Vignettes

It is not uncommon to see young teen and preteen boys escape from paying bus fare here by either climbing in the windows of moving buses or by hanging off the sides and backs of buses, holding on to whatever they can as the buses madly swerve in and out of traffic. One weekend, as I was heading into town, a young boy latched himself onto the outside of the bus, his hands peeking over the ledge of an open window. Unconstrained by traffic, the bus barrelled down the street at a clip that would make any weekday driver envious. The driver stopped a few times to let people on, thus giving the boy a chance to rest his hands and arms before heading off again. Through all the stops, the back door remained closed as not one passenger left the bus. After the boy had held on to the side of the bus for well over two kilometres, the driver opened the backdoor just long enough for the boy to climb in. Clearly relieved, the boy took a seat on the back steps. Moments later, when I glanced over again, the boy had disappeared. I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had taken a seat at the back of the bus and had promptly fallen asleep.

Last week I had lunch in a bit of a fancy restaurant [read: my meal, including an appetizer and dessert, a drink, a coffee, and tip cost R$60/C$30]. As I was digging into my meal, a couple and their small son walked in, young nanny dressed in a white uniform in tow. The family sat down at a table and the man and the woman examined the menu, ordered the food, and then shooed the son (and consequently the nanny) away. Before too long, a plate of hors d’oeuvres arrived which the man, the woman, and the now returned son enjoyed, the latter courtesy of the nanny’s help. Once the hors d’oeuvres had been polished off, two steaming entrées were brought to the table, from which a portion of one was siphoned off for the son. The nanny sipped a coke while feeding the son. Otherwise she stared straight in front of herself. When the man and woman had finished eating, they ordered and drank a coffee. When the coffees were finished, the foursome got up and left. In all likelihood, assuming their lunches were more or less equivalent to mine, the couple's meal cost 1/3 to 1/5 of the nanny's monthly salary.

One night when I was coming home after an evening out, I got stuck in a mini-traffic jam near my house. Thinking this a strange thing for such an hour, I glanced out of the car window and saw the reason for the hold up: the occupant of a flashy SUV negotiating with a young barely-clad teen on the street corner. Horns honked expressing annoyance at the delay. The SUV turned the corner, the girl ran the few metres and hopped in, and the cars continued on their way.

Over the past year, the Ministry of Communications, in partnership with a variety of other institutional partners, has been installing telecentros - essentially internet centres - in small agricultural communties in the Northeast as part of an effort to increase access to information and communications. Isolated and poor, a majority if these rural communities did not even have access to conventional phone lines when the centros were installed. This week I attended an event during which an evaluation of the centros was being conducted. When asked how the internet could change the life of subsistence and often illiterate rural farmers, a cotton farmer answered. At one point over the past year, the farmer had been dealing with a potential buyer. When the buyer offered the farmer R$2 per bushel, the farmer's son hopped on the internet and found that cotton was currently being sold for for R$4 a bushel. Armed with this information, farmer and buyer subsequently agreed on a sale price of R$3.50.

This afternoon, I met a group of twenty teens who applied to and were accepted to be trained as volunteer peer educators with a local teen health clinic. On Monday, the teens will find out if they "passed" the training and whether they will become part of the core teen education team. If successful, the teens will spend eight hours a week doing extension work in the clinic, in schools, in communities, and with families. All twenty teens were on pins and needles waiting to find out whether or not they would be invited to be a part of the team. These are the faces of tomorrow.