May 2, 2005: So I am trying to build a community radio station. The station would be part of an existing Viva Rio project called ‘Fight for Peace.’ I thought it might be a good idea to go into a bit more detail about that project and what it does, because I hope the radio station will have a similar impact on the youth that will run the station as ‘Fight for Peace’ has on its kids.

Fight for Peace trains 120 kids from 12 to 25 years old. It offers boxing, wrestling and martial arts (hence the FIGHT for peace) to attract youth, especially violent youth, to the project. Once attracted through sports they get literacy help, psychological counselling and are required to attend citizenship classes that teach non-violence and conflict resolution. Bring them in with the flash of sports, keep them there with the hope of a positive future and fight the violence with education and social services sorely lacking on the streets.

The idea is completely logical but wasn’t so intuitive to me until I started to sense the self-reinforcing aspects of poverty and social exclusion. Sadly, many negative aspects of life in the favelas are self-reinforcing catch 22s. Luciano, a teenager in the Fight for Peace project, needs to earn a living, study and take care of a toddler. Fine, that’s nothing unheard of.

But his boss tells him each day that he has to stay at the store where he works until 8 pm, even though his job should end at 6 pm, leaving him two hours to train. He doesn’t get paid for the extra hours. When he complained his boss threatened to fire him. Because of the lack of job opportunities, he has to work a worse job during hours that he would prefer to use to study or train or be with his family. So both his chances at getting out of a low wage future, education and sports, suffer because of his job, which he needs to survive.

There are many more examples of this with many of the kids in ‘Fight for Peace.’ The idea of the project is to break this exact cycle, to show that it can be beaten. If kids grow up believing they can’t beat the stacked deck, they have no incentive to try, and there is nothing keeping them from turning to the lucrative crime and violence of the drug trade which is a constant and easy option for them.

Boxing is one of the activities offered by the Fight for Peace project to steer the youth of Rio away from drug violence.

Sports and education have been an effective combination with some great success stories. Here is an edited excerpt from a Fight for Peace project summary; I have added to it also in places. I know Manuel (name changed) and think the following short profile is the best case for projects like Fight for Peace and youth radio or anything that offers alternatives to crime.

Manuel came to the project five years ago at the age of fifteen because he wanted to be able to fight better. He was already in trouble with the police and had a troubled history: his father was in prison for armed robbery and his mother had effectively abandoned him when his father went to prison. Manuel was ten years old at the time and went to live with his grandmother. He has several family members working for drug factions in other favela communities besides his own. As he was already involved in street crime outside of the community where drug factions do not prevent it with martial law, it was seen as a logical progression for him to also join the local faction and involve himself in the drug crime within the community.

Soon after Manuel joined the Fight for Peace project, his cousin was tortured and murdered due to his involvement in the local drug faction. In the same year, Manuel fathered two children. These events made him want to really change his life. He began to train harder at the Fight for Peace boxing club until he won a place on the club’s amateur boxing team and he has been competing ever since.

At the end of 2002, Manuel was ranked number three in his weight class by the Rio de Janeiro State Boxing Federation. He began to participate more actively in the Citizenship Classes until he was nominated by the project’s co-ordinators to participate in a youth leadership course being held by another Brazilian NGO within Rio de Janeiro. Manuel passed the course and now holds the title of Fight for Peace project spokesperson.

He has represented Fight for Peace at events, speeches and interviews with the press and has even travelled around the country and abroad promoting the project.

With the encouragement and support of the project in 2002, at the age of seventeen, Manuel got job training as a carpenter and he is now going back to school to finish his primary level education.

His wife, Julietta, has also joined the project and found her own success. Earlier this month she summed up the impact of Fight for Peace in her life during a post fight interview with the Brazilian press. Tearing up and emotional, Julietta said: “My life changed completely after boxing, it is so much better. Before sports, I lived in the streets, only finding trouble. Today, my dream is to be a professional fighter and a lawyer.” She has a shot too. Last year she was national vice-champion in her weight class and she is improving all the time with a shot at a spot on the national team.

I hope the radio station can have the same impact on the youth that work there. That’s in addition to the uplifting impact that community radio can bring to the listeners who hear programming designed especially for their oft forgotten neighborhoods. We shall see. But first we have to build it.