>I am quite surprised Nathaniel's group was booked there in the first place. The movie was not a blockbuster but it got plenty of publicity. None of the organizers knew? They should have IMO. There is a certain level of responsibility when you take other people's kids to a foreign country. (And that's not a dig at Brazil; as Claudio says, we have areas just as bad, and where organizers would be equally negligent taking a group).

The "organizers" here are the kids themselves. This is an entirely student-run group. A student is the business manager; another student is the music director. For a trip like this, one or two kids collaborate to put the whole trip together.

In this case, they visited some kind of a community center (Casa de Santa Ana), which has a relationship with the Yale Alumni Chorus. Here's some info about the place: http://www.globalenvision.org/learn/10/1066/

FWIW, the people from the center picked the kids up and gave them explicit instructions about how to behave to avoid problems.

Tamar