If I’m to be entirely honest, I found it slightly difficult at first to write this blog, being as the content of the lecture that we heard from in the morning differed quite a lot from the content of the lecture that we heard in the afternoon. It took a moment of reflection on my behalf to realize that this wasn’t exactly the entire truth after all, though! What our Collective Health lecture did with Marcio Natividade could very well be compared to that of the mission of our lecture on Graffiti and Tagging with Eder Muniz: they both managed to show us the people.
Our day first started off with a very much so welcomed extra hour of sleep as we all prepared to meet for 9:30 am at the ICR. Our lecturer for the morning, Marcio, greeted us with a very engaging look into one of the most remarkable examples of collective health in action. The AFTP program (a pharmacy program), as sponsored under SUS, is one that managed to accomplish what programs and policies have yet to in the States. It desired to identify and analyze geographical access factors to medication utilizing large data banks in order to really tackle problems like Diabetes and Hypertension in Brazil, and tackle these problems it did indeed. From the mouth of the wise Marcio himself, in reference to the increase in available pharmacies, “Since the program was created there has been seen an expansion of 80% in the Brazilian territory”.
The conversation was lively, the topic was engaging, the questions were flying, and it was interesting to see the extension of SUS and its coverage. So, where exactly did we manage to see the people? (This is you speaking). We saw the people through their concerns and through the examination of an aspect of their livelihood, a commonality and consistent theme that has been maintained throughout our immersion into the topic of collective health.
Onto the tasty bits, a group of us went out to lunch at a neat restaurant called Saúde Brazil. I couldn’t help but feel ever so slightly guilty as I watched the restaurant worker weigh my food and the number kept matriculating higher and higher. Brazil needs to work on making their food less tasty, it’s a danger to my health!
Waking up from a food coma, I found myself on the bus alongside the group on the way to Castelo Branco, where we would be treated to a wonderful lecture and walking tour of the famous Eder Muniz’s prized graffiti artworks.
We were well received into Eder’s home as we sat and learned about the history of graffiti and tagging, and most importantly how these forms of street-art, although often misconstrued for vandalism, can often symbolize the voice of a people long forgotten and left out of history. A person’s tagging art can often be the biggest way of them proclaiming that they are here, and that they will be heard (and we most certainly heard them).
So, to conclude, today we learned not only a bit about the people in terms of the health concerns that they face, but also the expressions and beliefs that they can share with the world through art. I enjoyed the lectures, and I hope that whoever reads this can feel inspired to look into programs like AFTP themselves, or to even check out the local graffiti art in their area. Enough chatter from me though, I’ll let the art of the people speak for itself.
