Day 13-Graffiti time!

       Saturday-Now today was saweeeeeet!  We got to go to a favela and paint some of the houses there.  As I have mentioned the favelas are what you would consider the slums.  This is where super poor people have constructed very rudimentary houses out of anything that they can.  They are all really close together and a lot of people live in them.  The poverty is really sad, a lot of them have very little food and it is a daily struggle.  Drug trafficking is a very real and very big part of life in the favelas and that is one thing that CCJ, the place we are doing the internship with, is combating.  They are trying to take in the kids that have no where else to go, catch them before the drug traffickers do and teach them skills and things to do besides getting caught up in that.  The average kid that gets involved with trafficking does not live past the age of 25, so basically once you start your days are numbered.
     Doug, one member of our group was talking with one of the guys that works with the CCJ and asking him about it, if it was really that big and bad out here, if he had any contact with it.  He told Doug that it is, then he pointed to one of the young men that was with us and told him that the traffickers were trying really hard to get him involved, so the CCJ guy kept inviting him to as many activities as possible to hopefully get him into spray painting and graffitying so that he would take that up instead of getting involved with drugs and death.

 This is the wall that my group painted.  Do you see how narrow it is between the buildings?  The clothes hanging up on the wall are hung up with barbed wire.  Between the two rows of houses there is a ditch, so you have to walk on cement slabs placed over the ditch.  They don´t have running water in all the houses, but they have water spickets placed throughout the favelas so they fill up buckets of water from there and carry them home.

 This is Pedro, we painted the wall of his house.  He was so excited, it was fun to see how happy it made the people there, it was something to be super proud of.  I felt like we were on display because people kept walking by to see what we were doing and asking us to come and paint their houses.  Pedro had a huge smile on the entire time.

    This adroable child is Pedros grandson Igor.  Look at his huge eyes, is he not just enbtirely too adorable!  Most of the kids there were running around in nothing but their underwear (of course that is what all kids everywhere want to do, but our parents make us put on clothing, boo) it is sad to think that one day he might get caught up in the drug rings too, and be killed.  It is a fear that all the mothers and wives have for their sons, brothers, husbands.  I don´t know if women have to deal with it as much as the men, but even if they don´t it is still a huge part of their lives.

 Look at me go!  First you put on a base of latex paint that you tint to any color that you want, we obviously chose blue, then you paint and spray paint to your little hearts content.  I was immensely pleased with my palm tree, I am not much of an artist, usually, but look at me go!

 These are the other members of my group, Mitch in the back, then Cristina and then Jordan.  If you look behind them on the left there is an arm sticking up, that is Avraão...or something like that, he is part of CCJ and he loves painting words, so that is what he is doing over on that wall.

There he is right up front now.  They are all super cool people, they are so good with the children that they work with and it is really awesome to remember that most of them are from favelas as well and they have overcome a lot and now help others.  Imagine if there weren´t organizations such as this that help these kids to find something else to do in life, to love art and have meaning and purpose for what they are doing.

 Here are a few pictures of what the other groups did.  There were so many houses there that obviously we were not able to get to all of them, not for lack of them all trying to get us to paint their houses, but we did run out of paint eventually!  We have some very creative people in our group.

Now we get to some of the ones that the real artists from CCJ created.  These pictures are cool because not only do they show the creative artistic ability of the painters and graffiti artists, but also their photography skills at work, which is another one of the aspects of art that they teach to kids.

This is Carbonel, from what I have seen he is the leader there.  He is a really nice guy and he is fantastic with the kids.  He is super patient and they just adore him.  Before we left we went over to see what he was painting and he had about 15 kids around him, he was letting them all help him with his wall and they were just eating it up, it was adorable.

 This guy is super talented, not sure what his name is, but on Face book he is Preto Ds.  It was really cool to watch this bird come to life, I didn´t get to see him actually finish it but got to watch part of it.  They have so much talent, it really is quite hard to graffiti and have an image turn out this good.  I don´t know if any of you have tried it, but I think we should have a party when I get back and spray paint the old shed, eh, eh!!  That would be a lot of fun...but it would probably end up with palm trees and an ugly beach scene rather than something fantastic like this, oh well, we can´t all be born with this much raw talent or it wouldn´t be so stinkin cool!

Check out this last picture, same picture, and this is the guy also at work, but look at the photography, amazing isn´t it!  These people are so talented!  I can´t get over it.  I love working with them so much because they are so talented, and yet they are working for an organization where they probably don´t get paid hardly anything, if anything at all, and they are doing it to better the lives of those around them, it is amazing!  I think that this might really be a deciding factor of me going into humanitarian work rather than international business or something else.  It has been an amazing experience just in these few weeks to see the difference that they are trying to make!