Dispatches: notes from a Rio favela
Last week Managing Partner Imogen Beecroft headed to Rio de Janeiro to see the progress made by SEJA, a social impact organisation.
Following a visit to gang-controlled Rocinha - the largest favela in Brazil - she offers her reflections:
They say guns don’t look real when you see them in the flesh but the AK47 cradled in the boy’s arms is surely a fake. Its grey barrel looks tinny and plastic, like it would snap under an errant heel. It’s a plastic toy, something that should have come in an Argos army set for a kid at Christmas.
Only it’s not. At least not here.
Although I’d been warned about traffickers, I’m so shocked at this casual display of firepower that I forget my instructions to keep my eyes down and keep walking. I accidentally glance at his face: wide, bloodshot eyes staring hollowly out of the face of a much younger man. He’s seventeen at best, probably closer to 13.
I avert my own wide eyes before (I hope) he clocks me. Don’t attract attention is the golden rule of the Rio favelas (second only to ‘don’t get your phones out. And don’t talk to the police.’). He hasn’t. I keep walking.
These boys are positioned at the entrance to the favela, standing guard for the gangs that rule them (currently Comando Vermelho, after a violent takeover from Amigos dos Amigos in 2020/21). Behind them is where the real power lies: the more senior you are, the further up into the favela you live and work. Every so often, the police will conduct a raid on the favelas (part of the government’s ‘pacification’ process, most recently championed by Bolsonaro), in which they’ll enter and open fire on traffickers to stamp out the drugs trade. Often given drugs to enable long stints on duty, these boys are the gang’s first line of defence against these raids. Or, as I’m told, ‘they’re coked up and sit waiting to die’.
I’m in the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro to see the work of SEJA, a social impact organisation founded by George Crawley and Dylan Brown in 2017. No less than 10 metres from that boy and his AK47 is a small building, home to Tio Lino, one of SEJA’s projects. In one room, a heavily pregnant community leader teaches writing to a room of attentive children. Her baby’s due in two weeks. Thanks to SEJA, she’ll have maternity leave and pay – unheard of for women in the favelas of Brazil. In another, they’re reviewing the fruits of their photography lesson. Crowded around a single laptop the teacher comments on the artful blurring of an image one of the students took. ‘It’s important they know about this side of it too’ he tells us, gesturing at the digital setup.
SEJA was founded after George moved to live in a Rio favela and gained an understanding of life there. He began teaching tennis to local kids until he realised, in his words: ‘These kids don’t need some gringo teaching them how to serve an ace. They need local community leaders who know the lives they live and the challenges they face. And they know what they need to survive it.’ From this understanding, SEJA was born, an organisation that engages local people to run unique community projects. SEJA now has 60 community leaders working all over Rio, Natal and Salvador, and is expanding to Europe and the US. In Brazil, these 60 leaders serve some 2000 children every week.
SEJA’s projects offer hope of a different future for these children. One in which they could be a photographer or a computer programmer. Or a teacher or a waiter. Anything but the next in line to take that boy’s spot once the inevitable raid has taken him. Anything other than a life where one fifth of youths taken into a gang are killed within two years.
I ask one of the SEJA team how he thinks people manage in a world where life expectancy is 48 (20 years less than the national average); if emotions are different here; if feelings are incomparable? ‘Yes. I think so. It’s expectation management. You love less.’
Life has a different meaning in Rio’s favelas. For most of us reading this blog, it’s an unassailable right – something we are owed. Here, it’s a currency.
But the favelas are not a lawless place. Rules exist – they’re just not ones we’re familiar with. Women, for example, are off-limits. There is not only a respect but a fondness for the gangs in the local community. For many people, the ruling gang will do more for them than the state or the police will ever do. If their children are sick, local gang leaders might buy them medicine or take them to hospital. Every weekend, they’ll host a party in the favela for locals. They are part of the fabric of the community.
Even in my very limited experience, I see these acts of kindness everywhere in Rio. When a tiny, skeletal boy offers us some sweets for a real (16p), a waiter at the restaurant escorts him back round the corner to where his mum will be waiting, out of harm’s way. On a sunny Saturday morning, as we walk to a popular street market in central Rio, a local takes us by the arm and steers us away from the most direct route saying ‘perigoso, perigoso.’ Dangerous, dangerous.
There’s a well-known phrase in Brazil: ‘bota mais água no feijão’ that captures much of what I see and hear during my time in Rio. It means ‘put more water in the beans’: feed more people, even if it means having less.
As George succinctly puts it, ‘You walk into somewhere where people have nothing. Nothing. And a stranger wants to buy you a beer. No one in London buys me a beer when I walk into their neighbourhood.’
Later that week I’m at KEBRA, an annual cultural festival established by SEJA. The MC is an ebullient, vivacious girl with bright pink hair. Her story: ‘She’s from one of the worst favelas in the north zone of Rio. Before she was working for SEJA she was selling sweets on the bus for two reals.’ Now she’s on stage in front of 300 people, commanding the room with a stage presence most performers would envy.
The event gives people a platform who would otherwise have none. There are breakdancing and rap battle competitions, and even a vogueing runway for the city’s drag queens. Given the average life expectancy of a member of the trans community in Rio is 30, for them to have such a space to exist is nothing short of revolutionary.
The Kebra winner receives two thousand reals a month for a year (about £4,000) as well as other prizes from sponsors. Last year’s winner used his earnings to go back to north Brazil and build his mother a house. He’s back this year – although only just, he missed his bus back from the north – as a judge.
On the night of this year’s final, the mood outside on the streets of Lapa is a febrile one. There’s a high-stakes football match and the city is on edge. Some of the people who were meant to join us don’t attend because they don’t want to travel alone at night.
But inside Kebra the mood is only celebratory, collaborative. After every battle the participants embrace and congratulate one another. ‘It’s your day today’, says one runner up to his rival. The entry fee is a bag of rice or beans, common practice in Brazil, which will go to a local food kitchen. One drag queen gets stage fright and the crowd rallies around her, cheering her down the purple runway.
Everywhere, everyone is putting more water in the beans.
I leave Rio keen to return – for next year’s KEBRA if not before. But it’s not so simple. I’m reminded of what the ongoing economic crisis means for organisations like SEJA, who rely on private and corporate donations to survive. Increasingly, their corporate partners are cutting funding. Multinational corporations, who contribute thousands – not tens of thousands – of dollars to the organisation on an annual basis are ending their partnerships saying the current climate can’t justify supporting social projects.
An organisation like SEJA can survive on a couple of hundred thousand pounds a year, but in this environment raising any funds is difficult – not least for an unseen population like those dancing at KEBRA – and this money has to come from somewhere. For many big corporates, ‘now is not the right time’.
If this week has shown me anything, it’s that the reverse is true. Now is exactly the right time. Put more water in the beans.
To find out more about SEJA visit www.SEJAhubs.org
By Imogen Beecroft, Managing Partner at Audley.
Image credit/Ray in Manila/License