from Photographers Blog:
Village of joy
By Ueslei Marcelino
Deep in the Brazilian heartland, where the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin dissolve into the central plateau, I had the opportunity last week to spend a few days in the village of joy.
What I dubbed the village of joy is the home of the Yawalapiti tribe. One day last week, a group of us were escorted into the Xingu National Park by members of the Darcy Ribeiro Foundation and the Cavaleiro de Jorge cultural center, and arrived at the circular Yawalapiti village under an enormous full moon.
The mood was one of celebration. The Yawalapiti, one of the 14 tribes living inside the Xingu National Park, were preparing a new "quarup," a ritual held over several days to honor in death a person of great importance to them. In its original form, the quarup was a funeral ritual intended to bring the dead back to life. Today, it is a celebration of life, death and rebirth. From the very oldest to the very youngest, all the members of the Yawalapiti tribe participate in the preparations.
They wrestled, danced, fished and prepared food for the main event which will happen in August. Yawalapiti warriors held wrestling matches in a sort of qualifying round to select the best team to confront warriors from other tribes. From the inter-tribal event during the quarup will emerge the great champion.
Rio de Janeiro taps spiritual help for sunny Obama visit
Rio de Janeiro, famed for its warm beaches and sunny skies, has hired a spiritual guru to keep the clouds away for U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit this weekend.
Adelaide Scritori, a medium who followers believe can help control climate patterns, claims to make contact with an ancient spirit known as Chief Cobra Coral who, according to legend, is powerful enough to influence natural phenomena.
“She goes into deep concentration so that she can communicate with the chief, and she asks him for good weather,” said Osmar Santos, her husband and a spokesperson for the Chief Cobra Coral Foundation that supports Scritori’s work.
Scritori provides similar services for Rio ahead of its New Year celebrations and has also helped out during the visits of former U.S. President George W. Bush in 2007 and late Pope John Paul II in 1997.
Her intervention was credited with helping raise temperatures in London during an exceedingly cold winter in 1986, according to Santos.
Scritori may have her work cut out for Obama’s visit, which runs from Saturday night to Monday morning. Brazilian weather website Climatempo was forecasting partially cloudy weather with occasional showers.
Obama will be in Brasilia on Saturday and Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.
World’s tallest Jesus statue unveiled in Poland
About 15,000 Christian pilgrims and tourists streamed into the western Polish town of Swiebodzin Sunday for the unveiling of what has been billed as the world’s tallest statue of Jesus.
Polish television stations showed throngs of worshippers marching in procession with religious banners and placards proclaiming “Christ the King of the Universe.”
The brain child of retired local Roman Catholic priest Sylwester Zawadzki, the figure soars to a height of 33 meters (108 ft) which he said symbolized the 33 years Jesus lived on earth. It is three meters taller than Brazil’s statue of Christ the Redeemer which stands on a mountain top overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
It’s unfortunate that the Poles can’t build their infrastructure (roads, etc.) as quickly as they built this statue. Big Jesus won’t get you to work any quicker.
Giant Jesus statue rises above Polish countryside
A statue of Jesus Christ that its builders say will be the largest in the world is fast rising from a Polish cabbage field and local officials hope it will become a beacon for tourists. The builders expect to attach the arms, head and crown to the robed torso in coming days, weather and cranes permitting, completing a project conceived by local Catholic priest Sylwester Zawadzki and paid for by private donations.
Standing on an artificial mound, the plaster and fiber glass statue will stand some 52 meters (57 yards) when completed, taller than the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer with outstretched arms that gazes over Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Polish officials say.
“I’m happy because this project will bring publicity to our town, not only in Poland but also from the global media. Other countries are showing a lot of interest,” said Dariusz Bekisz, mayor of Swiebodzin, a town of about 21,000 people in western Poland some 100 km (60 miles) from the German border.
“The priest, Father Zawadzki, is a man of action who always, throughout his life, has built and created… In the future we’re going to have to think about bringing the carnival to Swiebodzin too, just as in Rio,” he joked.
Brazil’s Rousseff survives abortion row, looks set to win presidency
Dilma Rousseff, front-runner in Brazil’s presidential race, appears to have successfully shifted the focus of the campaign away from corruption and her controversial views on abortion and back to the shining economic legacy of her popular former boss, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Rousseff, a 62-year-old career civil servant and former leftist militant, fell short of the majority of votes needed to win the election outright in the October 3 first round as last-minute doubts of many evangelical Christian and Catholic voters about her support for abortion rights probably cost the Workers’ Party candidate an outright victory. Opposition challenger Jose Serra then closed her poll lead to as little as four points.
But her shift in focus appears to have re-energized her base in Brazil’s emerging lower-middle class, which has nearly doubled in size under Lula’s mix of market-friendly policies and social welfare programs, and now accounts for about half the population. Rousseff has promised to stick to Lula’s policies.
Rousseff’s support slipped precipitously in the 10 days before the first round but she has taken steps to avoid a similar fate this time. Her written promise not to change Brazil’s abortion laws, which forbid the practice in most cases, appears to have eased concerns among religious voters who abandoned her in the first round but are now coming back, a Datafolha poll showed.
Brazil’s ugly abortion reality lost in election noise
It was a little-noticed headline amid the daily crime, violence and accidents in Rio de Janeiro’s rough outskirts — Adriana de Souza Queiroz, 26, dead after a clandestine abortion went wrong. Queiroz, who scraped a living handing out pamphlets and was 3 or 4 months pregnant, last month became one of the some 300 Brazilian women who die each year after back street abortions.
The issue of abortion in the world’s most populous Roman Catholic country has been thrust into the spotlight by a presidential election in which front-running candidate Dilma Rousseff has been punished by religious voters for her past support for decriminalizing the procedure.
Abortion rights groups have long argued the law does little to prevent abortions in Brazil and mostly hurts poor women who can’t afford safer, expensive underground clinics.
The health ministry says that about one in seven Brazilian women under 40 have had at least one abortion and about a third of all pregnancies end in the procedure. That is in line with the rest of Latin America, which has among the world’s highest abortion rates despite it being mostly illegal, and compares to about a fifth in the United States, where abortion is legal.
When President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva came to power in 2003, many believed Brazil’s strict abortion laws could be liberalized. But with both Rousseff of the ruling Workers’ Party and her opposition rival Jose Serra now vying ahead of the Oct. 31 runoff election to convince voters of their “respect for life” and opposition to decriminalization, any reform may now be off the agenda for years.
Brazil “values voters” go YouTube against prez hopeful Rousseff
The YouTube video that helped push Brazil’s presidential election to a second round begins with Paschoal Piragine solemnly telling his flock: “In 30 years as a pastor, I’ve never done this before.” He then warns them that the ruling Workers’ Party wants not only to legalize abortion, but would make divorce easier, permit the spread of pornography, and continue to allow tribes in the Amazon to bury alive “thousands of children.”
The video, which includes disturbing images and has received nearly 3 million views, concludes with the Baptist preacher telling his followers not to vote for the Workers’ Party in upcoming elections. “Otherwise, God will judge our land,” Piragine says.
The last-minute doubts of many evangelical Christian and Catholic voters probably cost Workers’ Party presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff an outright first-round victory in last Sunday’s election, polls suggest. The shift is unlikely to keep Rousseff from winning an October 31 runoff vote against her nearest contender, opposition leader Jose Serra.
Yet the twice-divorced former Marxist guerrilla, who in past interviews has questioned the existence of God and supported greater abortion rights, will face enduring scrutiny from an increasingly powerful bloc of “values voters” that could prove a major source of opposition if she takes office.
The election could signal a sea change in Brazil’s politics in which social issues begin to trump economic ones for some voters as the country enjoys an unprecedented run of growth. Rousseff could also face constant resistance to her agenda from a faith-based movement or party in the same way that Democratic Party presidents have in the United States since the 1990s.
“I just don’t trust her, and I’m not sure I ever will,” Piragine told Reuters by telephone. “There are a lot of us who will continue to oppose her agenda if she’s president.”
Rousseff courts Brazil’s faith voters with “for life” comments
Brazil’s ruling party candidate Dilma Rousseff is playing up her Roman Catholic background in efforts to win back religious voters, whose doubts about her faith and position on abortion rights may have cost her an outright victory in Sunday’s presidential election.
In a surprise shift, many religious voters who oppose abortion, especially evangelical Christians, abandoned Rousseff’s center-left Workers’ Party to vote for the Green Party’s Marina Silva, who captured an unexpectedly large 19 percent of the vote.
“Personally, I’m from a Catholic family. I am and always was in favor of life,” Rousseff told reporters on Tuesday outside of her campaign headquarters in Brasilia. “I have no problem addressing the religious issue. My project addresses all the religions.”
She did not elaborate. Internet videos in recent weeks showed Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla leader, apparently favoring the decriminalization of abortion, which is illegal in most cases.
Evangelical Christians are growing in influence in Brazil and now make up about 20 percent of the population in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.
Ms President Dilma Rousseff is right about abortion in Brazil. It’s completely hypocritical to hide the truth of the fact that millions of very poor, illiterate, unemployed Brazilian women are undergoing abortion in Brazil every year, in the most chaotic conditions. Of course, being right and aware of reality in our country, Ms. Rousseff is in favour of legalization and provision of concrete health care conditions offered freely by the government to these Brazilian women who cannot afford to raise a child or the abortion procedure itself. Our country is full of beggars who were brought to the world by these needy, resourceless women, who are better off undegoing abortion, and their to be children are also better off not coming to the world to suffer and hunger.
Ms. Rousseff is an intelligent, educated, experienced, realistic woman and knows best what less privileged women in our country needs. These ridiculous so-called religious people do not support the millions of newly-born babies who starve from an early age and have no other choice in life other than become a criminal in their teens. These not aborted children are killing and robbing us from the middle-class all over Brazil. This a horror, sad chain that must be broken with the interruption of pregnancy and / or contraceptive procedure in the first place.
Chile RC bishops sorry for abuse, Brazilian priests scandal
The Roman Catholic Church in Chile on Tuesday said there had been 20 confirmed or alleged cases of child abuse by priests, and asked for forgiveness from the victims.
Monsignor Alejandro Goic, head of Chile’s bishops’ conference, said that in five of the cases sentences had been imposed, in another five trials were still under way, and in 10 others priests had been absolved or results were pending.
“There is no place in the priesthood for those who abuse minors, and there is nothing that can justify this crime,” Goic said, reading a statement after an assembly of Chile’s Episcopal Conference. Read the full story here.
In northeastern Brazil, three Roman Catholic priests are suspected of sexually abusing children in a scandal that arose after a video showed one of the priests in a sex act with a young man.
Luiz Marques Barbosa, a Catholic monsignor in the city of Arapiraca in Alagaos state, was arrested late on Sunday after a congressional commission examined the video and heard witness statements from alleged victims.
Local police chief Barbara Arraes told Reuters that Barbosa, who media said was between 82 and 84 years old, and two other priests were suspected of abusing children and that prosecutors are now deciding whether to file charges. Read the full story here.
A 7-year-old Rio Carnival queen parades in tears and controversy
A tearful 7-year-old Carnival queen led exuberant drummers through Rio de Janeiro’s Sambadrome stadium on Sunday, in a distressed state that may add to controversy over whether a tiny child should perform such a high-pressure, sexually-charged role.
Wearing a short purple dress, a sequined halter and a silver tiara, Julia Lira emerged blinking into the bright lights and deafening fireworks of the Sambadrome and soon burst into tears as photographers and reporters scrummed around her before her samba group started its parade.
The selection of a third grader in a role usually occupied by high-heeled models and sex-symbol soap opera stars has sparked a heated debate in Brazil and abroad over the role of children in the annual festival of hedonism. Lira was given the green light to parade by a judge last week after a child protection agency tried to block her because of concern about a child performing in a sexual role.
Read the whole story here and tell us what you think.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Wonderful images, the indigenous people has much beauty and mystery to be unraveled. Congratulations for the photographs.