This blog was is not really participating or sharing about the on-going FIFA World Cup, Brazil 2014, in solidarity with the families of those who lost their lives while constructing some of the stadia being used for the competitions.
However, Sam Laird is in Brazil, working for Mashable. This blog shares this human angle post of Sam's take on real life in Manaus, located in Amazonas, the fourth-poorest of Brazil's 26 states.
Here is his story...
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Arena da
Amazonia stadium, in Manaus, Brazil, as seen while still under construction on
Dec. 10, 2013.
Image:
Renata Brito/Associated Press
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| Sam Laird/Mashable |
Wednesday, 18th June, 2014
MANAUS, Brazil
— If you spend enough time in FIFA's air-conditioned World
Cup media center, where bean-bag chairs let you stretch your back
and the Wi-Fi is good and plentiful and everyone has a smartphone and a laptop
and a fancy digital camera, if you spend enough time bullshitting with other
journalists and tourists from England and Italy and the United States, you can
almost forget the absurdity of where you are and the contradictions surrounding
your being here.
You can almost
forget three workers died building the Arena da Amazonia, the massive $300
million structure where you're stationed. You can almost forget that stadium
was built in Manaus, a city with no major soccer team that can realistically
come anywhere near filling the place after it hosts the four World Cup matches
it was built for.
You can almost
forget Manaus is located in Amazonas, and that Amazonas is the fourth-poorest
of Brazil's 26 states, a place where a quarter of inhabitants live in extreme
poverty, according to the World Bank.
You can almost
forget that just this sort of poverty is endemic to Brazil's extreme income
inequality. You can almost forget where you are epitomizes the anger behind
large-scale protests against the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics
coming to Brazil when more important tasks like education and healthcare could
use attention and funding.
Almost.
So, after two days in the cushy bubble of the World Cup industrial
complex, I set off in search of the "real" Manaus
So, after two days in the cushy bubble of the World
Cup industrial complex, I set off in search of the "real" Manaus, or
at least something like it. My two goals that Sunday afternoon were simple.
First, get a
little bit lost. Second, don't get stabbed or robbed. Brazilians in the States
told me both were distinct possibilities in this third-world city of more than
1.5 million people surrounded by Amazon jungle and reachable only by boat or
airplane.
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Empty net: A
soccer court sits unused in Manaus' sweltering afternoon sun.
Image: Sam
Laird/Mashable
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Even while
staying far from the favelas where most of
the city's reported 945 homicides in 2012
occurred, it's not hard to get a look at life beyond the FIFA-spun cocoon centered around Arena da
Amazonia. In front of some shuttered store fronts, homeless-looking men without
shirts or shoes leaned against closed gates, their bodies so caked in dirt that
their skin was nearly pitch black in patches. Mangy stray dogs loped from shade
spot to shade spot, their tongues hanging lifelessly from open jaws.
Cinder-block
homes stacked precariously on top of one another peppered the town's ravines
and small hillsides. Steep staircases led down to neighborhoods of twisting
streets where jeans, T-shirts and replica soccer jerseys dried on clotheslines,
offering a strong contrast to the cheap plastic World Cup streamers that arched
over other streets around town. Down those winding neighborhood paths, men in
flip-flops sat languidly under shade trees to escape the punishing afternoon
heat.
Elsewhere,
families enjoyed the afternoon in gated front patios. Men at small bars played
cards as TVs blared in the background. At the Millennium shopping mall food
court, men, women and children watched France play Honduras on big-screen
projectors and young women with impeccable English staffed a temporary
information desk where they answered questions and kept a running tally of
where World Cup visitors came from.
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Figuratively,
if not geographically, far from the World Cup spotlight, a man in a no. 9
Brazil shirt begs for money from passing motorists in Manaus.
Image: Sam
Laird/Mashable
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But my Sunday
experience is perhaps best illustrated by a story from Saturday night.
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England and
Italy play in their opening World Cup Group D match at the Arena da Amazonia in
Manaus, Brazil, Saturday, June 14, 2014. The stadium will go largely unused
after hosting four World cup matches.
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The night prior,
a few hours after watching England lose to Italy at the Arena da Amazonia on
Saturday, I met a World Cup volunteer and Manaus resident named Carlos. Carlos
is one of a swarm of volunteers who wear bright blue and yellow hats and shirts
made by Adidas, one of the tournament's official sponsors. They help keep the
stadium, and others like it, running.
They answer
questions, guide you to where you need to go and stand as smiling sentries in
front of doors you're not supposed to pass through.
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2014 World
Cup volunteers' uniforms, made by Adidas, were unveiled on April 10, 2014,
during Rio Fashion Week at an even featuring former soccer star Cafu and
Brazilian model Fernanda Lima in Rio de Janeiro.
Image:
Felipe Dana/Associated Press
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I was in the
wrong place for a cab, Carlos said. Come, he said, he'd take me around to the
other side of the stadium, to Avenida Constantino Nery, where taxis pass more
frequently. I followed, and we started to talk, and after a couple minutes I
took out my notebook.
Carlos said he
was glad the World Cup had come to Manaus. Then he went on.
"Yes, I'm
happy it comes to Manaus," he said in his proficient but imperfect
English, with a nod toward the stadium on our right. "We know the stadium
is too big. We know the football here isn't big enough for it.
We call it a white elephant. You know this term?
I assured him I
did. It has been used by the American media for some time with reference to
Manaus and its new stadium.
Carlos said
that, yes, I could use his quotes for an article, but that he couldn't give his
last name because, he said, "my boss is from FIFA." (I later learned
from other volunteers and supervisors that the World Cup volunteers aren't
permitted to discuss, you know, the actual World Cup.)
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The 2014
World Cup is certainly not the only evidence of commercialized globalization in
Manaus.
Image: Sam
Laird/Mashable
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I asked him why
he volunteered to work for free.
"It's
because like right now, I'm talking to you," Carlos said. "I hope you
and people like you come to Manaus. I hope you like Manaus, and you come back
or you tell your friends it's a good place to visit. Or maybe people start to
invest here. I want it to help Manaus."
My exploration
of Manaus beyond the bubble brought no robberies — which would
have been a dramatic denouement, to be sure, yet was obviously for the best.
Perhaps the warnings were overblown. But the walk did bring a deeper look into
the World Cup's most bizarre, extreme and inexplicable host city.
Does a half-day
kicking about in the humid dust and wandering down side-streets and staring at
locals make you any sort of expert on what is or isn't the "real"
Manaus — or any other place for that matter?
Of course it
doesn't. It can feel voyeuristic and exploitative, at times. But here and now,
amid the World Cup and all its paradoxical splendor, it's worth doing anyway.
