Pandemic Heroes: Brazil’s Thiago Firmino
If you go up Santa Marta hill in Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, you get a treat: the most amazing view of the famous statue of Christ and the Sugar Loaf, and you can take a selfie with a statue of Michael Jackson, who filmed parts of his “They Don’t Care About Us” video there. Jackson became possibly the first international superstar to go up the narrow lanes, unpaved passages, and cramped corners of the stacked bare zinc-roof cabins that make up this neighborhood.
Here, like in most favelas in Brazil, public services are all but nonexistent. So when the pandemic hit, a resident decided to act.
By Cecilia Tornaghi via Americas Quarterly