Michael Jacks
West Virginia University College of Law, 2L
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Day 18 – Reflection

The Favela

There were three specifically memorable events on May 30th on Brazil ?07, the trip of a lifetime. The first was my trip to the favela as part of Luiz?s tourist caravan, the second was a memorable soccer game at Maracana, and the third was Professor Outterson?s emotional farewell.

The favela has been fairly well portrayed by my counterparts on this page already, so I am not going to dwell on the details. I enjoyed the motorcycle ride up the hill, although I don?t think we ever went more than 20 or 25 miles per hour. We saw a complete absence of any city or urban planning, many poor people, piles of garbage, and the one little school/daycare in the middle of it all. Hopefully the pictures will help to explain this place. It is hard to understand without being there. The positive things to take away are the incredible resilience and adaptability of humanity, how people exist in unhealthy and entirely substandard living conditions, only to ride the bus into town to work for a pittance for those better off. Those people are tough, living like that. It was hard to walk through it, and look at people and children and starving dogs, without feeling awful.

It is an odd kind of place to be a tourist in, but ultimately not surprising. A man like Luiz finds the potential for profit, to innovate in an industry based on people traveling to a city to look at things they haven?t seen before, and he takes off and runs with it. Multiple tours per day, hopefully with the idea of promoting awareness of poverty and inequality (inequality as a word, does not even come close to describing the incredible dichotomy we saw in Brasil) may help the people there rise up from where they are. I can hope so, and hope that tourists that choose to pay for that tour do so with some sort of true emotion in their hearts and some sort of desire to help, and not just as some sort of thrill-seeking zoo tour. 200,000 people crammed into less than one square kilometer. Drug dealers with guns you can see, oh, and a motor cycle ride to start up your adrenaline. Tell your friends to watch City of God and then brag about walking through a favela ?just like the one in the movie.?

I can only say that I was sick inside walking through that place, disgusted not with the people and the filth, but with the situation as a whole. I didn?t want to talk to anyone about it, or talk while I was there, the feeling itself was overwhelming and all-encompassing. The perspective we have, from flying thousands of miles for pleasure from a stinking rich nation that provides a handy pattern of exploitation to the rest of the world, and from staying with and meeting some of Brasil?s richest people, is what makes it hurt the most. The children in the favela don?t know any other way. They don?t understand the standard of living that a privileged few enjoy behind locked doors, stone walls and electric fences, razor wire, guard dogs, doormen and bulletproof car windows. Maybe their parents do, as they are the doormen and bus drivers, the waiters and maids and garbage men, the wandering trinket sellers on the beach who all have the good fortune of serving the rich Brasilians and the rich tourists like us. I started out with the perspective that I was not a rich American tourist, because I am far from the U.S. standard of ?rich,? but almost every one from our country is rich compared to this.

Brasilian Playoff Soccer at Maracana

Maracana Stadium was built for the 1950 World Cup, which was hosted by Brasil. At that time it held roughly 300,000 people, standing room only, no seats. It has since had seats added (not that anyone uses them) and is supposed to hold 150,000. The night we were there, it probably had between 120,000 and 130,000. It was almost full. We went as part of a tour group, and promptly lost our guide after being out of the van for about 35 seconds. I?m not sure that this wasn?t done on purpose. There ended up being about twelve of us who stuck together through the match and managed to find our way back to the vans after the match. 5 Americans from WVU Law, 4 British, 2 Norwegians, and 1 South African. I think there might have been one or two Dutch guys also.

The difference between American sporting events and this game was remarkable and striking. The atmosphere is much better, fans let off fireworks, road flares, and sparklers, and wave giant flags, singing songs that insult the opponents, their mothers, and possibly some rival team that isn?t even there, and no one sits down. Americans seem to want to sit on their butts, consume as much crappy overpriced food as possible and only get up and cheer maybe every 15 or twenty minutes. The only type of sporting event I have never been to is an NBA game, and I?m sure that those games do not upset this rule. Also, although the tickets to this match would have been expensive to many of Rio?s population, at about 12 US dollars, the earlier game we went to, which was not a playoff match, only cost about six dollars. Beats the hell out of trying to buy Steeler?s tickets.

Maracana, or specifically the police there, had the biggest Rottweilers that I have ever seen, quite intimidating. I would guess 140 pound dogs, minimum. Another interesting tidbit, there are no seat numbers on the tickets, you just go and sit wherever you can find space. Oh, and one beer costs about a dollar. Again, dramatic improvement over American sporting events.

The experience was memorable, with the match scoreless until the late minutes, only to have the away team put in a beautiful goal, which was matched moments later by the home team in stoppage time, ending in a one to one draw. When the away team (Figueirense) scored, it was like everyone in the stadium had been punched in the stomach, silence but for the few supporters the other team had, who lost there minds. The home team (Flumeniense ? one of four Rio teams) put in a cross to draw even, and everyone celebrated out of relief, but the final outcome was still disappointing to the home side. As soccer does one of the more intelligent things when it comes to playoffs, the teams then traveled to the other team?s home stadium to play a second match. (update ? looks like Flumeniense went and won the second match 1-0 to advance in the Copa de Brasil one week later ? but I am reading this off a Portuguese language website, so no guaranties) This home and home series allows both teams to play in front of their fans, and garners twice the revenue. Imagine if the BCS championship game was done in a similar fashion.

Farewells

The last event I will write about from Wednesday May 30th, although it happened before I went to the soccer game, was the final departure of Professor Kevin Outterson. He was one of the original co-conspirators of the Law in Brasil trip and concept originator, as well as being one of the best teachers at our school. Most of the students on the trip were first years who never had the opportunity to have him in class, but it only took me about two days in the Amazon to realize how bad it was that he was leaving. WVU Law has always had (to the best of my knowledge of rumor and hearsay) a major problem with talented young professors spending their first few years there and then using the experience to springboard off to another school. Hopefully this will change, and hopefully K-Dog will come back, if only to stop the more sensitive members of our group from bawling like babies. Outterson for Dean in ?08.