Who is Brazil?

Upon arriving to Brazil I soon realized the visible signs of a developing country. A country in which its cities are regulated only to a certain extent, and in which its people expect things not to work.

Upon exploring more aspects of Brazilian culture we dove into the topics of favelas. One of the interesting things about favelas is the relationship between the community members and the police. The favelas symbolize the relationship between the police and the rest of Brazilian society. It seems that the police is not a beacon of safety and order for the people, it is merely a tool wielded by the wealthy to exert power over those less fortunate. Thus you are left with the saying, “for my loved ones, everything; for my enemies, the law”. Was Brazil a more developed country in which corruption was not as widespread as it currently is, I believe the police would be more reliable and honest to its people. 

Brazil has a long way to go before its country’s corruption is eradicated however the first steps have been taken in the political sphere. With the impeachment of the president comes a backend deal with the leader of PMDB, one of the most corrupt parties in Brazil. Unfortunately one of the biggest roadblocks for a developing country is corruption however it is nearly impossible to get by it. It is not people that hold the power, it is money and you can see how it plays a role within Brazilian society since there is no middle class.

You have the rich, the poor, and nothing in between. As money holds the power, the rich find themselves only getting richer while the poor find themselves being suppressed. Conditions seem to be difficult for anybody who isn’t born rich as they are entered into a public school from the start, which does not bestow a strong education upon its students. Once the child hits a working age, he or she is put to work. Once work is begun, it almost doesn’t add up to continue with education if the money they make is enough for them to survive. However, if the person aspires to get an education then he or she must apply to schools, whether it be a public or private university. The public universities are the strong universities and they are free for its students, however the private university is the weaker university yet each student must pay tuition to go to it. So the students that are had to spend their time working while in high school did not have the opportunity to fully invest themselves into their studies making it all the more difficult for them to pass the tests necessary for acceptance into a public university. They are left going to a private university with the weaker education and high tuition bills, or they are left without a university education.

Thus the population carries on in the country. With consumerism on the rise as the economy develops itself, the education of the people does not rise for opportunities are not created at the same rate as the economic incline.

This is reflected in the voting of the people for the people must vote for somebody or for a political party when the time comes to do so, otherwise they are fined for not voting. Thus it is easier for them to go to the polls and vote for a random name. Most people are busy working hard in order to take care of their loved ones and providing for them, so much so that they do not have the time or inclination to follow the political elections that affect the rest of the people.

One of the thought processes that is incredibly prevalent in Brazil is thinking on a micro-scale instead of a macro-scale. People think about their inner circle of people but not about the well-being of the greater population that they are a part of. Their small-scale thinking could be part of the reason why corruption is so strong within the country. There is not enough people caring to make enough of a difference necessary to get the development of the country to surpass its current roadblock. If the education was stronger and the system of keeping the poor poor and making the rich richer was destroyed, we’d be able to create a community of people within the country that would bring great success to the Brazilian name. However, we are not there yet. Until that day, most people will continue to focus in on their close circles and they will continue to follow their passions, just as the concept of the cordial man exemplifies.

Little by little, people are beginning to notice that their social and political systems aren’t working, as is exemplified by the current impeachment process going on and the strikes happening here and there and everywhere. Yet with the chaos ensuing, it is the larger powers (the organizations with money) that are taking advantage and working their best to profit off of the people’s strife.

I can see Brazil joining the ranks of the developed countries someday sooner than later but this would take a lot of time and there would have to be a lot of change to the country and its culture before this happens.

Soccer & The Cordial Man

In visiting the Curitiba soccer game I saw how the concept of the cordial man was related to soccer culture. The day after we arrived to Curitiba we attended the Coritiba game. We were lead to the family section of the concrete stands. It was calm, quiet, and there were little kids around, which is why I considered it the family section. Nevertheless, people would yell obscene chants at the teams all around the stadium.

When the game began, the choreographed fall of the gigantic t-shirt ingrained itself into my memory for the gracefulness of it struck me as strangers let it drop and then quickly folded it back up as another banner raced up the crowds. From there the giant flags were released and danced across the sky among the crowd. Chants filled the air, mainly coming from one section of the stands, and energy surged through the stadium.

After witnessing the difference between the two sections (the family section and the other section) I wanted nothing more than to go to the other section to see what it would be like to be surrounded by the enthusiasm of the fans. After halftime I made my way over to the other crowd. You could feel the stands shake as the fans jumped around singing. We were warned early however to be careful because the people in these crowds lived and breathed soccer. If provoked they would be merciless and take you down. They may not be welcoming or kind to foreigners because they would deem you unworthy of their enthusiasm for you don't share their magnitude of passion. However, these warnings did not stop me as I went ahead over to the section anyway.

This passion reminds me of the cordial man and its significance in Brazilian culture. The cordial man leads a life following his passions just as these soccer fans do. They know what makes them happy and the rest of the world just falls away as they focus in on what they care about. This experience truly tied together what I learned in class about Brazilian culture and the visible lives of the people of Brazil.

Sao Paulo's Energy Secretary Visit

Today we visited the Secretary of Energy of the state of Sao Paulo. When we arrived we were ushered into a big room in which we met the secretary and co-secretary of energy for the state of Sao Paulo. He warmly welcomed us to their offices and told us about their plans for the presentation. He soon left to attend other more important meetings. Once he left, the co-secretary took over the show. Upon taking over, he discussed everything with us from the state's goals to their actions. The state's goals include energy security, evolutionary chain competitiveness, and reduction of emissions. The actions of the state include the growth of renewable energy. The leaders helped us understand what the current energy situation is in the world, Brazil, and Sao Paulo. Including the face that 81% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, 14% comes from renewable energy including biomass, hydro, and other, while 4.9% of energy comes from nuclear energy. In Brazil the energy allocation is 57% fossil fuels, 41% renewable energy, and 1.3% nuclear energy. One of the things I had never thought about was the fact that Brazil does not obtain all of the energy that it needs from its own sources. It obtains roughly about 30% of the energy that it consumes from the sources within the country and thus it must obtain the rest of its energy from imports. This is where such areas such as international relations come into play. It helped me realize the interconnectedness qualities of energy and international relations, which I had never deeply considered before this dialogue and before our trip. Although yesterday's class about alternative energy policy did help give a little bit of an introduction to this topic.
One of the subjects we covered were energy incentives. These were government sponsored programs which gave the public incentives to invest in alternative energies for themselves and their businesses. I had known before this dialogue about these sorts of programs existing in the United States, such as the solar panel industry and that if you make more power than you need from solar panels then you can sell the electricity to the grid for a small income. However, the ideas the co-secretary and his associates were stating were much larger scale incentives which made the presentation and the energy department's ideas rather interesting to listen to.
After all of the information was presented to us we were allowed to ask questions. Multiple very interesting and intelligent questions were asked at the end of the meeting and then the secretary left his important meeting just to see us off and to take a picture with us. All-in-all it was an informative trip.

Power Games

Favelas are very interesting to learn about because they are so different from the structured cities that are so prevalent in the United States. Favelas are considered almost separate from the rest of society. They nearly have an air of exoticness. However, these images of Favelas are interestingly enough inaccurate. Favelas are portrayed as communities of poor, unruly, groups of people yet these groups of "unruly" people have established their own "governments". The illegitimate governments of the favelas are the people that have power which tend to be gang leaders. They keep the peace in communities by working with community members such as Lil' Dice did with the store owners. The gang leaders want as little disruption to their community as possible, thus they give the police what they want in order to keep them at bay, just as the cultural reading exemplified, "On a... memorable occasion, my trafficker neighbors simply left two tons of marijuana behind for the police to find, stacked in neat piles in the middle of an alleyway leading to a drug boss's house, on the route police were sure to take the following morning".
The best way that the reading portrays the relationship between the police the gangs, and the other favela community members is the following quote from the reading, "The police periodically attempt to bring order and control the imagined chaos represented by the favela, while traffickers seek to minimize losses of life and property and use the farcical nature of police performance to solidify their role as the de facto government of the favela." Although the traffickers bring the drugs into the favelas and distribute it, thus hurting the community, they also have the power to keep the police in check and because of this they do their best to work with the police to keep the violence at bay. This was visible in the movie, City of God, when the police were being bought off by the traffickers so that the police wouldn't bother them and also so the police would keep the traffickers updated on their movements.
It's most fascinating to see how integral the traffickers are to the favela society both from our reading and from the movie we have watched.

Alternative energy reflection

During the course of our time in Brazil we have visited a number of alternative energy plants and spent numerous hours learning about the state of alternative energy in today's day and age.
In the beginning of this trip I mainly only knew about solar energy and solar panels in particular. I understood their
Inefficiency and limitations but what i didn't yet know is what causes those limitations and all of the different factors that go into maximizing solar panel efficiency, such as the direction they face. I understand that there's so much room to grow with solar panels but we have to find a better material to help capture the electrons- to look into more than just silicon as the material used in the panels.
From our trips, readings, and discussions, I've learned about hydroelectricity. I knew that Brazil had 80% of its economy running on alternative energy with hydroelectricity being its main source but I never knew why. Once we went on our plant visit to Todon I learned of the magnitude of electricity that can be produced (up to 400+ kWh of electricity!) however hydroelectricity is usually set up to only meet the demand of electricity and not to store electricity. so there's still a lot to explore in terms of efficiently capturing and storing the electricity.
Before coming to Brazil I didn't know anything about ethanol and its production. Thus when we visited the plant and read about it I learned about how it's made and just how big the process is to go from corn or sugar cane to ethanol or electricity. I was stunned by the inefficiency of biomass as an electricity source and fuel source. I also never realized just how many steps are necessary to go from an original source such as biomass or sunlight and end up with electricity. With every step of the way, efficiency is lost as energy is lost.
Alternative energy is a vast field with many opportunities in terms of discovering new technology to greater maximize our efficiency in electricity generation. I'm happy to have been able to learn so much from this course and our visits. There are so many more aspects of my gained knowledge of alternative energy that this single blog post cannot capture. I'm very excited to see how alternative energy will play a role in my life and what else we'll learn in the remainder of this trip.

The Cordial Man

Brazilian culture is multifaceted; from the socioeconomic differences to the fundamental principles, we see the culture of Brazil rooted deep in time. One of the most prominent fundamental principles of Brazilian culture is the concept of the Cordial Man. The cordial man is the principle of valuing the simple pleasures in life. It is the principle that puts value in spending time with family rather than rushing from task to task in order to obtain some sort of accomplishment as would be the case in American culture. The concept of the cordial man also leans on following your heart and living your life passionately.

The cordial man is heavily reflected in the character of Dr. Carlos. Although old, Dr. Carlos portrays a well off man who does not look towards merits to fulfill himself. Dr. Carlos lived for the simple pleasures in life as he worked away at his paintings. He did not seek fulfillment from the same things that most people with a rather individualistic mindset would have sought fulfillment from. As a cordial man, Dr. Carlos looked to live his life with passion however he was unable to do so with his wife. His wife held an individualistic mindset which clashed with his principles. She looked towards things like her work and social status to give her life value, leaving her husband behind in the shadows, not giving him any attention. However, once Val's younger daughter entered the picture we see the sparks begin to fly. Val's daughter, Jessica holds a fire within her. She is passionate about completing her education and this passion is visible to Dr. Carlos. He finds her curiosity about the world around her enticing and he finds himself entranced by her. In an attempt to bring back passion into his own life he asks her to marry him even though he already has responsibilities and commitments in his life to account for. 

The cordial man highly contradicts the individualistic mindset that I have vaguely seen dominate Sao Paulo today. Today we see the business men and women crowd the streets during rush hours and lunch hours. We see people all keeping to themselves and not interacting much with one-another. Although this individualistic mindset could be attributed to the fact that Sao Paulo is considered the second largest city in the world after New York City. Learning about the concept of the cordial man juxtaposed with the city life we encounter every day is a rather interesting juxtaposition of culture in the past and the culture of today. Although occasionally we can see this concept of the cordial man prevail in today's Brazilian society as we saw in Dr. Carlos, for the most part it can be questioned whether this cultural principle is still relevant to the culture that the people have shaped in Sao Paulo. 

Tonon: Ethanol Plant

Today we visited an ethanol plant 3 hours away from Sao Paulo named Tonon. This plant produces 300,000 liters of ethanol a day, but it's capacity is a maximum of 450,000 liters of ethanol per day. The plant produces both ethanol and electricity. It produces up to 400 megawatts of electricity per day.

The plant has four parts to it. The first part of the plant that we visited was the extraction area. Then we moved to the evaporation portion. From there we went to the fermentation process area. The plant has 10 fermentation tanks. Yeast is used in the fermentation process to create ethanol. This yeast is used again in another fermentation cycle because after it ferments you get a wine. The wine is separated from the yeast through centrifuge. The substances go to a radiation tower and there the ethanol is separated from the water using different temperatures, also known as the distillation process/part of the plant. Once they separate the water from the ethanol they reuse the water to water the crops because the water is rich in nutrients. They produce 600,000 tons of sugar per day and 1,200 megawatt hours per day. The plant is completely self-sufficient in the sense that it runs off of the energy that it produces.

At the end of the trip, we went to a sugar cane field where they showed us how they harvest the sugar cane using two big trucks/pieces of machinery. One of the machines cuts the sugar cane stalks down while the other truck catches/collects the cut pieces of stalk. We were all given pieces of sugar cane stalk to bite on and have some of. The sugar cane juice was sweet but also tasted the same way that the plant smelled. After having walked around the ethanol plant for a few hours and smelling the potent sugar cane smell everywhere, the stalk tasted disgusting. 

This was definitely a place for chemical engineers since there was a lot of chemical processes going on at this plant which was rather disheartening for me as a chemical engineer because I would not like to work in a place like that. The plant smelled horrible, it was very dirty and the technology looked very outdated that the workers used in the little rooms scattered around the plant.