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1We-TV visites Nanko van Buuren in Rio de Janeiro
‘Football is the means for integration’
From above Rio de Janeiro looks like a colourful patchwork. Below is a hidden world of extreme poverty. Where criminal gangs and corrupt police fight each other as lice in a fur coat. In between Nanko van Buuren, a Dutchman from Groningen, tirelessly moves in the poorest slums as ‘El Patron’, which lies between Patron (boss) and Pai (father). “A mission? Nonsens. I just do my thing.”
A heavy sleepers blocks the access to Terra Encantada, one of the more than six hundred favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Amid miserable huts a street dog snoops in a pile of waste looking for something to eat. Here, on the grounds of a former steel cable factory, about twelve hundred families in just 3.5 years time found a rickety shelter. Nanko van Buuren from Groningen stops his Landrover near the entrance of the slums. With his imposing stature, wearing a spotless white shirt and dark blazer, he immediately draws attention. In no time he is surrounded by a small group of children with shaved heads. “Against the lice”, clarifies Nanko, while he greets the children enthusiastically. Open sewer In the favelas of Rio Nanko van Buuren for over twenty years is known as ‘El Patron’. It soon becomes clear that everyone adores this man with his piercing blue eyes. Here and there he shares a pat on the head, a hand, a kiss or some reals. “Most of them I’ve known since childhood”, he tells while he moves us into the direction of a small street bar. Balancing on the border, Van Buuren and his organization IBISS daily deals with organized crime and corrupt police system. Despite, or perhaps thanks to the danger he himself is taking - “the other day I was shot by the police in my car” - he feels like home in Rio de Janeiro.
‘The other day I was shot by the police in my car'
Accompanied by a heavy delegation of five persons, we some moments later get a tour through the district. It is one of the poorest favelas we have visited in recent days. The slum does justice to its name. There are no stone houses here with paved roads, but slums that bunch of waste wood, rusty nails, rags, cardboard boxes and corrugated plates. Ironically, some huts have a real door, with a padlock and a whitewashed house number. Narrow alleys lead us as in a maze through the district. Dogs, chickens, cats, a horse, a pig and probably mice and rats, everything walks right through each other over the piles of waste on almost every street corner. Suddenly a river looms for us, as a green oasis in the heart of the otherwise sad slums. With as a binding element between one and the other part of the district a scenic suspension bridge of iron fences and steel wires. Only the stench that hangs around reveals that the river actually is a large open sewer. 
Traumatic past Apparently the habitants of this favela live in a hopeless situation. But the opposite is true, shows the story of Nanko van Buuren. “98 percent of the children in this district goes to school now. We centrally arranged that they get food with them to school. There is homework guidance and they can follow literacy lessons. The latter is done using the rules of the football game, which children learn to read, write and calculate while playing. As number one sports in Brazil, it is the means for integration.” Also music and art contribute to the development of young people who often as so-called ex-soldado’s have a traumatic past. “Through rap and graffiti they express their feelings which helps in processing their trauma”, explains Van Buuren. With his organization he already has saved hundreds of child soldiers from the hands of the drugs mafia. Saving angel What is it that moves this man from Groningen to raise himself as a saving angel for the favela habitants? “It can not be possible that some groups are excluded from society, because then you get this kind of excesses”, it sounds firmly. "Therefore you must ensure that these people integrate and that the rest accepts that. In Italy for example it has led to the closure of all psychiatric institutions. In The Netherlands this approach is the basis of ambulant psychiatry. In Brazil they initially say that you are crazy but that you really should try. When they see that pioneering works, they will pick it up.”
‘A mission? Nonsens. I just do my thing'
Meanwhile IBISS with 68 innovative projects is active in almost fifty favelas. With this the organization tries to bridge the gap between de slums in Rio and the so-called asphalt, the civilised world. Successfully. Through the project Van Buuren and his 430 workers reaches around 25.000 people daily. Nevertheless he says he sometimes gets crazy of the growing violence. “It is often labour lost. The favelas are totally dominated by the organised crime with heavy artillery. Just in cocaine there goes around several hundred of thousands kilos with a street value of thirty or forty million dollars. We navigate between the gangs and the police, the latter we have the most to fear. In the last ten years eighteen employees of IBISS have been killed. That gives me the thrill to keep going on. A mission? Nonsens. I just do my thing.” |
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