Gringolado POV: Samuel Tesfay

Sammy was staying in the favela Tavares Bastos. Here is his POV of the favela:

Well my experience in the favela has been overall great! But I have to admit that I had my preconceptions about it from all the movies and the reputation that Rio has of being one of the most dangerous places in the world. So I was watching my back constantly the first couple of days. But after a while you realize that the favela is just like any other place in the world. Just people doing their thing, but doing it much better! I really like the fact that you see people of different colors living together like that, music playing constantly, the doors to the houses are always open during the day, it’s a good vibe! The people are very laid back and always seem to be having fun. And I believe that if you really want to get to know the real Rio, then you should definitely stay in a favela because of the constant vibe that is going on there. And most of all you feel welcomed there, it’s like if you live there you are a part of the family from day one! But you should of course do some quick research on what favela you should stay in. Every favela is different and has its one way of living. And some of them maybe aren’t as safe and easy going as the next one. So be sure to ask around and do some resource before you decide to live in one.

Gringolado POV: Sarah Achucarro

My perception of favelas was of a very dangerous and violent place, where you dont go in alone, run by drug dealers with guns on the street. To be honest I only thought of the main characters in the public eye of the favelas (the gansters) and before I didn’t think about all the other people who were living there lives there separate of the drug situation, but involved through a consequence of living there.

Tabajaras

When I went into Tabajaras the first time i was scared about the unknown what I was going to find, it was like walking into a small village where I was the outsider the unknown and I saw a teenager of around 15 to 17 with blue sunglasses and a machine gun sitting on the street he looked at me with a ‘”I’m a celebrity, you’re here to see me, look” or so I perceived.

After this I wanted to know how things had got to this point where so many young tennagers were loosing their lives stationed at points with guns, and my curiosity turned from fear into interest. I moved into the favela a week later, and started to feel accustomed, was welcomed by some into the community warmly and met very kind and generous people who were curious about me and what I was doing there . My awareness of danger changed, being an outsider, there is a rule in the favela not to talk about the faction (gang) who is ruling the favela (its a dictatorship). No one talked directly to me about what was going on, through fear of trust and a silence. I was hearing lots of things going on, small 12 yr old being killed for stealing, first time he was beaten, the second time killed. Gun shots were going off and it was difficult to find out why. You need the info to keep safe.

It’s really complicated living in the favela run by gansters there are positives and negatives, the amazing people, so generous and warm, get over looked because the spot light is put on the celebrities (the gansters)

When I was in Tabajaras, I saw the direct effects of drugs, for expample, young teenagers, beautiful adults, and old people smoking crack on the street, as other mothers were walking their children past them in the street. A shot goes off in the middle of the day ,and by accident one of the gansters has shot a hole in his friends face, the friend was been rushed to the hospital and the police came, and now a war has started, no one leaves their house.

Also saw a boy of around 10 or 11 so badly beaten walking down the street he looked like an alien, I will never forget this image ,my friend walked over a dead body in the street when she came to visit me. Both of us, did nothing to help these people, because innocently if you do, and you go to the police (normal response) the war starts you will be held responsible, bad for business, and they’ll get rid of you. Its crazy!

I’m talking about negatives more then positives, because to be honest these images are in my mind so strongly. But I have so many good memories, of the rain pouring, running into a bar, naturally 4 or 5 teenage boys came in and started playing music and we were all laughting and talking, there is a closeness in a favela and community that I havent found anywhere else. Poverty, but an absolute generousity that I havent found anywhere else, and kindness. The kids are energetic, open to talk, curious and laughter, music and dance, and noise are common every day parties.

The first time I went to a party in the favela was a family party and I felt so welcomed and they were so kind to me, it was one of the best nights I’ve had in Rio, we had a great night, danced, ate, drunk, and talked.

My landlady took on a motherly role, and people seem to have more time for one another, content on hanging out, socializing and talking on the street, it’s more intimate, and more human contact. People live in such close proximity, people say hello, know your family life history, etc, so gossip and talking is a natural course, so is if some thing bad happens, or if you need anything, people come together and help.

Tavaras Bastos is a completely lighter engery and one I wish for every favela in Rio, all of the good aspects of favelas, and not the regular deaths and gunshots that go on else where. I feel so much more comfortable here, there is less of an edge and it’s an easier life.

There is music every night, dance, sense of community. The struggles go on, sometimes no water for a week, or no eletricity, or money worries, but at the same time, you’re not exposed to drugs on the street or violence or arms. This makes for a better envioroment for kids to grow up in.

I’m very happy here living in Tavaras and sometimes can forget about the other troubles going on in other favelas, which is not good as just because I dont see it on a daily basis doesn’t mean it doesnt go on…. where as before I was very much aware of it, it’s difficult to know, how I would feel being born in a favela, because I would be a different person, but I feel fortunate to have met so many wonderful people who have welcomed me and showed me a more open and communicative, generous way of living. It still amazes me how people with hardly anything share what they have, and when people have so much can be very selfish. Strange one…

WHAT DID I DO
I was working as a volunteer teaching english, community work restoring a community center, organizing fundraisers in Tabajaras, Parada de Lucas and Tavaras Bastos, somethiing that I would recommend to everyone. It’s been an amazing experience. The people are amazing and I have met life long friends here.

WOULD I RECOMMEND VISITORS TO STAY IN A FAVELA
Only clued up visitors, you need to respect the favelas more than the outside, and sometimes it’s difficult to know all the rules. There is more risk at being caught in the cross fire some where. Its difficult some of the things I saw in Tabajaras will always stay with me and were disturbing to me.

I would recommend EVERYONE to stay in a favela if it was ganster free and without the everyday wars that go on, but to be honest I wouldnt want my family living in a favela run by gansters, at the same time I wouldn’t want to live outside a favela in Rio, it becomes a confusing and contradicting situation.

When people do have the opportunity to get out of the favela and become wealthy, through business, usually film, music or football, some choose to stay living in the same favela, all their friends, families and community are there, it’s a lifestyle and culture, that maybe moving to fit in with the other culture, Ipanema apartment, is harder to do.

I could write alot more, and at the same time, these are my views, from my perpective, living and visiting the favela is so different I will never know what it feels like to be born into the culture, I will always feel differently, it’s a very individual experience depending on the person as well.

I hope this is ok, and I didn’t go on too much, it’s hard to give an opinion to a situation that I still find so facinating and complex, but I love living where I’m living at the moment and wouldn’t change it, if you offered me a rich apartment block in Urca, for me this place doesnt have life, and its like self built prison with armed gaurds in the street. Both are crazy solutions. Why is there the need for all this protection, bits of paper called money that we have put this imaginary value to, that without it, we can’t do anything…..

anyways probably boring you now,

but seriously if i can help or you have any more questions just ask

peace and love and light

BBC correspondent starts hotel in favela

Here is an article about Bob’s Hotel, The Maze in Tavares Bastos.

Amazing views over Rio and a steady stream of celebrity guests . . . no, it’s not a glitzy hotel but a guest house in one of the city’s notorious favelas. The view from the veranda at the Maze Inn is one of the finest in Brazil. The hubbub of central Rio de Janeiro stretches from the base of the hill on which the house is perched until the shores of Guanabara Bay. Across the water, dotted with yachts and fishing boats, I can trace the paths of cable cars sliding up and down the iconic granite peak of Sugarloaf Mountain.
Such panoramas are one of the few privileges of living in one of Rio’s favelas – the multitudinous cascades of slum housing that coat the city’s hillsides.
“It’s all due to a Portuguese design fault,” says Bob Nadkarni, English-born owner of the Maze, Brazil’s first favela guesthouse. “They couldn’t be bothered to build up the hills, and the favelas gobbled up all the best views!”
Bob has been in Brazil in various guises since the 70s – as a journalist, a BBC cameraman and a documentary maker – and moved to the favela in the 90s having driven his ill maid home and been gobsmacked by the views.
In 2000 Bob pounced on the then governor of Rio, Anthony Garotinho, at his inaugural international press conference, and presented the plans of an abandoned warehouse behind his house on the favela’s peak, challenging him to station a police squad there.
Forced into action by such a public challenge, the authorities agreed and by the end of the year the police had pushed the drug-runners out, and made the favela one of the safest districts in the city.
Behind us, the Maze is buzzing with activity. Scattered around a multi-level lounge, pinned by large pillars and clad in demolition wood under a large skylight, dozens of people are whizzing to and fro. Inexplicably, the Maze is home to the cast and crew of Hulk 2, the Incredible Hulk. I’m informed that Edward Norton isn’t on set today.
But this is just the latest chapter in the Maze’s extraordinary story.
Even before it was made into a guesthouse in 2005, Bob had a variety of interesting guests turning up, fascinated by tales of an English film-maker living in a Rio favela.
George Martin recorded a chapter of his Rhythm of Life series here, and Alan Parker and Stephen Frears have visited. When film companies heard about a favela where they could “shoot without being shot at”, they started knocking on Bob’s door. Episodes of Brazilian soaps and a Snoop Dogg music video have been filmed on Tavares Bastos’s cobbled streets using the Maze as a base, and now, of course, there’s the Hulk.
But the Maze is mostly a rather unique guesthouse. Eight double rooms above the main lounge area – each with original paintings by Bob – are arranged around asymmetric arches and multicoloured broken tiles. It’s a beautiful, organised chaos that imitates the favela around it.
I ask Bob if this is the beginning of some kind of favela gentrification. “It’s already happening! We have regular live music nights in the lounge, and we get locals coming up who would never have gone anywhere near a favela in the past. We put on jazz bands, bossa and samba nights, and they come, drink R$5 (about £1.30) caipirinhas and walk home safely at 3am. OK, right now we are the only favela that is totally safe, but 200 years ago Hampstead was the most dangerous favela in London.”
The Maze’s temporary role as a film set means that there’s no room for me, but since arriving at my hostel near Copacabana I’d been asked various times whether I had “done” a favela yet. Since entering the international vernacular via films such as Fernando Meirelles’s Oscar-nominated City of God, various companies have been running tours into the slums. Just like Sugarloaf and the Christ Statue, the favela experience is another box to tick when visiting Rio.
“Some of it is voyeuristic,” says Bob. “The tour people take you to designated areas where the locals know you are coming. But you can’t observe anything in that way without changing its behaviour.
“At the Maze Inn it’s safe enough to be on your own . . . spend a week in Tavares Bastos and the locals get used to you, and you can drink with them in the cafes, or maybe play snooker in the bars. And when you want a change you can head down the hill to the bars in Lapa, or jump on the metro to Copacabana and Ipanema.”
We head to a small cafe behind his house where a couple of women and their children sit watching the TV. Then Bob’s phone rings.
It’s a guest booking herself in over Carnival. Dutifully, Bob ambles back to the Maze to confirm the booking. I head down to the base of the favela, past flaking buildings and vested locals who had directed me to “Casa du Bobby” on the way up.
I button my pockets and shove my camera to the bottom of my bag, leaving the only patch of Rio hillside that, thanks to a slightly eccentric Englishman, manages to be safer than the flat land beneath it.

Gringolado! Gringos luv Favelado lifestyle.

An interesting article from the Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Most of the massive hillside slums that rise up around Rio’s posh Ipanema beach district are places where middle-class Brazilians would never go. But a growing number of tourists are shunning the beachfront zones with their pricey hotels and shops to get a taste of the “real Brazil,” one outsiders rarely see up close.

Gabe Ponce de Leon is one — he came to Rio as a college exchange student in 2001 and lived the high life until he discovered the slums. Teaching English for pocket money, the Brooklyn native got his first taste of a “favela” when a student took him home to Rocinha, a place whose very name makes many Brazilians fearful.

“Rocinha looks daunting from the outside, like an impregnable fortress,” said Ponce de Leon, 27. “But inside it’s like a hamlet, with kids playing in the streets, and you know all your neighbors.”

Ponce de Leon decided to rent a room in his student’s home for $75 a month and immerse himself in the favela life.

“There’s a lot of fun there. There are samba groups, ‘funk’ dances and more bars than any other business. It’s a cop-free zone, no lawyers, no bureaucracy, no corporate regulations or commercialism,” he said. “But there’s also old-fashioned human warmth; people help each other out. For a guy who grew up in Brooklyn, you see this way of life still exists.”

While there is no exact count of how many foreigners live in favelas, Rio’s Federation of Favela Associations says the number has risen sharply, from dozens a decade ago to hundreds today, especially from Europe and the United States.

Most got their first taste of favela life on the Jeep and walking tours of shantytowns that began in the 1990s.

More recently, bed and breakfast inns have opened up in some of the less violent favelas, even advertising in English on the Internet to attract more adventurous travelers.

One service, called “Favela Receptiva,” offers rooms in favela homes, plus airport pickup, free breakfast, bed linen and telephone service.

“Favelas have a negative image of drugs and violence, but visitors find out it can be different,” said Marcelo Mendonca, who rents out a room in his house in the Vila Canoas favela. “People love to go to the bakery and the corner bar. They help the local economy.”

So far, Mendonca has hosted guests from England, Australia, Hong Kong and Spain. Some complained that his favela, one of the city’s safest, seemed too nice.

Mabel Taravilla, 29, doesn’t consider that a problem. She rents a bedroom for $200 a month including breakfast, sharing Mendonca’s house with his wife and their two children. “It’s cheap and peaceful and not linked to the drug wars,” said Taravilla, an anthropology student from Acobendas, Spain.

For many years, Rio’s 600 favelas occupied a romantic space in the Brazilian imagination, as the birthplace of samba and the carnival groups that draw thousands of upper-class Brazilians to Rio’s Samadrome parade grounds each year.

That changed in the 1980s as heavily armed gangs defended a rising cocaine trade. Today, few middle-class Brazilians have ever visited a favela, and few have any desire to do so.

While some favelas offer spectacular ocean views and a population more accustomed to foreigners and tourists, most lay behind the back of the towering Christ the Reedemer statue, on Rio’s low-lying north side, and are brutal, dirty places with homicide rates approaching war zones. Stray bullets are a constant hazard, and shops often close on orders from drug bosses.

But a cruel form of justice meted out by drug gangs makes Rio’s infamous street crime less common in the favelas, where people with a high tolerance for risk are sanguine about flying bullets.

British painter Bob Nadkarni made his move in the 1970s, to the Tavares Bastos favela, at the top of a winding cobblestone street reminiscent of the colonial era, where the road ends abruptly and a labyrinth of alleys, shops and bare-brick apartments begins.

Nadkarni discovered the favela when his maid got sick and he had to take her home. One glimpse of the spectacular Sugarloaf mountain view was enough — he decided to build his own home there. Now he rents rooms to visitors and features a monthly jazz night that attracts scores of outsiders, Brazilian and foreign.

Nadkarni, burly man of 64, says many Brazilians are unjustifiably afraid of favelas.

“They’ll even brag about it, and compete to see who is more afraid,” he said. “But I couldn’t live anywhere else.”

Beautiful – Snoop Dogg and Pharrel

This video made tons of guys want to come down to Brazil, but what many don’t know is that many shots of this video was shot in a favela.  Bob’s hotel The Maze was seen in the first shot of Snoop answering the phone. The name of the favela is Tavares Bastos which has also been seen in the film Hulk, and many Brazilian novelas.