Uncovering unheard voices of Brazil...
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Version 0 of 1. I wrote last summer about our plan to run citizen reporting programmes in different parts of the world. The aim is to train marginalised people and communities to bring forth burning issues and stories that, perhaps, the national and international media are overlooking. In June we visited South Africa, and October India. Now we’ve just returned from Brazil. Twenty people came from all parts of the country to take part in a two-day workshop. The training covered storytelling, evidence-finding, verification, ethics, social media and the ways participants can connect to us directly through digital platforms such as GuardianWitness. The stories they brought in were extraordinary, covering indigenous rights in the Amazon, Olympic relocations, young people in the favelas, sex workers during the World Cup, and life for Bolivian and Syrian migrants. One of our trained citizen reporters, Luis Adorno, collaborated with our Latin America correspondent Jon Watts on a murder story in Sao Paulo. We plan to use their work as part of a big piece on violence across Brazil. ‘A Year in a Favela’ will chart the period immediately before the Olympics, with our newly trained citizen reporters in Maré, Alemão and Rocinha delivering monthly updates. We have also commissioned a ‘How I Go to School’ video series with children from rural areas in Brazil. Several participants said education was their priority, especially the problems that many children face getting to school. One landless worker told us of students who had to walk for two hours across a river after their old school was shut down. Favela residents described long bus journeys even to reach city schools. Indigenous groups spoke of the challenges faced by children who have to go by boat through the forest. Our correspondent is in touch with citizen reporter Tonico Benites in order to plan a visit to Guarani Kaoiwa for a feature article about Brazil’s other indigenous people, and how they are not the photogenic jungle-dwellers of the world’s imagination, but live in much worse conditions. Finally - for now - we also commissioned an opinion piece about the threat posed by miners and loggers to the village of Itaituba. These workshops showed us that there is still a great deal out there, sadly, which the national and international media are not covering. You just have to let people tell their stories... |