Today was the first “slow” day we’ve had.  So this will be a short post.

Daily rundown:

~4:00am:  It started DOWN POURING!  I have been sleeping with my window open and the fan on high, so I jumped out of bed and rushed to close the window.

X 6:40am: Naomi and I had planned to meet at ACBEU this morning to go for a run around Campo Grande and Vitoria, but due to the rain we crawled back into bed and slept for another hour.

9:00am: Today’s lecture at UFBA was titled “Health system reform and the Unified Health System (SUS): History, advances and challenges” by Adjunct Professor Monique Azevedo Esperidião.  Prof Esperidião works in the area of health evaluation systems, specifically child health.  She is a psychologist and received her PhD. at UFBA.

– The Brazilian health reform was driven by civil society.  SUS is a historic achievement for the Brazilian people.

– 1988: A “citizens” constitution deemed that health is a right of the people.

– 1990: The first Presidential election was held after the overthrow of the military dictatorship.

– 2008: 93% of people who sought out care received treatment asking the question; could social inequalities seen in the health care system be explained by differences in health seeking behaviors?

– Obstacles or Problems seen in Brazil health care: 1.) long lines or queues 2.) scheduling delays 3.) a lot of human suffering 4.) queues are seen as “natural” or “cultural.”  Instead of fighting for better services through SUS, people just go out and buy private insurance.

2:30pm:  Our afternoon lecture at ACBEU was titled, “Education and Affirmative Action Programs in Brazil.”  Professor Paula Barreto teaches sociology at UFBA.

– In Brazil, most higher education institutions (HEIs) are private (87.4%) however, the Federal universities are more prestigious.  There are two big competing problems between public and private institutions.  Firstly, public institutions are harder to get into because of the competitiveness of the entrance exam; and secondly, private institutions are very expensive.  Affirmative action is in place to help aide students from disadvantaged backgrounds either pay for high education, prepare them for the entrance exam and make sure their is an equally distributed number of available spots for them in schools.

– Race/color classification in Brazil:

• White “branco”
• Mixed “pardo”
• Black “preto”     –> mixed + black = “negro”
• Natives “indígena”
• Yellow/Asian ” amerelo”

-2005: UFBA was the second Federal university in Brazil (after Rio de Janeiro) to implement an affirmative action program.

• 45% of student quota
  • 2% Native
  • 43%: 85% black and 15% white
  • 2 places in each course for those who live in reserves and/or quilombo’s

2005: PROUNI: University for Everyone Program (private HEIs)

• Provided partial or full scholarships
• Federal tax exemptions (4)
• Student are low-income, attend public school and Afro-Brazilian

So like I said, today was a “slow” and easy day.  It was also the first majorly rainy day.  Anu, Naomi and I decided that today was the day we wanted to check out Shopping Barra.  So after class at 4:30pm we trekked the 1.3miles in the rain, with two umbrellas, in flip-flops, to an very nice (thinks Tyson’s Galleria) mall.  Needless to say we did not end up purchasing anything and were only there…maybe an hour.  We did however meet a very nice women from Indiana who met her husband at the University of Indiana and moved to Brazil ~40 years ago to marry him (it really is a small world.)

It gets dark here really early, around 5:30pm, so we grabbed a taxi from Shopping Barra and headed back to ACBEU to walk home.  By the time I walked through the door I was drenched because it started monsoon-ing as soon as the taxi pulled up outside ACBEU (naturally).