Two Worlds United Programs in Brazil for High School students

Overview Brazil is a land in which the past collides with the future. Cows lumber across multilaned highways, battery-powered TVs blare in the jungle, and some of the world's most sophisticated music emanates from the sorriest ghettoes. In Brazil's modern metropolises, skyscrapers surge toward heaven, while only blocks away lie beaches of such astonishing beauty they can only be called paradise. Hot spices, hot rhythms, hot climes combine to produce a multicultural mélange of elements as diverse as animist cults, and Carnival. Some observers have characterized Brazil as an adolescent struggling to find itself in the face of an enormous but chaotic inheritance. Long called a sleeping giant, Brazil is just now waking from a hibernation that has, with a few notable exceptions, kept it politically and economically dormant for most of the 20th century. From its birth as a Portuguese colony with unlimited promise, it has steadily transformed from unwieldy empire to ambitious republic to repressive dictatorship, progressing into the democracy it is today, supported firmly but cautiously by the world's major powers. Brazil today is a country where you can travel between centuries in a matter of hours. Two Worlds United students can experience the Amazon rain forest, whose indigenous people live as they did 5,000 years ago; 18th-century historical villages where you'll find horses hitched to posts; 19th-century fazendas (ranches), with cowhands still riding the range; fashionable 20th-century cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where international trends set the style; and Brasília, whose avant-garde sculptured buildings proudly face toward the 21st century. Some tiny villages, such as São Tomé das Letras in Minas Gerais, that seem otherworldly—it's not for nothing that Brazil has a reputation for some of the most famous UFO sightings in the world.

TWO WORLDS UNITED
Admissions Dep't.
Tel: 1 (805) 581-9191
Fax: 1 (805) 581-6079