Silvia was a seventeen-year-old boy from Rio de Janeiro. He was a normal boy who lived in the favela and spent his time writing for his schools newspaper. Within 24 hours he went from being a normal boy with only 180 followers to 29,000 followers. On the day that was the scariest day of his life, when the two huge gangs joined forces and fought for one cause, Silvia became famous. Drug dealers ran his small town and he knew that if they were in charge then you had to play by their rules and if you didn’t then it meant bad news for you. They were hosting the Pan-American Games so the police tried to take over and get the cocaine dealers under control, but they went about it the wrong way. The two gangs that ran that area joined forces and fought against the police. Silvia and a couple of his buddies started correcting the media when they got the street names and things like that wrong. Suddenly everyone wanted to know what was going on and they had a better perspective and knowledge of the people and of the area then the media and news reporters did. Since this incident the government paid attention to them and gave them the funding they needed. They got a $131 million cable car system installed that provided transportation for 12,000 people and the number of homicides have dropped by 80%. In the years following it Silvia has become an actor on his favorite show, Globo, and he was selected to carry the torch in the Olympic Games in London.
This story is important because it’s a true story of a boy who grew up in and around violence and drugs and was able to make it out of there and pursue his dreams of being a journalist. It gives hope to the kids who think that there isn’t any way their dreams could come true.
I think that human-interest stories do deserve to be called news because that’s what te news should be about. It should be showing us what good things and some bad things that are happening around our nation. It should show and give credit to those who work hard to make this country a better place, not some celebrity who does something stupid like twerk on national television just for attention. If we didn’t make such a big deal about what stupid things our celebrities do an actually give some attention to everyday people that make up our country, then maybe, just maybe our celebrities wouldn’t do half the things they do.
Believe that this form of journalism is better then CNN and FOX because its more real then those other news channels. It is giving someone like you and me a chance to tell their story and maybe give others hope. Half the time I feel like whatever is on the news is “sugar coated” and they are just telling the country what the government wants us to know and we have to believe it because if we don’t then what are we going to believe?
I think that Narritive.ly definitely helps promote equality because it doesn’t matter who you are, what gender you are, or where you came from. It gives everyone who wants to tell his or her story a chance to tell it. That’s something that you don’t always have an opportunity to do. With websites like this it helps those who don’t think they have a voice, voice their opinion and tell their story.
http://narrative.ly/patchwork-of-poverty/spokesman-of-the-slums/
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