A young journalist tackles Brazil’s social problems

Worldfocus has partnered with Pearl World Youth News, an initiative of Daniel Pearl Foundation and iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) to bring voices of young reporters from around the globe to our viewers.

Bruna Santos, a 17-year-old student from Brasilia, Brazil, produced a short video about child labor in Brazil.

In the accompanying text, Santos discusses the plight of children who work on the streets selling candy and other goods to supplement their parents’ income.

Child labor in Brasilia is becoming more common day by day. Children work mostly on the streets selling candies, flowers, stickers and other small items. Some perform services, such as watching over cars or washing them in public parking lots. Others shine shoes. Brasília has 2 million inhabitants and is the city with highest per capita income in the country, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Research by the Federal Policy Department shows that about 7,512 children are now working on the streets.

Most of these children come from low-income families, and their parents do not have a steady job or do not make enough money to take care of their children. So, the children work on the streets to help buy food and pay for bills….

Wesley Pereira, 12, and his brothers, Walisson Pereira, 14, and Wellington Pereira, 16, sell candy at a busy downtown intersection for nine hours a day. They have been working at that intersection for more than a year, said Wesley. They earn about 150 reais ($68 US) a day, but must spend 60 reais ($28 US) of that to buy candy for the next day, they said.

Worldfocus producer Channtal Fleischfresser spoke with Santos about her experience making the piece.

Why did you decide to do a story about child labor?
I had to choose from a number of issues: student politics, child labor, and other areas, and I was the only representative from Brazil to deal with child labor as a subject.

Here in Brazil, we often see children asking for money at street lights, washing cars, selling stickers or sweets. I thought it would be interesting to show other people. When most people think of child labor, they think of kids in sweatshops, not selling things on the street.

Did you have trouble getting the children to speak to you?
We interviewed three kids and one who was afraid of being identified because he thought his parents would beat him. My teacher and I went through several drafts of the piece to avoid exposing the kids too much.

Did you write the piece in Portuguese or English?
I wrote a draft in Portuguese and then wrote it into English with the help of my teacher, Claudia Batista.

Have you already decided what you want to do professionally?
I decided two years ago that I wanted to be a journalist. I’ve always liked to read and write, and I started looking for people who worked with this. I’m sure it’s what I want to do.

How long have you been working with iEARN?
I’ve been working with them since the beginning of 2009. It’s very interesting, because in addition to using a different language, [English,] you get to meet lots of different people, and see different perspectives you didn’t know about before.

This post originally appeared at Worldfocus.org

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Channtal Fleischfresser, November 20th 2009 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Video

For Google Maps, Diplomacy Trumps Geography

In recent years Google Maps have become a go-to source for web-based mapping. They provide visualizations of virtually any location on Earth to varying degrees of detail, depending on the region. But as Google has gained a foothold in markets around the world, adapting its versions to different countries and languages, an inevitable problem has emerged: how do you delineate international boundaries when they are disputed by multiple countries?

This caused problems for the tech giant earlier this year, when its Chinese characters mislabeled an area called Arunachal Pradesh, which is under Indian administration.

While a simple solution to border disputes would be to stick to internationally recognized demarcations, Google has taken things a step further. Rather than risk antagonizing disputes among its partner countries– each with its own market potential– Google has customized its maps according to different countries’ official positions on their versions of its Maps application.

“This does not in any way endorse or affirm the position taken by any side,” according to a Google spokesperson, “but merely provides complete information on the prevailing geo-political situation to our users of global properties in a dispassionate and accurate manner.”

Take, for example, the Chinese version of Google Maps:
chinamap

The disputed boundaries between India and Pakistan are indicated by dotted lines. But the border with China (to the northeast of India) is nevertheless solid.

Consider, then, the Indian version of the same region:

indiamap

Here, it appears the only disputed area lies between Tajikistan and China, to the north of India. Indian territory itself, including the western part of Kashmir which is often attributed to Pakistan, is not in question. Furthermore, the area between China and India, which in China’s version belong to China, now lies within Indian territory.

Finally, compare these two version to the standard version of Google Maps:

mainmap

Here, all disputed boundaries are indicated by a dotted line.

These border disputes predate the Internet — and are unlikely to go away any time soon.  Google has at least managed a temporary diplomatic resolution in cyberspace.

This blog post originally appeared at Worldfocus.org

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Channtal Fleischfresser, November 3rd 2009 | Tags:
Posted in Google