The 2014 World Cup

B-R-A-Z-I-L, those were the letters that the president of FIFA mentioned in 30, October 2007. Unique competitor to host the Cup, five-time-champion, the biggest cradle of pros, random continents and good avaliation of inspectors. Everything has gone perfectly. The 2014 World Cup will certainly be held in Brazil. The former countries who have hosted the World Cup have had a breathtaking impact on its economy. In countries as the USA in 1994 and France in 1998, the NGP reached an increase of almost 1.5% during and after the competition. In Germany, this increase achieved 2% in 2006 and the championship created over 50,000 temporary jobs. In 2002, Korea’s NGP boosted to an astonishing 3% as the country received 250.000 tourists during that period. In 5 years, Brazil will have the chance to host this worldwide known competition again. Having the World Cup in Brazil in 2014 will be a unique chance to offer temporary jobs to the general population, to spread our culture more assertively to the rest of the world, and to improve our security problem, which has been an issue that has been plaguing our society for years.

One of the advantages of helding the World Cup is the huge number of temporary jobs that will be created for the population. Among the FIFA’s demands there are: evaluating, planning, investing, mapping, controlling problems  with intelligent and preventive actions and preparing the country to enjoy the most the event, before it, during it and even after it. To accomplish all these requirements, a big team of employees will be involved. Our country needs a big change on its infrastructure. Works on soccer stadiums to seat the cheerers, improvement of means of transport including a new highway planning, mending roads and corrections on the airports are indispensable. As well as a development on the telecommunication systems to divulgate the event and broadcast it to the rest of the world and building hotels to accommodate the tourists. But all of these are some temporary jobs necessary before the games. During the event another ones will come up as information assistant for the tourists, hotel extra employees for cleaning and preparing the food, public drivers and other ones to transport the teams, police and so on. So, the population, besides being able to see his country hosting an international and important event, can also collaborate with his works and profit from it too.

Moreover, the fact of the world cup be in Brazil can help our country to spread the Brazilian culture among the world. The expectation is that in a month 500,000 tourists of all over the world – 10% of the total that the country received in a whole year – will arrive in the cities where the games will be placed. This will be a great opportunity to show  that Brazil is a polite country, with ravishing landscapes and a carefree population, diminishing the prejudice that develop countries have about Brazil. Rubbernecks who visited for the first time our country say that they thought that nation was only about forest, carnival and football. Now, once in Brazil, the tourist will have the willing to came back to spend the vacations with their families and friends, causing development in our economy. Therefore, hosting the world cup will help Brazil to take off the bad ideas the world has about the land, disseminating our culture worldwide.

Finally, to be the seat of a vasty event that the world cup is, lot has to be done to improve the security. Violence has been the number one issue in our society. And in this period of intense circulation of tourists in the country, the security has to be strengthened, especially in places near the stadiums and in the tourist points. For this to be possible, a group of Brazilian policemen was in Germany to follow Pantry 2006 and to study the project of security adopted in the competition.  The main highways and the accesses to the competition places will be under responsibility of the Federal Road Policy and the airspace and maritime will be fiscalized by the Armed Forces. All these measures need to be taken so that unfortunate examples of violence against tourist do not occur as of an Italian youngster who was in vacation with his family in Rio de Janeiro, when reacting after an assault, was beastly killed. For these reasons, the security has to be guaranteed for all the people so that the 2014 World Cup can be a beautiful and peaceful event.

Therefore, the World Cup in Brazil, 2014, will be a huge opportunity to approach our security system, disseminate our country towards the world and give temporary jobs to the population. Besides being a sort event, Brazil has to go beyond the sporting range as a right and chore and reassert the soccer as a cultural endowment. As Mauricio Murad, a 57-year-old sport sociologist it is not because we have flaws on security, transports and infrastructure that we can’t host the Cup, on the contrary we should host it to improve our conditions. This huge and known event is the first step for the improvement. Sport is identity expression and factor of social promotion. A Cup doesn’t solve basic and structural issues, but can help. It only depends on us.
 

Thousand of Years of the Lotus Flower

Wearing a 10 cm shoe just for your feet to look like the lotus flower? Impossible. The tradition of having the feet bandaged has existed in China since the tenth century although it was prohibited by the communists in 1912. The children had their feet wrapped since they were very young. It was a tradition passed on from mother to daughter. Their parents thought that having small feet would make their daughters pretty, as the small foot was a synonym of grace and beauty in the Chinese society. It is a beauty standard that had been established by the Chinese men. Therefore, the women have to wear very small shoe to stop their foot growth to be accepted in the society. Chinese women should stop wearing those tight shoes because its practice causes them physical, emotional and cultural problems.

Wrapping the feet in China has been a tradition that has been causing many physical damages to the women as their bodies were deformed and they were not able to do some things like eat, drink and walk, because of the pain. They are supposed to have their feet about 10 cm long. Because of that, they have been having serious medical problems, as they are more likely to fall and damage their hips and spinal cord. Their skin gets damaged too and these women have a big chance of having osteoporosis. The feet bones are broken, avoiding the feet to grow. For instance, Lia Yixian, a 78-year-old woman has her feet bandaged since she was 13. When she reached the age of 50, she wasn’t able to walk anymore and her spinal cord was totally deformed. Her doctor told her to walk and continue doing her normal activities and for that she has to use a cane. In the beginning it was helpful, but after a year suffering a lot, she started to undergo physical therapy and to take a lot of strong anti-pain pills. Walking with a cane and the physical therapy didn’t work. Nowadays, Lia Yixian can only move around on with wheel chair and she still takes anti-pain medicines to relieve her pain. The physical damages that Lia Yixian suffered are irreparable. Because of the serious physical damages these Chinese women have been suffering wearing those small shoes, this practice should be abandoned in China.

Second, this tradition has caused not only physical damages to Chinese women, but emotional issues as well. It has been common in China for women to get married as soon as they become a teenager. Because of that, when they get older, they usually try to run away from their husbands. When girls break her foot bones to make their feet look smaller, they also lose their ability to run, which guarantees that they are prisoners of their husbands, triggering depression among women. Zhou Guizhen, a 86-year-old woman has been a hostage of her own husband for nearly 70 years. She has tried to run away three times, but six blocks away from home has been the maximum she was able to reach. Guizhen complained that the feet hurt so badly after walking for so long that she collapsed in pain. When she was discovered, she was not only punished by her husband, but also chastened in public making her feel humiliated. The fact that they haven’t been able to run away, has made Chinese women be prisoners of their own lives. Because of that, depression became something very common in Chinese society. In order to give Chinese women a choice over their lives, the tradition of wearing small shoes to stop the bone’s growth must be eradicated.

Last, the Chinese society has always been very male-oriented. It is normal for women to be seen as inferior. Even these women consider themselves less important than men and the tradition of breaking women’s feet bones just to fit them in a small pair of shoes and therefore please their husbands only helps to disseminate such an ideal. Chinese women used to follow this tradition without even questioning it, because they made everything their husbands wanted even if it was absurd. For instance, Kara Yizhan, an 82-year-old woman, used to spend an hour and a half preparing her feet every time before going out in public. If her shoes weren’t impeccable, she wasn’t considered worthy of her husband. Chinese women have agreed with such a tradition, because they truly believed that it is their duty to serve men they had gotten married to and they haven’t realized what an absurdity it is to humiliate themselves just to follow the current standard of beauty. These women not only were considered inferior, but they also felt so. The ideal that men are superior than women must be changed. The first thing chinese women should do is to stop humiliating themselves wrapping their feet just to make their husbands happy and proud. For the chinese women to achieve equal rights the tradition of having the feet bandaged must be abandoned. For the world to become a more respectful place where everyone has the same rights, traditions that makes some people be seen as better than the others, causing huge emotional damages, should be banished; specially when the damages are more than cultural and the human body suffers irreversible damages.

In conclusion, this tradition of bandaging the women’s feet to make them smaller caused a lot of emotional, cultural and physical problems to the chinese women that has been following such a tradition for over a thousand years. Nowadays, this practice is considered all over the world as something brutal to the women´s body. The Chinese society should overcome this primitive tradition.

The Equal Opportunity Program

How can 30% of the openings at the best public university in Brazil be allocated to a restricted part of the population? Unbelievable. In the past 10 years, the government has been reserving some openings at USP or UNICAMP for black people just because they are different in race. Inspired in the United States, the Equal Opportunity Program in Brazil was supposed to help black people get into the university. The main goal of the project is to improve the participation of black people in society and to show the population that the public education is efficient. But the EOP is just a palliative solution for the huge unequality in Brazil and for the weak public education because, it increases prejudice against black people, it places unprepared students in cognitively demanding institutions, and it hides the real education problem in Brazil.

First, the EOP develops the possibility to spread the prejudice in our society. The privileges given to black people can increase the bias among the population because many people can think that they their brain are less capable than the others and that they don’t have the same brain evolution than the white people. So there is the necessity to compete only with people of their same race, believing that black people need to have advantages when taking college entrance examinations. Also, because of this huge competition in these tests, white students feel they are facing a disadvantages since they do not get the same help given to this portion of society. They also think that their opening can be filled by a black person at any time, increasing even more the hatred they may have already felt towards Black people. According to Michele dos Santos, a 18-year-old black student at FEA, USP, after the establishment of the EOP program, her Caucasian classmates at Colégio Novo Horizonte in the eastside of São Paulo, started to stare at her as if they were mad at her because of the advantages she had been given when she got into the university. Some of them even tried to avoid talking to her and study with her because they thought she would take away their openings. Michele was outraged by a group of people that called her incapable to compete with them at the same level even though they knew it was an excuse to unleash their prejudice against black people .Therefore, the Equal Opportunity Program, which is supposed to create balance in the society, is just making it even more racially divided.

Moreover, EOP places unprepared students at the universities. Because of the poor education they had in high school, these grantees won’t be able to keep up with the rhythm of a high quality public university. The huge difference between students creates two categories of people struggling for the opening: the incumbents and the other ones. For example, if two white excellent students fight for two openings with a black one with a medium level education, the black one will surely be approved, because of the EOP, even if his level isn’t so high as the other two guys. Once they get in the university the less prepared ones will be unapproved, become demotivated dissimulated and will drop out of college. And if the universities decide to cater the education at the same level of their students, the standard of the graduated students at these universities would decrease.

And finally, instead of solving the real problem which is the education, the government has created the EOP as a palliative solution. The public education is a complex problem in Brazil. Most of the public schools are in a precarious situation: classrooms without blackboards, bathrooms unavailable, lack of school lunch, and so on. To aggravate the problem, the faculty is not very well qualified and due to their low salary, they are always on strike. The public school students, who don’t flunk just to disguise the statistics of the government, are not ready to embark in the higher education. With palliative measures, the real problem will never be solved, but only postponed. EOP hides the higher problem: the mediocre Brazilian public education.

In conclusion, the Equal Opportunity Program doesn’ t solve the problems in Brazil. It spreads the prejudice towards the population, it places less prepared students in remarkable universities and it disguises the public education problem in our country. To diminish the flaws of the public education and make an equal society, the government should invest on the cradle of the situation: the public schools. A bigger investment on the infrastructure of public schools, making it more comfortable and usable, maybe change the students’ view of the institution. They can become more interested and take the study more seriously. But to definitively approach the public education, proffessionals’ salaries have to improve including the teachers’ and other functionaries’ because they give quality to the school, making it comfortable and clean. This factor would be essencial to the improvement because it nips the problem in the bud since as the salaries are degrading, driving away the best teachers. Without salaries, there is no change. Without change there is no quality. And without education there is no progress.