The interaction with exterior community members within the bounds of the Escritório Modelo is quite structured and bureaucratic. Community members from the neighborhood come in, either for an unscheduled consultation, or a scheduled meeting, and (depending on the nature of the appointment) they are either attended to by an intern, who documents important information related to the case, or are attended to by a team of cross-disciplinary professionals and interns, who all join the user (the word "usario"/"user" is used in place of "cliente"/"client" (sometimes knowing English makes me feel like I'm cheating at Portuguese :0) because the services offered are all free) in a large circle of chairs. Because these meetings are sensitive and require a specific skillset and language ability that I do not have, I only observe the individual meetings. However, I'm able to join the circle during communal meetings. We all introduce ourselves, and then the users talk for most of the time and explain their situation, prompted by questions from the professionals in various fields. (law, psychology, social services) However, I've observed that in both the individual meetings, and the communal meetings, there exists an easy, friendly rapport between the users and the office community. This rapport allows me to interact with the community members more directly; people are often curious about my background and where I'm from, and I'm always interested in hearing their stories, and what experiences they're going through. In the future, I'm planning on possibly conducting interviews with users for my project, which would be a much more direct form of interaction, mediated through the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy seems difficult to manage, and so I anticipate that securing the actual time with people will be difficult, but I think that the strong bureaucracy also works well to protect the users. It promotes legal thoroughness and certainty, which in a system which, as I've learned, often leverages subjectivity and ambiguity against marginalized people, secures the rights of the people it's serving.
Here's a photo of a parrot I saw on one of the university buildings! They're just there, like pigeons in NYC! They also have pigeons in São Paulo.