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Article by project gem founder |
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Latest News
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 19 July 2010 |
About ten years ago I was sipping a cold beer in on a dusty evening in a crowded street in the middle of a notorious favela, Baixa da Egua, in Salvador, Bahia. I was in Brazil with my wife-to-be Daisy; we had just spent a week with my relatives in Rio and Sao Paulo. Whilst the road side bar wasn’t quite the Country Club in Rio, Daisy was gripped. Odd as it might seem, a favela at night is a beautiful place to be: children playing in the street; young men on bicycles with their girlfriends propped on the handlebars artfully weaving through a street football game; bare-chested men sitting at aluminium tables, engrossed in Canasta their endless games lit by light bulbs swinging in the breeze; groups of girls, arms inter-linked parading in their skimpy finery whilst swinging in time to booming sound systems. At night, the poverty and squalor are hidden, the vibrancy and exuberance of the people shines through.
I was very happy. I saw that Daisy had also fallen in love with the other side of Brazil. We were visiting my friend, Marinheiro, a life guard, who was using his skills as a Capoeira teacher to run a social project in the playground of the local school. The children in his group were kept off the street and through Capoeira they learnt basic social values and skills to help them grow up in one of the most difficult urban environments in the world.
I’d met Marinheiro in my third year at university, when I lived with him for 6 months in his simple house in the favela researching Brazilian folklore. We became firm friends and he is now godfather to my eldest child. Various students with whom I had trained Capoeira four years previously came up to our table for a gossip. I noticed that a couple of old friends were missing and learned from Marinheiro that they had left his group and gone to join other Capoeira groups with their own academies. There was a danger that Marinheiro’s social project would eventually loose its core students.
The next day I asked Marinheiro how much it would cost to rent or buy a place to base his work. By lunch time, he had found an old house for sale, right in the middle of the favela, on the corner of what passed for a square. It cost £2,500 to buy and both Daisy and I were impressed by his instinct to base his project in the middle of the slum. This was where the transvestite drug dealers whistled at you as you walked by and where families of 10 were crammed into tiny houses. It was then that I realised that a man who had taught himself to read and write at the age of 33, who dedicated his spare time to keeping vulnerable children off the street, and who had the vision and courage to locate his project in the middle of the problem was a man who needed support. Daisy and I decided then and there to help.
We negotiated an option (yes, the favela does options) over the house on a public pay phone at the local grocer and the journey began. Back in the UK, in the last 3 months of my corporate seat with Nigel Stacey, I used my spare moments between due diligence a secondary buy out of a fund for Coller Capital to set up the charity. We called it Project Gem.
Over the next three years we raised money throwing rather sweaty parties in London, knocked down the old house and built a 3 storey community centre. Fundraising and monitoring the building project proved a rich experience. Trained to review and draft documents, and to play my part as a cog in well-oiled legal processes, I was suddenly thrust into the hurly burly of commerce in the favela. We decided to keep all of our suppliers and workforce local. This exposed me to a bewildering world of pre-dated cheques, barter and exchange and running extended credit lines to suppliers who operated with no bank support. Cash was king and co-operation and trust were vital. Similarly budgets and a receipt trail were new to Marinheiro. I learned to send small parcels of money to Brazil, recognising that the constant battle for money was a mentality that Marinheiro and the favela shared and respected. Even when the Project Gem coffers were modestly full, I always pleaded penury secure in the knowledge that this was the best budgetary control over Marinheiro. I also recognised that throwing money at the problem would engender a culture of dependency rather than self sufficiency, possibly killing the very initiative and vision that had impressed in the first place.
During my post-qualification break, I went to help put what I had anticipated to be the finishing touches to the ground floor before the inauguration party. ‘Hands on’ took on a new meaning after 3 weeks of manual labour where I learnt to mix and lay a concrete floor by hand. I also had a first hand experience of what employing the local labour force meant. Both the foreman and his only assistant, fondly known as Methanol, were alcoholics. Trips to buy a bag of nails nearly always ended two hours later as Methanol weaved back on site apologising profusely for some obscure family crisis. The inauguration party was a wild success. I will never forget meeting some intrepid Ashurst newly qualified solicitors at the mouth of the favela, dressed impeccably in chinos and blue shirts, and leading them through the alleyways to show them what we had achieved.
Soon afterwards Marinheiro’s project itself obtained charitable status in Brazil. He then succeeded in being recognised as the best Capoeira project in Salvador and secured 2 years federal funding for the community centre. We soon had 10 computers, internet, computer teachers, arts projects, drop-in health care, theatre and Capoeira all competing for space. The centre was a success. In two years more than 1,000 young people went through the basic introductory computer course. At the end of the two year period, many of the students had gone on to hold jobs in the real economy.
But these things never last forever. They require constant work and in the initial success of the project lay its current low ebb. Located in the heart of the favela, at the bottom of a hill at a junction of various alleyways, the centre is now threatened by violence on all sides as the crack-fuelled, drug culture migrates north from Rio to Salvador. Pursued by automatic weapons, victims always run down hill through the twisting alleyways. They are often gunned down in the open square outside the community centre, where the pursuing ‘traficante’ can get a “clear” shot through the crowded square. Both Marinheiro’s daughters have lost their boy friends, innocent victims of ‘balas perdidas’ (lost bullets). Marinheiro, with typical favela humour, grins at the predicament the girls now find themselves in: prospective suitors are deterred by the fearful odds for survival.
But there is a dark message here. Parents are terrified of letting their children attend classes; the once vibrant community centre is struggling to survive. Project Gem’s work in Baixa da Egua is threatened at a time when it is needed most. Conversely, the work in London exceeds expectations and goes on from strength to strength.
When I examine my motives for setting up and continuing with Project Gem I acknowledge that ultimately they are not altruistic but personal. Marinheiro is a great friend of mine and I care deeply about Brazil. The charity has allowed me to continue that friendship with Marinheiro and to ensure that my connection with Brazil will survive. I realise that if I had started the charity with a purely altruistic motivation, I would not be here now. The reality of running a charity is too difficult and draining. I haven’t bored you with the admin, the soul destroying reality of filling in application form after application form when all but one or two are rejected – it is dull to read and duller to write. I suppose the greatest lesson I have learnt is that you must have a strong personal connection with the charitable work you are trying to support. If you do, and succeed in making a difference, then the rewards are hugely gratifying and the skills learnt invaluable.
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Fundraising for Salvador project |
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Latest News
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 21 April 2008 |
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John Pullicino who worked as a volunteer for Project gem in Salvador during 2004 is taking part in this summers Etape du Tour, which is the amateur stage of the Tour de France. He's doing the gruelling 180 km in aid of Gem's Salvador project. To find out more and to sponsor his efforts through justgiving please visit: www.justgiving.com/projectgemtour |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 April 2008 )
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Project gem launches new website |
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Latest News
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Written by Administrator
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Wednesday, 07 July 2004 |
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Welcome to the new Project gem website. We hope that you enjoy it and send any feedback you have to:
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Last Updated ( Monday, 05 November 2007 )
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