[Bridge of Clay]

Quote: (Originally Posted by Said Eyes)

Wow. Very insightful stuff there. What part of Brazil are you from? Is there a mix of races in the more developed areas, or is it quite segregated? Is there any tension between white Brazilians and black Brazilians like there is the US? Do many people cross the border from living in the slums to living in the fancy neighbourhoods? What kind of government is in power at the moment, and do they try and help out the poorer people, (ie. Are there any government programs that try and help the less fortunate?) or is it all screwed up by the massive corruption you spoke of?

I'm from São Paulo City (capital of SP State), Southeast. SP is the largest city in Brazil, and the most developed as well. It's the Business capital of ours. SP has about 12 million habitants and comparing to USA cities, it'd be like New York.

You wouldn't believe how races are mixed here, specially in big cities. We have a lot of Dutch descendents in Northeast, for example, when a long. If you go to the 3 states from BR South, black people are practically rare. You'll only find blond with blue eyes people, since it's where people from Italy, Germany, Holland and other European countries immigrated. SP has a large concentration of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Jewish and Asians, along with other Europeans. In the country of SP state, you'll find a city called Americana, founded by Americans. They only speak English there, but now they're on their 3rd generation, it seems they're not stick to their roots anymore. There's a dutch city as well.

There aren't any racial segregation/tensions/riots as we (used to) see in US. Of course you'll always find people that think they're superior to the others. But you can pick various reasons, not only race, such as social class (wealth), sex, etc. But people are like that. I'm not saying we're strawberry fields!

About crossing the borders... well, there are no borders! Richness and Poverty live side by side. You can go to a neighbourhood that's like our Beverly Hills and find those huge residencial buildings that are next to a slum. And many people from this slum work at those buildings. It's such a paradox land.

Right now the goverment here is a goverment that won the elections for the first time. They were always opposition, the kind that always tried to ruin things situation proposed, no matter how good it was. You can tell I don't like it. Luiz Inacio Silva, aka Lula, is the president. He was a metallurgist that got involved with Labor Unions and led lots of strikes in the past. Never got to college... but he's too populist you know? He lost election 4 times before the last one. The previous goverment was brilliant. The president was re-elected and he was fixing this country, but then we had crisis in Russia, Asia and Argentina that affected our Economy, so the unemployement rate went high. The speech from Lula was what the poor wanted to hear... Like if the previous goverment never cared for social agenda. Now he's in power, he launched a "hunger zero" program that's only advertisement, since it doesn't work. So, when he realize that all his ideas were failing, he joined all of the previous goverment programs, changed the project names and brags about it. And from a guy that was pretty marxist, he learned well. His economic staff is brilliant. Our Central Bank President (like the Fed) dropped his FleetBoston's CEO job to assume this new gig! Quite a transformation for who wanted to call default on IMF and globalization.

Unfortunaly, many from Lula's party has antiquated and lefty ideas, but they're learning fast. Last year, the Brazilian Stock Market's valorization was over 100%, going from 11000 pts in January to 23000 pts in December.

But here we always had a good public healthy policies. For example, HIV positives get their medical drugs for free. Many, many people get drugs for free, from the goverment. Of couse the majority of hospitals aren't first world, but we have many first world hospitals that admit people for surgery, cancer treatment, heart diseases and stuff. Surgeries as well, from plastic to brain and transplants (plastic only when people for suffer accidents, not for beauty reasons). I have a friend (actually my dad's friend) who lived in California for 2 years, he says the Public Health System here is much better than in US. It's not paradise, otherwise I wouldn't have to pay for private healthcare.

In sum, we got the best from the best and the worst from the worst, living together in the same place.

I don't know, but I feel Brazil is getting better, despite all the problems we have, we're developing. Things will chance for the best.