Every four years, São Paulo’s thousands of street vendors – who usually weave through traffic selling anything from water to cell phone chargers to fly swatters – invest in much more lucrative merchandise: World Cup paraphernalia. During this month, Brazil’s national pride is on fierce display, and cars, apartment windows, and sidewalks are decked out in the country’s national colors of green and yellow. The enthusiasm is a boon for the street vendors, who peddle the decorations. But their fortunes are inextricably linked to the success of their team. I spent an afternoon at a traffic light in São Paulo for Al Jazeera English and heard Misael Batista’s story.
This video originally appeared on Al Jazeera English’s television channel.
Al Jazeera spent several days in Brazil’s flood-ravaged northern state of Alagoas, documenting the destruction caused by raging rivers that overflowed their banks. Check out Al Jazeera’s Americas Blog for some photographs I took of the destruction.
In a town called Santana do Mundaú, I also interviewed a man who saved five people in the town, which lost most of its town center in the flooding.
The CEAGESP agricultural market in São Paulo supplies the city, whose metro area houses nearly 20 million people, with products from all over the continent. Restaurant and supermarket shoppers alike, as well as brave individual food enthusiasts, come to make their way through the boxes piled high with corn, parsley, starfruit, persimmons, mangoes, and countless other kinds of produce to get fresh picks at pre-retail prices. In a city often described as a ‘concrete jungle’, CEAGESP in many ways represents the intersection of the urban sprawl with the vast agricultural area that surrounds it. Here are some photos from my visit.
On January 1, 2010, the flooding that affected much of São Paulo state destroyed much of São Luis do Paraitinga, a historic mountain town. I passed by there a few days later, on January 6, and spoke to some residents about the flooding, which destroyed countless homes and toppled the town’s main church.
