MY LIFE AFTER YLAI: WHAT HAPPENED SINCE I RETURNED TO BRAZIL

After the end of the YLAI Fellowship, I returned to Brazil to continue working on my project.

by Thais Pinheiro

Since I returned to Brazil from the YLAI Fellowship, my work has become more visible . My project, Conectando Territórios (Connecting Territories), seeks to bring people closer to the history and memory of traditional communities in Brazil, such as the quilombos, indigenous , and urban communities, through community-based tourism, which is a sustainable way to generate income. In addition to my sustainable tourism work, I seek to reinforce legislation that requires the teaching of Afro Brazilian and indigenous history in schools.

One program of Conectando Territórios that has really taken off is the Little Africa Tour, which shows the Afrobrazilian influence on Rio de Janeiro’s culture. I am currently taking on average two groups of regular toursists per week. I was also invited by the US Consulate General in Rio de Janeiro during Black History Month to teach public school students from the US about Afrobrazilian culture.

The visit visit opened the students’ eyes and minds to their ancestry and the historical connections that Brazil’s culture has with current affairs.

I develop community-based tourism programs and create experiences where locals can share their own voice, bringing people closer to Brazil’s diverse culture through dialogue events, tours, workshops, and sustainability consulting.

I was invited to collaborate and organize one dialogue event, “Libertador”, to discuss religious intolerance and the issues that Afrobrazilian religions such as Candomblé face in Rio de Janeiro.

In addition to managing Conectando Territórios, I helped organize the World Social Forum in Salvador, Bahia, the II Sustanable Global Tourism Forum. The goal of this event was to discuss the sustainability of community-based tourism for traditional communities in Brazil and around the globe. The forum has hosted more than twenty communities from diferent parts of Brazil as well as from countries such as Palestine, Colombia, and India.

I also began working as a consultant on a project from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at the quilombo Tapera community in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. There are more than 5 million of African-descended communities such as quilombos around Brazil that are still mantaining their unique ways of life and cultures. This project aims to implement tourism programs that will provide these communities with a source of income.