Complexo do Alemão with BBC London

Complexo do Alemão with BBC London

Esta actividad fue increíble!!! Cumplió totalmente todas nuestras expectativas y aporto mucho a nuestro entendimiento de Río de Janeiro, tuvimos la oportunidad de compenetrarnos en otra cara de la cultura carioca además de, por supuesto, practicar nuestro portugués de una forma divertida y enriquecedora.

Swiner Russi, Colombia

Last Thursday was a great day! As usual we did our monthly visit to Complexo do Alemão, but this time our students were recorded by BBC London! Our friends from Turismo no Alemão did a special visit for our school and for BBC London.

Lots of things were seen as our local guide Cleber explained about how living around Complexo is.

We knew the creator of a free-wifi local point that allows to people around to use internet when they don’t have the chance to allow a connexion in their house.

We got invited to go inside the house by a local woman, to see that a home at a favela can be very beautiful and not as always is show on TV shows.

Our students Jorge Jr, Ricardo and Swinner from Colombia loved to be there and they asked us to open a new Rio&LearnSchool there, just to enjoy class and local people. Swiner did a nice friendship with our local guide Cleber, and they joked about the chances of Swiner to get a girlfriend from Alemão 😉 Swiner’s father, Jorge, and her sister Melissa, looked at this conversation with interest.

We visit a cultural center where locals can have new opportunities like do cultural presentations to other locals, they got help for new business planning and entrepreneurship, people around can have access to internet and books and kids can play videogames with flat TV. Everything is done to allow future opportunities to everybody around.

Our student Queenie from Hong Kong, bought a ‘pipa’ (kite), handmade by young people from favela with the colours of her Brazilian time, Flamengo. But after some minutes she knew a group of kids that were amazed to see foreigners there and she gave the kite as a present to them. They leave running happily with their new toy.

Queenie got amazed too when she was able to talk with the chef of the best Yakisoba restaurant in Complexo do Alemão, a Chinese guy with more than 5 years living on the favela, he got very surprised too. They talked as BBC guys recorded this unexpected encounter.

Riya from China and Jonas from Germany were interviewed by BBC about their experience in the favela visit and everybody practiced lots of Portuguese as people from favela got surprised with their Portuguese new skills

Mohamed from Belgium did a good local friend and they talked together all the time long! Mohamed has just been 4 days in our school and he didn’t know any Portuguese when he arrived.

So many things too explain that this post would be too long. We were happy to participate. Obrigado!

We will show you BBC video next month, when it will be on TV. We don’t know if we can wait so long!!