Casa Jimmy

If you've been enjoying the World Cup- and really, you ought to be; it's been awesome so far- I feel the responsible thing to do would be to maybe leave our hosts a little tip. I figure that even though this Cup is going along the same lines as all the other World Cups and Olympics- where despite all the talk about infrastructure and facilities and a fresh start for the disadvantaged citizens in the community, in the end those disadvantaged are simply nudged, pushed, or violently driven away to make way for the stadiums- we can at least do a little bit of actual good while we're still focused on Brazil. Clean up after ourselves, if you will.

So I went and looked for a charity that would serve that purpose, and I think I've got a pretty good one in Task Brasil, which seeks to help out children in Rio favelas forced out onto the street for whatever reason. They were able to purchase land for a house in 1997 due to a donation from Jimmy Page (he of Led Zeppelin), and since then they've been able to take in children to place in that house, aptly named Casa Jimmy. It's very possible that they'll have children at their doorstep, and whom they're otherwise helping out, that have been displaced by us foreign tourist louts. So it might be worth your time to take the money you were going to spend on some sort of soccer merchandise and put it into Casa Jimmy's mailbox instead. If you were to want to actually sponsor a child, that runs $20 a month.