Rio World Cup: Language Classes Democratized
There are many good reasons to learn a foreign language and getting a new customer ought to be somewhere near the top of the list. This, or something along those lines, seems to be the rationale behind the offer of free English language courses to about 16,000 workers in tourism-related sectors (street vendors, hotel employees, and so on) as part of a joint effort by the Ayuntamiento de Río de Janeiro and the Brazilian Tourism Ministry aimed at getting the city ready for the 2014 World Soccer Cup, reports El País [1].
This piece of news is little more than just one more feel-good example of economic orthodoxy. With government support, a bunch of worker-bee Brazilians are practicing their “Hello”s and “What can I get you, sir?”s to get the gringo to tip them well. The world is so predictable sometimes.
Indeed. In fact, there is a second part to the story, equally predictable (especially considering the soccer fan demographic) and also related to feeling good, in a way. Besides government officials and street vendors, another, rather more sizeable constituency is busy boning up on their English. It is Brazilian prostitutes. The El País report quotes the president and the vice-president of the 80,000-member-strong Asociación de Prostitutas de Minas Gerais, Ms. Vieira and Ms. do Espirito Santo, respectively, as saying that they too are busy organizing free language classes for their colleagues and, moreover, are actively looking for volunteers willing to teach them (so far, ten kind souls have answered their call). English was named as their first-priority target, but Brazilian prostitutes are nothing if not cosmopolitan and urbane (or perhaps just street smart): they are quite interested in picking up the basics of the languages of other soccer-crazed countries, namely Spanish and Italian.
