The day dawned a little grey and overcast after yesterday's rain but brightened up as the day went on.
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| Overcast morning view from hotel - our office is out there somewhere! |
I started (after Carin collected us and took us to the office) with documenting the remainder of the interviews from the day before. Then the team split, with one group working on at the office with a university specialist in the area and Chi and I going in to meet two academics who had supervised Laerte when he was doing his thesis on the 3rd Sector and the beginnings of what became SEDE, the organisation we are working on. We had more than two hours with them (an Academic Director and a Professor) and they were very helpful in answering all our questions and generous in coming up with ideas for consideration. They also filled in a lot of the background in terms of Brazilian education and the challenges it faces which I found very interesting to compare with where New Zealand is at. The College is a private one, and home to around 3,000 students. It also ranks highly in the latest Brazilian government survey.
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| View of College forecourt |
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| L-R is Carin, Academic Director, me, Professor, Chi |
We were fairly late back so we all headed out to the first kilo restaurants we'd eaten in with Laerte and had a good meal there. When we got back we held a team review session and worked through a number of things we needed to do, then got on with them until around 6pm when the SEDE team started to turn up for their fortnightly planning and review meeting. We've met some of them a few times since our first lunch with them which now seems months ago but I find was last Thursday - they all seem like old friends now. It is probably appropriate to comment now that in general Brazilians are very friendly and interested in who you are and where you come from, and the people you work with even more so. Turning up with the SEDE team thanks to Carin was a plate of small cheese rolls, hot from the oven - delicious!
The bulk of the meeting was dedicated to planning a review and presentation session of some projects that they have run for some NGOs. It will take place on Tuesday 2nd October and we will contribute a presentation on our findings at that session - it will be a chance to test it out on a knowledgeable and critical audience before we do the final version to the Mayor and his team next Friday week, the 5th.
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| The SEDE team in discussion, Laerte making a point |
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| Chi giving some advice on the construction of the agenda |
Another late evening back to the hotel around 8:45 with the others in Brazil 14 waiting to go out to the next dance class. I decided to waive that as I had just enough time to have a Skype call to my wife before she headed out for her work. Unfortunately tonight the internet connection played up a bit, which is unusual in my experience to date, so the call kept disconnecting. Still we got there.
#ibmcsc brazil
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