Rhythm and Harmony: Treme Terra/ Brazil

About a month ago, I was in São Paulo, Brazil to produce a documentary about the Treme Terra project: an initiative that brings together youth from diverse backgrounds in the Morro do Querosene neighborhood…an area known for its strong Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions. In 2008, Treme Terra received an award from the Programa IAM, Iniciative Jovem Anhembi Morumbi, the YouthActionNet® National Institute in Brazil, which is sponsored by the International Youth Foundation, the Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, and the Sylvan/Laureate Foundation.

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil and the world’s seventh largest metropolitan area. The view from my hotel window was a vast expanse of high-rise buildings that stretched as far into the distance as the curve of the earth. There is the constant buzz of helicopters landing on rooftops, circumventing the snarled traffic below. A significant financial center of South America, São Paulo has one of the most diverse populations in the world, and throughout its history people have come from every corner of the globe to make their fortunes in coffee, lumber, and rubber. This international mix is reflected everywhere in its arts, culinary offerings, and cultural landmarks.

The Morro do Querosene neighborhood is becoming gentrified, with an increasing university and young professional population. There is rehab construction everywhere. The streets are lined with houses reflecting an eclectic mix of architectural styles, and many have colorful murals decorating their exterior walls. Some murals depict the ethnic diversity or the cultural heritage of the neighborhood.

In 2006, Ronaldo Gonçalves Alves and João Victor P. do Nascimento co-founded Treme Terra to encourage harmony within the diverse population of the neighborhood youth through a program of music and art that focuses on the cultural legacy of the area. Treme Terra is loosely translated as “earth shaking.” It’s also the name of a bassy, powerful drum used in some styles of samba. The project aims to dissolve ethnic and socio-economic barriers, and the xenophobia that these barriers produce.

When we arrived, neighborhood kids were filing through the streets of Morro do Querosene on their way to a rehearsal, carrying a variety of drums and other traditional musical instruments. The Treme Terra participants reflect a variety of São Paulo’s ethnicities and socio-economic situations.

The first thing that you notice is how engaged in the program these kids are. There is a sincere interest in becoming proficient performers of a repertoire of Afro-Brazilian musical and dance pieces. The show was much more professional than I had expected. Moreover, as you watch the interaction between the kids, you realize that the program actually works to bring kids together in a multicultural environment. There was a lot of visible camaraderie and respect. It also gives the local youth a focus at an impressionable stage of their life.

João expressed it best: “We are in search of one dream….a world without barriers to diversity.”

To view a video about Treme Terra, click on the photo in the left column.

OYE/Honduras

I heard from friends in Honduras a few days ago about the ongoing political crisis there. Everyone is safe, but they characterized the situation as “unstable.” Of all the places that I’ve traveled to, Honduras is one that I’ve become particularly fond of, yet it’s also where I sensed the most personal danger. I remembered the video shoot that we did a few years ago in El Progreso, in northwestern Honduras, for the International Youth Foundation.

Honduras is a very green and lush country, with thick tropical hardwood forests and the terraced hillsides of coffee plantations. On the ride from the San Pedro Sula airport to El Progreso, there is mile after mile of banana and sugarcane fields, interrupted by the occasional designer underwear factory. The farther you get from the cities, the more people you see using equine transportation. I’ve been stopped by military roadblocks more often in Honduras than anywhere else in my travels. Most small businesses and restaurants have guards wearing body armor and carrying shotguns, and I saw several businessmen accompanied by armed bodyguards all the way to the departure gate at the airport. Kidnapping is not uncommon in Honduras. Nonetheless, it can be very beautiful and charming, and I’ve gone back there on several occasions to see more of it. We took the name of our organization, 18 rabbits, from the Mayan king after visiting the ruins at Copán.

We were there to interview Ana Luisa Ahern and Justin Otero; two of the founders of The Organization for Youth Empowerment. Both are in their mid-20’s. O.Y.E. operates a diverse program of services to the children of Honduras. Primarily, they provide scholarships to children in orphanages, but they are ubiquitous in their efforts to improve the lives of the local youth.

Honduras is very poor…one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. There’s little access to suitable water in the rural areas, and there’s malaria and cholera. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch hit Central America. Tens of thousands of people died and millions were left homeless in Honduras and Nicaragua. Many children, orphaned and displaced by the hurricane, roam the streets…without families or income…sniffing glue and living however they can in the grimmest of circumstances.

There’s very little educational development for the children who end up in the orphanages, which are so overwhelmed it’s all they can do just to provide food and shelter. O.Y.E. works with the orphanages to bring the children scholarships so that they don’t end up back on the street when they leave. They also have art programs for the younger kids in order to improve their developmental skills and self-esteem.

Another component of O.Y.E.’s program is to provide money and school supplies to children whose parents are too poor to send them to public school. Without this, many children are forced to drop out and comb the local landfill for bottles and cans for the recycling money. I saw this while we there, and we were chased out of a landfill by a group of adults wielding machetes.

O.Y.E. provides so many efforts for children that it’s hard to characterize them all. On our first night there, we drove to an orphanage in the mountains outside of El Progreso. As we got higher into the mountains, the air cooled and there was the rich organic smell of the tropical forest. There were orchids in bloom, growing out of the moss on trees, and there were feral macaws in the forest hammock.

It was a boy’s orphanage, mostly for kids that had been living on the street and addicted to glue. Ana Luisa and Justin were there to coach a soccer practice, but really to mentor and provide positive role models and guidance. These kids have few adult influences…and the ones they do have are other street people who are exploitive. It helps these boys to develop a sense of trust by having adults around who don’t want something from them.     

At each orphanage we visited, there was noticeable excitement when the kids saw Ana Luisa and Justin arrive. These children sit around bored all day with little to do because there’s just no money available to fund any services other than warehousing them. The O.Y.E. staff hands out educational manipulatives to the children to stimulate their learning development, and they become kids again…not the grim little adults that we saw when we drove up.

O.Y.E. and its staff are the real thing…humanitarians who are making a big difference in the lives of Honduran children. Hopefully, the current political crisis in Honduras won’t make their job even tougher.      

There is a video about O.Y.E. on the link in the left-hand column.

The Otesha Project: sustainable consumer choices

Last January, I was sent to Canada to videotape a segment on the Otesha Project for a humanitarian organization that was honoring young social entrepreneurs. Otesha's office is in a lovely old house in a residential neighborhood in Ottawa, which was snow-covered when we arrived. There are two things that you notice when you walk into their office...first, everyone is wearing hats and scarves because they keep the heat turned down...and second, there is a constant flurry of activity throughout the house. The Otesha Project operates in a very high-energy environment, and you immediately feel drawn into their movement.

I was there to interview Jessica Lax, the co-founder of the Otesha Project. Jessica had met Jocelyn Land-Murphy during a sustainability field studies program in Kenya in 2002, and their experiences left them overwhelmed with the inequality in resource allocation between North America and Africa, and to the global effects of their consumer society.

These two young women began to dream of the impact of spreading a message of sustainable consumer choices to Canada's youth. Thus, on Feb 16, 2002, on a beautiful sunny day in Kitale, Kenya, the Otesha Project was created.

Almost 2 years after the first Otesha dream sprouted under a tree in Kenya, it became a reality on October 10, 2003. On this date, the first 33 members of the Otesha Project completed their incredible 164-day bicycling & presenting venture across Canada, having made over 250 presentations to more than 12,000 young people across the country. Since that first project, the Otesha Project has only continued to grow. A dream born in Kenya has become a charitable organization of hopeful young people uniting as the Otesha Project. Otesha, which means "reason to dream" in Swahili, was created to mobilize youth to create local and global change through their daily consumer choices. The Otesha Project believes that there are alternatives to our culture of overconsumption, and that each one of us has opportunities to have positive impacts every single day.

The Otesha Project's education programs and bicycle tours use theatre, multi-media, and storytelling to engage a wide range of audiences, and have reached more than 85,000 people to date. Otesha’s performances focus on re-evaluating our daily choices to reflect the kind of future we'd like to see - rethinking what we really need, conserving resources, and voting with our dollars. Otesha's aim is to demonstrate the positive effects our everyday choices can have, by living sustainably, changing the world, and having loads of fun--all at the same time!

There is a video segment about the Otesha Project at the "Otesha/Current TV" link in the left-hand column.

Earth Day

On this Earth Day, I would like to celebrate the work of Maritza Morales. As a producer of CSR and non-profit media I see many compelling stories, but occasionally, I meet people who make a profound and lasting impression on me. Such is the case with Maritza, a young woman who founded an environmental sustainability education program for children and youth in the Yucatán region of Mexico. Maritza’s organization is HUNAB, which stands for Humanidad Unida a la Naturaleza en Armonía por el Bienestar, la Bondad y la Bellezaor (Humanity United with Nature in Harmony for Wellbeing, Goodness, and Beauty). Maritza founded HUNAB in 1995, when she was ten years old. 

I met Maritza when our multimedia firm was producing a conference for university executives in Florida. She had received an award from a social entrepreneurship recognition program, “The Universidad del Valle de México Prize for Social Development” and was speaking to the executives about her work. We were so impressed by Maritza’s commitment that we offered to produce a pro bono documentary on her organization.

Maritza is very tenacious in her mission to educate people on how their lifestyles affect the long-term viability of the Yucatán environment. (I noticed in interviewing people that her name and "tenacious" often come up in the same sentence). She trains children to be peer educators, who in turn bring a message of sustainable practices to their friends and families. What impressed me most were the comments of parents who said that their children had educated them on what they could do to curb the environmental damage to their community. Many of the parents are fishermen, so there are practical economic reasons for the continued viability of the local environment. Open burning of garbage, out-of-season fishing, and roadside & beach littering have severely impacted the Yucatán ecosystem. Maritza's program has measurably affected the environmental practices of the communities that her program serves.

Aside from the environmental advocacy that HUNAB promotes, it also gives children a focus in their lives at an age when they could be susceptible to bad influences. It's amazing to listen to pre-teen kids articulate complex environmental issues with enough conviction to convince adults to adopt their program principles. I'll never forget one little nine-year-old girl explaining to me a game she had created that involved folding a newspaper to ever smaller proportions in order to illustrate receding land mass from global warming. HUNAB truly is a positive influence on the children who participate, and we felt compelled to do all we could to help promote the organization’s work. Maritza has very effectively used the video to promote her organization, acquiring funding and raising public awareness. The incredible hospitality that we received from Maritza and her family, as well as many other children and their parents in the four Yucatán communities where we worked, will always be warmly remembered. ¡Muchas gracias a nuestros queridos amigos en el Yucatán!

A four minute video about HUNAB may be viewed at the Current TV link under the photo of the three little girls in the left-hand column. 

Changing Global Perceptions

A few years ago, I worked on my first CSR media project in the Dogheretti slums near Nairobi, Kenya.  I'm the managing partner of a multimedia firm that caters to executives of global companies. A few of our clients are on the boards of various NGOs, and one of them asked me to produce a documentary for a non-profit of which he's the Chairman of the Board.

The program that I was focusing on was The Emmanuel Boyz Center, a drug rehabilitation center for street boys, mostly orphaned by AIDS. It's run by a young man named Daniel Nduati, who was a street addict himself, went through rehabilitation, and started this program. Many of the boys also have AIDS, either passed on at birth, or from being sex workers.

There's a beef processing plant in the Dogheretti, and lot of men come from different areas of East Africa to work there, leaving their families behind. There are a lot of vices in the area that cater to these workers; bars, drugs, prostitution, and gambling. I was shooting footage of some of the street boys that live on the peripheral of this illicit economy. Most of them sniff glue from a bottle that they affix to their lip so that the glue is under their nose all day. Some of the local police procure these boys for pedophiles, and threaten the boys if they don't go along. 

Many of the boys who live there have parents who are still alive, but are too sick to provide for them, so they have to leave home and fend for themselves. There's a garbage dump behind the slaughter house where they rummage for food. They have to compete with the huge storks that also live off the scraps. A lot of these boys are grade-school age, so the storks are bigger than they are. The men who work at the plant wear white coats that are splattered with blood, and the air is thick with the smoke of cooking fires from the food stands that provide meals for the workers. 

There was an overturned dump truck blocking the road when we arrived, and the men involved were engaged in a fist fight that looked to get worse before it got better. Add the sound of cattle being killed with a sledgehammer, and it was pretty much my vision of hell.

I returned to my hotel after the shoot with the wind knocked out of me. I had been on assignments in the developing world before, but the way these kids lived really hit me hard. It occurred to me that this was happening on our watch, and that history will judge us for letting this stand. I pulled some stills from the video that I had shot and e.mailed them to people that I know. I was amazed by the depth of response that I got back. Most of them said something like "What can I do to get involved?" 

It was then I decided...hey, I wouldn't have the slightest idea about how to bring a good water source to this area, or supply AIDS medicine for these kids' parents, but what I do know how to do is show people what's going on here and be an advocate for action and change. I co-founded 18 rabbits digital media in order to put a face on these problems and to give a voice to youth through a student media program. We want young people all over the world to have the ability to express what's going on in their society and to change global perceptions. 

There's a video segment about the Emmanuel Boyz Center on the "Emmanuel Boyz Center/Current TV" link in the left-hand column.