 Thank you for sharing our experience about community needs and community demands in a favela called Mare in Rio, Brazil. So as Monique says, I work in a community-based human rights organization called Heges da Mare, which means network of Mare. That is based for more than 20 years in this favela, the largest favela of the city of Rio. With 140,000 residents, it's a scale of a little city in Brazil. And a favela could be translated as a slum, but in the Brazilian context it's important to understand that more than an underserved community is a space regulated by non-state armed criminal groups, basically gangs, and favela are the ground for the so-called war on drugs in Brazil. It's where the state in the name of this war killed eight times as many people than in the rest of the country, a country that has already unbelievable homicide rates related to police violence. So my organization works mostly with educational programs and by engaging local lecturers for social change, but until 2015 we were not involved in any kind of harm reduction. So our experiences in harm reduction is short in time since 2015 and small in space because we work with a small community of homeless people who use crack around 100 people in a specific favela in Rio. So we got into harm reduction without really knowing what harm reduction was when some changes on our local context happens. Before the World Cup and the Olympics, which are major events in Rio, the state launched a security program that and one of the aim was to remove crack holandes from public visibility. Crack holandes are public spaces where people use crack and as a result of this program the community where I work received in 2013 a large influx of drug users. Until then it was not a visible problem for our community, but when a group of homeless people who use drugs was pushed into Marais it became invisible for public eyes but it became visible for our community and people in our community were really bothered about the situation and wanted to get rid of them. So it became clear from our organization that we should do something and integrate these new influx of people into our mission in order to govern human rights and dignity to them as well as all the residents of Marais. So the time we didn't really know what we should do so we designed an action research project that aimed at first one to get closer to the people living in the crack scene, two to understand their desires and need and how why they were there and at last to understand how we could integrate them into the local support network. So since 2015 a team of six people who didn't have previous experience with addiction issues I've been going weekly to meet with this group of people living in the street and using crack. So we wanted to offer something that would allow us to be there and to get close. So at the beginning we started using art activity as we do in other product of the organization as a mobilization strategy and as a way to positively engage with them. And at the beginning we started activity mainly as strategies to get closer but it soon became clear that they were a powerful tool for reducing stigma, for helping people develop outside interests, for giving them a feeling of belonging. And today I can say that it's the heart of our activities. And this switch happened because the residents of the cracks and really respond to these activities. They told us they liked the way art engaged their mind and gave them an opportunity to reflect on their lives. That's when we saw that it was a therapeutic vehicle which opened a genuine space for dialects and learning. And the second step was to identify the specific harms the crack users identified themselves as harms. So we conducted a survey with 60 out of the 100 people living there and not surprisingly none of their biggest problem were directly related to the use of drugs. The four main harms they self identified were first the stigma they suffer for faced both from inside and outside community to the lack of efficient and nearby basic health care, treated the unhealthy conditions of the place where they are living, mostly the lack of hostilities as a bathroom and for the violence from the non-state criminal groups. So I will explain how we have been trying to deal with just four harms they self identified. The first one, as I just explained to you was by engaging them in art and other activity and building trusting relationship. And I let me show you some pictures because I think they speak more than me. So one of the consequences of the stigma is the are really reduced mobility so they don't feel allowed to be in other place than in the crack scene. So we made like photographs, workshops, music and painting, a field trip like going to the beach or even into the Olympics. So that's some picture of the project that an exhibition we made in the crack scene with photo made by us and by them. That's a movie session that we do weekly at the scene and it's important to say that in this session people from the crack scene and from the surroundings participate in the movies. The beach, the Olympics, that's picture taken by them so we give disposable cameras and we made also like at the beginning we we didn't want to portray them so directly because we we thought that it would like ring for the stigma but they asked themselves to be like which way did beautifully. So we made like portraits and we made us as streets exhibition called I'm not sure of the translation but do you see do you see me when you look at me and it was in the the streets of the community. So the second harm they self identified was the lack of access to basic health care and at the time we mapped all the public health and social services that were supposed to be available to them and the main finding was they didn't have access to the most basic health because they didn't have a permanent address. So the only access was a mobile unit that came once a week to the community despite the fact that they were a local unit just middle away from the place they were living. So even though they had been living in the favela for four years they couldn't utilize services that were like meters away. So to remedy these we create a forum that brought together all the health and social workers working in the area to think about how everyone could improve their practices and one of the solution was a very simple one it was to create a fake address. So now the unit the health unit invented a fake address for 500 that is the name of the street and the number of the corner which made it possible for them to now use the local unit services. And then the third one was the lack of basic facilities as such as a bathroom. Yeah and since the beginning it was clear that the structural improvement of the space one of the top one of the top priority for them and the challenge for the team was to understand how we could actually solve that problem and it was more than one year between the recognition of that problem and actual construction that started last year because the team felt strongly that the construction of the bathroom should be a collective process between the crack users the residents of Marais the actors engaged in the forum that we didn't know that it to be a unilateral response. So one of the biggest challenge was to find arguments between the parties as we were facing a lot of criticism from from our partners and other local actors basically because no one wanted to drug users to assume that this was a permanent place. So how could we convince them that providing a bathroom would not make this place more permanent? They were living there for like four years it's quite permanent but so one of the the thing that helped us was as you can see in this picture is that this place is not just a place for using crack but it's much more than than that it's a place of living it's a place of relationship of protection a place really close to what we could call home so the bathroom. So by constructing a bathroom it was like recognizing that they are not just living on the street but they have built like permanent home relationship and feeling of belonging it was recognizing and allowing the existence of a place they have created for themselves. Also we had to convince people that the absence of a bathroom is one of the elements that contribute to the stigma they suffer from. Wanting a bathroom sends a clear message that they feel bordered by the dirt and recognize it as an element that contributes to the stigmatizing process they were claiming for the right to be clean and one sentence I hear often in the field it's I do not want to leave this place having nowhere to go so they don't believe that the cracks in the best place to be the best alternative only the best possible place to be why they have nowhere else to go somehow the process of constructing the of construction of the bathroom and constructing it together helped us to define what we understand as harm reduction in our context it is to create place of dignity even when they are transitional and it is also a way to claim public spaces and visibility for homeless people use drugs. So the bathroom story is a good illustration of our approach that is that harm reduction in Brazil has to be understood in its social dimension a dimension that includes social exclusion poverty racism and that goes far beyond the field of drug policies public safety criminal justice and even healthcare and medical services it's a human right issue related to extreme social exclusion and that obliged us to think of harm reduction a broader way so as you can see the bathroom exists now so that's the construction almost 30% of the crack scene participate in the construction and it was and it stills a long collective process where the residents of the crack scene were involved with the design they decide themselves how many bathroom how many shower and the whole community of drug create themselves the rules around the maintenance and the cleaning of the bathroom and they say now that they are living in the best crackland of the world because of the bathroom finally and to conclude the violence from the criminal arm group you might know but Brazil face a utterly complex human violence issue involving a violent and corrupt law enforcement system system and strong territorialized armed groups and with the prohibition as we know drug users are pushed under the control of and the violence of criminal groups so outside of a valid drug users have to defend themselves from the state violence like incarceration compulsory treatment removals and inside of a valence where they go to protect themselves from the states they are under violent and strict control by the criminal groups that can be considered as non-state law enforcement agents who decide what they can do and what they can where they can go and every transgression of the rules are violently reprimanded in the case of all the cracks in where I work we speaking about 25 expulsion from since 2015 two deaths two deaths this year and among other violation and we and also knowing that we lost track of more than 30 persons since the beginning but we did not face any overdose so it's we have like a really different context but now and it was not planned we understand that we have an important role of mediation between the criminal groups also because this year they call us like three times to help them resolving issues with drug users by saying so we recognize that you can deal with that kind of people we do not we do not want to kill them but we have to maintain order in the favela so please help us not to kill them and try to find solutions together so we are at this time in the project now I'm just trying to understand how we could like make this mediation role and to conclude because my time is over and I think our experience shows the importance to enlisting our kind of organization to work towards harm reduction and create like a poor network and to promote the inclusion of people who use drug in the agenda of community-based organization because they can engage people use drug people of the community local actors public services to create solutions together and the work we do has no sense without like being articulating a larger and strong protection network so in one sense and I think like harm reduction in our context is to trying to establish possible dialogues with as many partners we can so thank you very much for your attention