Translator: Vitor Belota Gomes Reviewer: Theresa Ranft In May 2013, I attended a lecture at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. They were offering social exchange opportunities. There were three students giving a talk, one had been to Africa, the other to India and the third to Eastern Europe.
Their stories were so incredible that they made me question that moment I was living. I'd just graduated in Business Administration, and had returned to my senior year at law school. I had a full-time job, so I was professionally satisfied, but deep down I felt that something was missing.
I lacked life experiences like those. I started researching some places I was interested in, I was torn between Asia and Africa. So I talked to some friends about where they'd been, and their impressions.
Two friends of mine who had been to Kenya described it with such passion, such emotion, and even nostalgia what they’d experienced there, that I'm sure they would’ve killed me if I'd considered going somewhere else, But mostly I wanted to feel for myself and see with my own eyes if everything they'd told me was true. At that time, the hardest thing was quitting my job. My boss thought I'd become a hippie because I was going to leave everything to do volunteer work in Africa.
But the decision was made, I bought my ticket the day after leaving my job, so there was no turning back. In July, I flew to Kenya, and as soon as I arrived, the journey proved to me that if I was seeking adventure, I had found it on that first day. The airline company lost my bag.
Great! The guy who'd pick me up didn't arrive. I was left alone in the airport for four hours.
The house where I'd stay no longer existed. I ended up going to another house, and all of this on my first day. That's fine, I wanted adventure, that's what I was there for, so I had to face it.
Nairobi, to my surprise, or rather to my ignorance, was a very rich city. I saw BMWs, five-star hotels, even an expensive Brazilian steakhouse. The first time I saw this reality, this stereotype we have about Africa, was my first day in the school.
I remember waking up early around 7 a. m. , leaving home with my two Chinese friends, Alan and Dousy.
We got into a Matatu, a small shuttle for 16 passengers, really tight, with very loud music. Some even have neon lights, almost a party. I strongly recommend it to anyone who goes to Nairobi, to try a Matatu.
It took one hour to get to the slums. I remember when we got there what surprised me most was the filth. There was no sewage system.
I mean nothing at all. They make huge piles of garbage and burn them into embers. They'd burn releasing this horrible odor and toxic smoke into the air.
Not to mention all the dust around because the streets weren't asphalted. In some slum areas the majority of people can't afford private toilets, so they put their waste into plastic bags and throw them out the window. In some places the smell was just unbearable.
So this was the first important lesson. We'd return home asking ourselves how we'd be able to work there every day for eight weeks if we already felt sick on the first day. The first lesson was a paradigm shift in that humans are extremely adaptable.
After three days we were already at home, we didn't care about the stench, we walked everywhere and knew where to avoid the worst places. This was already the first learning experience. I had originally gone to Nairobi to teach English and math in a primary school, and to help build a school with money we had fundraised in Brazil.
My first challenge was as a teacher. I shared a 20m² room with two other teachers. Three classes in the same room, with no partitions.
Sometimes I tried to do dynamics, or tell a joke, which was impossible since it distracted students of the other classes. It created an awkward situation with the other teachers. I also had to adapt myself to the culture, because teachers there have strong authority over the students.
Sometimes they'd beat the students, and I had to keep quiet, absorb this, and accept the culture, and I couldn't do anything about it. This all proved to be very difficult for me. I started to teach, and a week later we demolished the school to build the new one.
We moved to another building we had bought, 500 meters away. The new building had better infrastructure with a room for each class, but it presented us with a new problem that we hadn’t dealt with before. Inside the classroom, you couldn't see your own hand.
This slum where I worked called Mathare had 600 thousand inhabitants, one of the poorest in the whole of Africa. The shacks were very close to each other, which didn't allow the sunlight in through the windows, to light up the houses or classrooms. We already had enough daily problems, like hungry students whose only meal of the day was at school, a lunch made of potatoes or beans, or peanut butter for breakfast.
Not only did they not have learning material, trained staff, but on top of this the student couldn't even see his own book. This made me so frustrated. I talked with an Egyptian friend of mine who had the same problem at his school, and we decided to find a solution to bring light to communities that didn't have access to electricity.
We googled it and found a project called "Liter of Light", but instead of trying to explain this to you, I'd rather show you the video of our first test. You can see how it works and I hope you like it. [Liter of Light Brazil - Kenya] (Music) [Before and after results] (Video) Three.
Two. One. Go!
(Cheering) Wonderful, wonderful! (Applause) Vitor Belota: Well, just like you, the school director seems to have liked it too. He was saying: "Wonderful, wonderful!
" at the end. Besides him, several other school directors came to visit our school to see how the project was done, and ask us to install it in their schools. Unfortunately, my Egyptian friend was leaving that week and I had to start the project without him.
I quit teaching through lack of time. We'd spend the whole morning preparing the bottles and the whole afternoon installing them. It wasn't an easy project, we cut and dirtied ourselves a lot.
We cut ourselves because the aluminum roof was very thin. Another problem was food. We'd spend the whole morning working, and going up on the roofs was complicated.
Being so dirty we had to eat something practical, which is difficult, for example, with chocolate; because I'm up there on the roof, a white guy, a "mazungo" as they say in Swahili, with all the children staring at me. How can you eat chocolate on the roof if they've never seen chocolate before? That wouldn't be right.
So our diet was basically fruit, and to give you an idea, at the end of my eight weeks stay I had lost 12 kilos. That wasn't my aim, but if you want to work for some social cause or lose weight I highly recommend it. (Laughter) Even with all those difficulties the project kept growing.
One day, I had the satisfaction of seeing my five best friends beside me on top of the roof, and below three more friends helping. At the end of eight weeks we had helped over 12 schools and installed over 140 bottles, including in the interior of Kenya, which affected the lives of approximately 3000 students. You may be asking, "OK, Vitor, but how did you do that?
DId you pay for the whole project? All those problems, cutting yourselves, and the food; how did the exchange students get together to do this? " I think the reason was about a feeling, which in order to explain I'll need to tell what happened in my last week there.
We were doing the biggest project so far in a school called “Spurgeons", in Kibera, in the largest slum complex in the world. In this school alone, we installed 48 bottles. This is the finished school.
One day I was up on the roof and the sky started to turn gray. We'd never worked in the rain. so I climbed down the ladder and gathered everything.
As soon as I got down, a teacher who I'd seen a few times there took me to show me her classroom. She led me to her table opposite the door, right under a lamp we'd just installed. And then she said to me, "My boy, this is the first time, in the four years I've been working here, that I can read or correct an exam in my classroom.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. " She said it so naturally, but she had no idea how those words would affect me. It took about an hour to get home and I was thinking a lot about how such a small thing as installing a plastic bottle on a roof could make a person feel so grateful.
You begin to question yourself. It wasn't just temporary help, because these bottles last 2-3 years, so it impacts many people's lives. I got back home where I lived with 21 other exchange students.
I like to joke that we didn't have dinner, we always had a feast. I asked my housemates, "Guys, how often in your daily lives do you feel unconditionally useful, without wanting anything in return? How often?
" I thought about my daily life. No. In my week perhaps?
No. Month? No.
And I reached the frightening conclusion, that at the age of 24 I'd never felt that way before like that day with the teacher. This is what united the exchange students and pupils in this project, it was this feeling of being useful. Unfortunately, that was my last week before going back to Brazil.
I remember being at the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, writing my last blog, updating my family about the news. My father who knew about my unease, which all exchange students and travelers have, the idea of going back to your old routine, going back to the old life. So my father called to reassure me, and said, “Son, don't worry, human beings are products of their environment, you'll quickly get used to it again.
" It was exactly what I didn’t want to hear, that I had to go back to my world. I had just been through this experience, I saw how adaptable humans are. My father with his usual pragmatism was right.
As soon as I arrived in Brazil I got in touch with Illac Diaz, president of the organization that had spread the Liter of Light idea, asking him if I could start the project in Brazil. He said, "Vitor, did you know that the person who invented the idea of the solar bottle was the Brazilian Alfredo Moser during the 2002 blackouts? " He invented it in Sorocaba and Illac had found it amazing.
He had asked Moser to spread the idea around the globe. In the Philippines that year he installed over 500 thousand bottles and began to spread the invention around the world. He said, "Vitor, of course you can, but first show me pictures of your project in Africa.
" I sent him the material, and we got the good news that, so far, our team had made the most bottles in Africa. And then he told me, "Vitor, there's a girl who contacted me wanting to take Liter of Light to Brazil. I'll put you two in touch and maybe you can work together.
" I said, "Of course! " Then a series of incredible coincidences started which brought me where I am today. I was born in Brasília, this girl was born in Maranhão, and both of us, by coincidence, had lived on an island called Florianópolis.
She got in touch with me, and the next day we had coffee together. I was very curious about how she got to know the project. And it was another amazing coincidence that she knew of the project when visiting an exchange student, who lived in India, the same student at the beginning of the talk who made a speech at the university and encouraged me to do this trip to Africa.
When she was visiting Pedro, he told her that he had been to an electric power conference and had met Illac Diaz in person, and that Illac had given him a Liter of Light flag and said, "Pedro, take the project when you go to Brazil. " So they both went back to Brazil eager to create the project, although they'd never been up on a roof before. But I had many roofs in my curriculum, so as soon as I arrived we put together our team in a week to begin working.
We saw huge potential for the project in Brazil. Approximately 2,7 million people in Brazil don't have access to electricity, according to the last national census. There are also those with access to electricity, but cannot afford it.
So you might be asking, "OK Vitor, hold on. . .
you, Pedro and Alanna, and this team you mentioned. Do you all somehow intend to climb up every roof in the world to spread this idea? " No, we don't have that intention.
Our goal is to inspire, motivate and teach local leaders to spread this idea inside their own communities. The same way that I hope to do with at least one of you here. After all, I sincerely want to ask you, how many times, in your daily lives, do you feel unconditionally useful?
Thank you.
