Word: favela
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Rodrigo, you are crazy. Poor people can never use computers." That is what friends and business associates in Rio de Janiero said to Rodrigo Baggio five years ago when he told them about his dream to bring technology into the city's sprawling slums, called favelas. He didn't listen. Now Baggio, 30, operates 117 computer schools in the slums of 13 Brazilian states through his Committee for the Democratization of Information Technology (CDI). Most of the 32,000 young people who have completed classes either have jobs or are starting their own businesses. Without Baggio's inspired idea, most...
...Favela, 10, a fifth-grader in Pacific Palisades, Calif., got the Monica Lewinsky story on MTV news. "They said this lady accused Clinton of a sex scandal, like Paula Jones. I was shocked." Well, what exactly is the President accused of, Max? "He, like, raped a woman." Unsure of his answer, he confers with his friend Josh. "A sex scandal," Max now clarifies. "Having sex with a lady, and she comes back later and accuses him. Now he's in big trouble...
...death toll from a devastating fire last Feb. 25 in the shantytown-or favela-of Vila Soco, in the southern Brazilian town of Cubatao, was simply too low. Only 86 bodies were recovered after a gasoline-fed blaze exploded into a giant fireball that looked like an atomic mushroom cloud. Yet some 9,000 people lived in Vila SocÓ, a patchwork of wooden shacks built on stilts over a marshy swamp. Coroner Carlos Affonso Figueiredo found it strange that no bodies of children under five years of age had been discovered among the ashes and in the hot rubble...
Vila SocÓ was an accident waiting to happen. Part of the favela had been built illegally on private land near a gasoline pipeline owned by the state oil monopoly, Petrobrás. The day before the fire, Petrobrás had ordered the wrong pipeline to be opened, causing a leak in the pipeline that ran next to Vila SocÓ. Investigators contend that Petrobrás failed to monitor a pressure buildup on the line and stop the leak. At the time of the explosion, shortly after midnight, gasoline had spread throughout many ditches of the shantytown, creating...
...slums of Rio de Janeiro. John Paul saw squalor. He climbed up a dirt road past the wooden shacks where 20,000 squatters exist under constant threat of eviction, toward a tiny parish church that serves the favela of Vidigal. On the way, he suddenly turned aside into a three-room hovel, where Elvira Almeida Lima, caught by surprise, had yet to make her bed or clear the breakfast dishes. The Pope gently kissed the old woman and blessed her. As he left she clutched a tablecloth and buried her face in it, sobbing. When he reached the church. John...