Paul Sneed admits the Brazilian slum of Rocinha first caught his attention in the summer of 1990 because it seemed an ominous, forbidden place. Tucked tightly into a hillside near the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, it loomed above the street corner where Sneed, then a Virginia under-graduate studying abroad, caught the bus each day near his host family’s seaside mansion. “It had a really bad reputation,” he remembered.
Soon, though, Sneed (Political and Social Thought ’92) began reading a book about the favelas, as Brazil’s slums are called. He learned that the reality of life in Rocinha was “a lot different than the things I was hearing or seeing on the news or hearing from my middle-class friends at the university. And so I was intrigued.”
Sneed spent more and more of his time in the favela, growing to love the people, the openness and the culture he found there. In the 14 years since that initial experience, Brazil has become a second country for the Arlington, Va., native. Now an assistant professor of Portuguese at the University of Oklahoma, he is the founder and president of the Two Brothers Foundation, a six-year-old nongovernmental organization that brings together a small band of local and international volunteers to focus on community development in Rocinha, especially for young people.
The work is not easy. Many local residents are eager to embrace the foundation’s efforts, but poverty and violence — though not the sum total of favela life, Sneed says — present huge problems.
Soldiers for the drug traffickers who run Rocinha “are on my street, carrying machine guns and hand grenades,” says Sneed, who has lived in Rocinha, off and on, for a total of about five years. “There are some times where we have to jump on the floor because a gun battle breaks out and there’s tracer bullets flying by my window.”
For most of its existence, Two Brothers has held classes for children and adults at night in rented space at a local preschool, but in April, the foundation had to scale back its operations for safety reasons after the favela was overrun for three days by a battle between rival gangs.
“There’s people there that work very hard, study, try to go to college, try to set up businesses,” Sneed explained. “They try to do things as if they’re living in a civil society, and yet you’ve got an urban guerrilla force which is at war with a police force and other urban guerrilla forces, and sometimes the stamp of violence [is] kind of imposed over the whole situation. It makes things difficult.”
As an organization with fewer than 20 staff members, Two Brothers can do little to alter Rocinha’s political climate. What they can do is surmount these challenges whenever possible and improve the lives of individual people. And Sneed says he sees progress. Soon the foundation will move into a permanent space procured through negotiation with a local Baptist church. Funds are being raised to give Rocinha’s 120,000 residents their first library. Eventually, Sneed hopes, the foundation will be able to fulfill its stated mission of facilitating a cultural exchange program whereby low-income youths from Brazil and the U.S. do service projects in each others’ countries.
It all goes back to the “Two Brothers” name, Sneed said. The title associates the foundation with the nearby mountains of the same name, but also “the idea of fraternity and the international community — that we’re essentially brothers and sisters working together to make the world a better place.”
Sneed spent more and more of his time in the favela, growing to love the people, the openness and the culture he found there. In the 14 years since that initial experience, Brazil has become a second country for the Arlington, Va., native. Now an assistant professor of Portuguese at the University of Oklahoma, he is the founder and president of the Two Brothers Foundation, a six-year-old nongovernmental organization that brings together a small band of local and international volunteers to focus on community development in Rocinha, especially for young people.
The work is not easy. Many local residents are eager to embrace the foundation’s efforts, but poverty and violence — though not the sum total of favela life, Sneed says — present huge problems.
Soldiers for the drug traffickers who run Rocinha “are on my street, carrying machine guns and hand grenades,” says Sneed, who has lived in Rocinha, off and on, for a total of about five years. “There are some times where we have to jump on the floor because a gun battle breaks out and there’s tracer bullets flying by my window.”
For most of its existence, Two Brothers has held classes for children and adults at night in rented space at a local preschool, but in April, the foundation had to scale back its operations for safety reasons after the favela was overrun for three days by a battle between rival gangs.
“There’s people there that work very hard, study, try to go to college, try to set up businesses,” Sneed explained. “They try to do things as if they’re living in a civil society, and yet you’ve got an urban guerrilla force which is at war with a police force and other urban guerrilla forces, and sometimes the stamp of violence [is] kind of imposed over the whole situation. It makes things difficult.”
As an organization with fewer than 20 staff members, Two Brothers can do little to alter Rocinha’s political climate. What they can do is surmount these challenges whenever possible and improve the lives of individual people. And Sneed says he sees progress. Soon the foundation will move into a permanent space procured through negotiation with a local Baptist church. Funds are being raised to give Rocinha’s 120,000 residents their first library. Eventually, Sneed hopes, the foundation will be able to fulfill its stated mission of facilitating a cultural exchange program whereby low-income youths from Brazil and the U.S. do service projects in each others’ countries.
It all goes back to the “Two Brothers” name, Sneed said. The title associates the foundation with the nearby mountains of the same name, but also “the idea of fraternity and the international community — that we’re essentially brothers and sisters working together to make the world a better place.”
