UF students immerse themselves in life in Brazil

In the small town of Icapui, Brazil, fisherman Eliseus De Sousa struggles to catch lobsters in a town where the fishing industry is dying. Some days, he does not catch anything.

He goes to work at 5 a.m., returns home at 5 p.m. His bed is a thin mattress on the dirty ground, which he shares with his 4-year-old son.

De Sousa allowed University of Florida students Lucia Tolosa and Zachary Bennett into his life recently.

Tolosa and Bennett, students in the UF College of Journalism and Communications, followed Eliseus for five days as a part of the Florida FlyIns course.

Photojournalism and design professor John Kaplan and retired professor Kurt Kent conceived the idea of the Florida FlyIns in 1999.

Students from the college apply to the prestigious program in the spring, and, once accepted, begin the class in the fall semester.

The stories of the students who went to Guatemala with the FlyIns last fall inspired Tolosa to apply, and she was accepted in the spring.

“I had to check my e-mail five times just to be sure it was right,” she said.

Since the program’s first trip to Costa Rica in 2000, the FlyIns class has traveled to South and Central America, rarely repeating a country and never repeating a region, said Boaz Dvir, director of communications in the college.

Dvir has been a writing coach with the FlyIns since 2004 when he went to Nicaragua with the program.

He said the program challenges students as reporters, because they face a language barrier, an unfamiliar terrain and a one-week deadline.

“Really, they are thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to swim,” Dvir said.

Tolosa, a telecommunications junior, and Bennett, a photojournalism senior, decided to team up on their project.

Tolosa planned to produce a radio story in Icapui and use Bennett’s pictures to visually accompany her audio, creating a multimedia project.

Students are given a starting point to find their story, but Bennett said that once they arrived in Icapui and met Eliseus, they knew he was the perfect subject for their story.

“We help them dream up the stories based on where they’re going and what they’re interested in,” Dvir said.

The fishing industry in Icapui is almost dead, Tolosa said. A nearby town has used illegal methods of lobster fishing, leaving almost nothing for fishermen like Eliseus.

“He has this giant dark cloud hanging over his head all of the time, that the fishing industry is almost dead,” Bennett said. “Now it’s not a source of income, it’s a source of survival. He is living off of the lobsters that he catches.”

Two years ago, Eliseus wanted to save up for a new mattress, but the fishing industry was doing poorly and he could not afford one.

Because the only language Eliseus speaks is Portuguese, a translator helped Tolosa to ask Eliseus her questions for the radio story.

University students in the country or non-governmental organization workers serve as translators for the FlyIns program, Dvir said.

He said that because most of the students cannot use language to communicate, they learn to use other senses to feel the story.

“Their eyes said it all to me,” Tolosa said. “I would catch their emotions through how they were talking to me, and I would nod and try to show them that I understand how they were feeling.”

“Some things were lost, but in the end, a smile is universal, and sadness is also universal,” she said.

To tell Eliseus’ story, Tolosa and Bennett spent five days doing everything Eliseus did. They were there when he cooked breakfast and took his son to school, and they were there when he showered and laid down to sleep with his son at the end of the day, Bennett said.

“I felt really happy for him to have let me into his life in the first place,” Tolosa said.

They spent a couple of days fishing with Eliseus on his boat. His boat was small and wooden with the paint chipped away.

Everything was sewn together, and the sail was made from parts of trees. It was a leaky boat, Bennett said.

Every day Eliseus had to bail it out with a bucket. Eliseus caught nothing the days they were with him.

“He knows he has to eat, and he has a son to take care of, so he wakes up,” he said. “I have a feeling his son is the big reason why he is motivated, why he’s not like everyone else.”

One night, they climbed to the tallest point they could find in the desert’s sand dunes. It was their first time without a translator, but Bennett said that was the turning point for their story. He said they communicated through smiling and gestures.

“We didn’t talk to him for an hour, but the mood changed and our connection with him got so much deeper,” he said.

Students are transformed through their experience with the Florida FlyIns, Dvir said. They become better storytellers, they have their passion channeled. They are often changed in ways he could not have even hoped for as a professor.

“There was one night when we came back and I was just so touched by the family that I couldn’t be around people,” Bennett said. “I couldn’t speak, my voice was so choked up. I had to be by myself.”

It has changed the way he sees things, and given him a sense of poverty and family that he never saw before, he said.

Bennett said he hopes that on a bigger spectrum, their story will draw attention to the fishing war that is taking place in Brazil, but the story is more about how people live their lives, and how Eliseus lives his.

“Maybe they have less materialistically than us, but those people are just so happy,” Tolosa said. “They’re happy to be together. Take everything away, and what you have is the people around you, the people that love you. And that’s all that really matters.”

Tolosa and Bennett’s story will be displayed, along with the stories of the seven other students from the trip, on the evening of Dec. 7 in the Reitz Union Gallery.

Everything the students do to create their stories leads up to the exhibition at the end of the semester, Dvir said.