Are you one of them who are bullying anyone or part of peer pressure?

Think; maybe you're one of them who are just to busy living your life to think about your neighbor, the environment, your friends or even your family. And you are doing what?

Think; What is really important, what really matters?

I will just challange you today to STOP and THINK; what on earth you are doing, and maybe take a day were you think about someone, something else. It's just a matter of small different acts, one day at a time and don't be afraid of dreaming!

Sosiale vesen!

"Are you walking ALONE? Are you OK?"
"Did you just go for a run ALONE?"
7am in the morning: "You are so quite, something wrong?"
This is not rare comments to get if you live together with 70 brazilians for three weeks. The social talks are endless and the need to do something else than just talk does not exist. Especially if it's raining. People are almost afraid of rain. "Are you running in the rain? you will get sick!"
For me, running for 40 minutes is my way of getting my space, break from the language and get some energy continue. For the Brazilians, this is just a way to converse in a different environment.. If you want to go for a run, you should ask everyone to go with you. Not less than five together, if you're fifteen, it's GREAT success! And you don't even have to wear other shoes than havaianas as long as you are up for the social part! I think the only time brazilians needs to be alone, is when they sleep.
It's funny and different, the need to always be so many people together. You can even see it in the pictures. They always have as many people as possible in the photo. It doesn't matter if you are just walking by, it's impossible to escape. When I look back at my picture it's not abnormal to only recognice half of the group in the photo.




For me as a introvert person, this is kind of difficult when you live together with 70 of them. To get the time and space that you need alone in silence is something you really have to fight for. Finding a place, not necessarily being alone, but calm. It's only calm at night, when I'm not allowed to go out alone. It really makes you miss the safe norwegian nature, the ocean, taking a trip to a mountain for a weekend or sleeping outside. But I really learn alot of this and it really makes me notice my limits and I'm getting to know myself much better.

The Big Guys - UPP

I spent my christmas and New Year in Rio this year! I lived at a friends house in the favela Realengo were they already have implemented the police unit UPP. So it's a safe and calm neighborhood to live in. We drove pass them everyday we were going to the city. The last day, we desided to be real tourists and ask if we could take a photo with them. But it wasn't as easy as we thought. We needed promision from the chefe. We waited for a long time, before he finally came to make sure that we only wanted a photo and that we were real tourists. And our norwegian look and language was definetly convincing enough, because we didn't just get a photo. We also got a tour around the area and he showed us their work and talked about everything they do in the favela. I actually got really surpriced over how good it was. They have classes there for people that never got their education, they have a swimmingpool that people can use and all kinds of dans classes. The police really join in with the people and spend time with them. We saw them all around in the favela, talking to the citizens there, not just being the big guys with the machine guns.




This is one of the state’s attempts to make a safer and better life for the people living in the favela. A step in the direction to people being able to come and go from there house safely. There are around a 1000 favelas just in Rio. The neighborhoods for more than 1.5 million people, 20 percent of the city population, placed in the hillsides across the city. Many of the favelas are lawless and controlled by fear, gangs of drug dealers and private militias. This of course, leads to big problems with criminality and drugs, especially in the big favelas in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In 18 of those 1000 lawless favelas in Rio are there now implemented police aims, called UPP. It’s not much yet, but the government has a goal to implement UPP in 40 different favelas before they are going to host World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. Their pride! They are also investing 15 million R$ in the qualification of the Police Academy. UPP is a public security initiative from the state government. They protect the favelas and fight the drug dealers. They try to take control and make a safer place for the people in the favelas. The officers are recent graduate and specifically trained for this task. Recently (10. Nov. 2011), as they also have done before, the BOPE (A Special Operations Squad) surrounded the favela (Rocinha) and didn’t let anyone in or out. They stayed for days and searched the area for drugs and weapons. The policemen arrested the drug kingpin; Antonio Francisco Bonfim Lopes (Nem), when he tried to pay a policeman to let him out of the favela. He where unlucky and actually met a policeman that wasn’t corrupt. They also confiscated a lot of weapons. They did all this, without firing any gunshots, which is much better than last time. In 2010, it became a “war” between the police officers and the drug dealers. It ended with many people getting killed and serious debates on human rights and respect for community residents.

I think they are doing an amazing job and I'm really glad they have the football world championship in 2014 to look forward to. It makes them work harder and faster and they have a goal.