It is against nature to have to bury your child.
Yet, Felipe's
father stood there with dignity and said that what comforted him was the fact
that his son died working, hard work, but honest work.
Felipe died under the
weight of the land and rocks that fell upon him while he was trying his luck in
a local unregulated gold mine.
Who was Felipe? A young man, inhabitant of Deixaí,
one of the poorest communities in the municipality of Cansanção, Bahia, Brazil.
A 22 years old man that took his social responsibility seriously. Employment
offers are scarce in the Territory of Sisal, northeastern Bahia and his
community is known to be one of the poorest in the area. Young people often
find themselves in a difficult choice: migrate to southeastern Brazil in search
of unqualified jobs and live in one of the many slums (favelas) that we know only from
films like Cidade de Deus or... try to make a living where they are. Felipe
chose the second option because he hoped he could do something more than
surviving. He worked as a community mobilizing agent with a local NGO and was
one of the pioneer local entrepreneurs to join, in December 2012, People-First Tourism, an alternative form of tourism, that provides genuine touristic experiences and a more dignified livelihood for the benefiting communities. A more detailed article about it on: http://people-firsttourism.blogspot.pt/2013/08/a-sobering-loss-for-p1t.html
I am writing this because I believe his death cannot remain just an already forgotten news about a young man that died as a result of an occupational hazard. Of course, Felipe knew that digging for gold, 9 meters below the ground, with no safety structure, could kill him at any point, but how many choices did he have? Agriculture is highly affected by the annual droughts. Yet, the inhabitants of these areas do not give up. Moving to an already overpopulated slum somewhere near an urban center is not solving their problem, it is just changing it for another.
What I see, in his death, is a proof of the difficulties fellow humans must deal with in the civilized year of 2013 and an alarm sign: THIS CANNOT HAPPEN AGAIN! Not anywhere, but especially not in a country like Brasil, where there is enough money for government investment in job creation. There is enough money for solving the annual droughts problem, but not enough political will. Water is an exchange coin for buying votes every four years. But I will not turn Felipe's story into a political scandal. My intention is to raise awareness. We spent a lot of hours since we knew about his death, me and Bruno, wondering what was there to be done. And one of the ideas we got to is that me, you, you and you and you, we can find an alternative when we cannot fight "the bad guys" directly, we can try our best into caring for the most vulnerable among us. Maybe, next time you or me have money to spend a holiday in an exotic country, maybe we can chose to go to Brasil. Maybe we can take a day from a beach hotel and go visit Deixaí. Felipe is not going to be there to take us on a tour of the local gold mines or to allow us to spend half a day as volunteers for improving the community road, but we will most certainly be able to find there inspiring people like him whose story will make us aware of how little effort it takes to think about how our choices can impact on other people's lives.
Felipe was my student for a few weeks, before we left from Brazil, struggling to learn English so he could better receive tourists willing to live a unique afternoon under the burning sun of the northeastern Bahia. He was the kind of student that would repeat a word as many times as necessary to make it sound as it should. It was his way of being, to struggle and make things work.
