The story of Manoel Soares shows that even the most misunderstood dreams can come true

The charismatic and irreverent manner of Manoel Soares has become well known by Brazilians in recent years. Baiano de Salvador, it was in Rio Grande do Sul that the then reporter for RBS TV, an affiliate of TV Globo in Rio Grande do Sul, emerged as a promise of journalism, still in 2002. After joining the team of Profissão Repórter and Encontro com Fátima Bernardes , reached even greater heights and won the post of presenter on É de Casa. Today, Manoel is co-host of Encontro com Patrícia Poeta and, from Monday to Friday, he is present in the mornings of TV Globo.

We, from awesome.club, we admired Manoel’s work and were even more moved by his life story, which, in some respects, can refer to the trajectory of many Brazilians. Therefore, we invite you to meet this professional who managed to write his own destiny and walk a path of success. Check out!

It is impossible to try to tell part of the story of Manoel Soares without mentioning Ivanete Pereira, his mother, who, in addition to being a real strength in raising children, was the only person who encouraged Manoel to pursue his dreams, regardless of how many difficulties appeared in his life. way.

Dona Ivanete created a mantra, which she repeated to her son every time the boy got discouraged: “Manoel, above fear, take courage”, he says. The phrase seems to have been engraved not only in the memories, but also in the affections of today’s reporter, presenter, writer and instrumentalist.

“Every time I said I wanted to work in television, they laughed at me. Every time I tried to play the guitar they teased me. I was the uptight boring one in the family because I wanted to read books and be the ‘smart’ one. When my mother did four extra cleanings a week so I could make a photo book, she was called a fool; today they say she was a visionary,” she posted.

Dona Ivanete was also largely responsible for Manoel’s affective memories during childhood and adolescence: “The world tried to give me bad memories, but my mother fought with the world and won. I have great memories, I know how to make pudding, I know how to make a cake, I know how to make a ball gown, I know how to jump rope, I know how to play, I know how to sing. I had a beautiful childhood: I can identify birdsong, my mother taught me a lot of beautiful things and my people taught me a lot of beautiful things”, he says.

Aware of all the efforts of the matriarch, whether working, in the past, as a cleaning lady by day and a street sweeper by night, or undertaking a cinematic escape from Salvador to São Paulo, to take her children out of the complicated family context in which they lived in the capital of Bahia, Manuel recognizes:

“Any possibility of success or financial gain that I had came fertilized by a delicate reality. I would love to be able to buy my mother a new sciatic nerve or two new disks for her spine, and it won’t do. The dreams that my mother abandoned in these last 50 years for me to stay alive will not come back”, she says.

After a few years living in the interior of São Paulo, Manoel was already in the second phase of childhood when his mother, once again, made a risky maneuver to remove him from a social context that left him close to marginality:

“My mother sent me to Porto Alegre to work with my uncle in a printing company. I worked in this graphic for about 11 months. When the printing company went bankrupt, I tried several jobs and, along the way, I ended up living on the streets for four or five months”, she said.

During this period of intense vulnerability, Manoel went through several jobs, until, one day, he was approached by a TVE RS reporting team. After granting the interview, the team asked if there was any way they could help him. Manoel didn’t hesitate and replied that they could help him with a job. It was in this unexpected way that the success story of the reporter, who would later be summoned live by Fátima Bernardes, began.

The work offered by the TVE team was to assemble and disassemble the stands. After that, Manoel also started cleaning. Eventually, he would answer the phone and, little by little, he learned to do other things: “They taught me how to print a text, and when I saw it, I was already correcting a letter in the character generator. From then on I left the street, I started earning R$150 a month and when I saw it, it was on television”, he says.

In addition to his mother’s support and encouragement, Manoel talks about one of the people who later crossed his path and changed his life: teacher Vilma. The presenter says that the teacher was firm with him, many times, putting him on “preventive suspension”, that is, making him sit quietly in the chair, in the corner of the room, even before he did something.

Once, teacher Vilma insisted that Manoel study everything about a certain personality that was in evidence at the time. The boy found it a very tiring job and presented it in a very average way, in the end, he received a grade of 6 or 7.

Professor Vilma seemed to know that the story of that personality would be important for Manoel of the future, and it was no different: 20 years later, already working as a reporter for RBS TV, Manoel was invited to cover the 2010 World Cup, on South Africa, but first I needed to deliver a cultural assessment study about the country, which would define who on the team would travel.

“I knew everything, it was all in here. Everything that people were starting to know, the concepts, everything was in here”, he says. Thanks to Professor Vilma’s insistence, Manoel had already studied in the past the subjects that his competitors were seeing for the first time and thus was selected.

In South Africa, working on World Cup coverage, Manoel was a few meters away from the person he had to study. The journalist did not hold back his emotion. When he saw Nelson Mandela, he waved and the only thing he managed to shout, in tears, was: “Dona Vilma! Dona Vilma”, as if she could hear him here in Brazil.

“Teacher Vilma always put me in detention because I used to be late for class. When I tried to tell her this story, she was no longer with us. I went to her grave and handed her a note: ‘Sorry teacher, I was late again’, he says with emotion.

A father for the first time at the age of 22 and without a healthy paternal reference to look up to, Manoel says that his first fatherhoods were quite incisive: “I trained my son to be a fearless man and I think my first children suffered a lot from that. . Today, in my last parenthoods, I prepare myself more for affection. I think the world has changed, but so have I. More important than giving my children everything I didn’t have is giving everything I had: life experiences, perceptions and worldviews that transformed me”, he says.

The presenter has six children, four biological and two adopted. He says he is experiencing a very important family moment, as the two youngest, recently, were diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. One of the ways Manoel found to get closer to his children was through music, which played a key role in his own path. It’s just that in childhood, Manoel was a stutterer.

“The guitar took me out of my stutter a bit. But if it hadn’t been for the stutter, I wouldn’t have implanted art in my life, and I think I’m an auditory person and music has a special function”, she says.

In addition to having become a more present father and emotionally concerned with his own children, Manoel is also more attentive to his partner’s needs: “When Dinorá agreed to be the mother of the children we have together, I wasn’t a father. I was a provider and an ‘alpha male’ of the world around me. Today my goal is to create spaces in the day for her to regain her individuality in the face of so many beings that are connected to her existence, ”he wrote.

“It is a very Brazilian reality. I lived four or five months of my life in Porto Alegre, on the streets. At the age of 14 or so, I built, with my own hands, a house for my mother, which was on land considered irregular. Today, home, for me, is where there is love. Where my wife and children are happy, I am happy too, ”she reports.

Since the beginning of his career, Manoel has been side by side with simple people, in vulnerable situations or not, in places where journalism usually does not reach routinely — at least not for 20 years. This characteristic, with her irreverent manner, informal language and gigantic talent for communication ended up catching the attention of none other than Fátima Bernardes. She invited the reporter to join the group of journalists at the Meeting in 2017.

“I study people. At the same time that I’m reading Dieese’s research, I’m going to the Paraisópolis fair in the morning, I’m going to get a haircut in Heliópolis to find out what people are feeling, if the armored cut is still active. I don’t want, because of the visibility that will obviously become more and more intensified, to stop going to 25 de Março, walking, sitting with people. Sometimes I sit down with the people who are there at Praça da Sé to find out what is going on, how they are being treated, all of this is part of it”, he said.

Today, co-host of Encontro com Patrícia Poeta, Manoel recognizes the importance of a woman continuing to lead the program. At the same time, he knows that her presence can be a positive reinforcement for many young people: “I am the result of a struggle”, he states categorically, citing all the efforts of his ancestors for freedom.

“Me being on a television show is proof that we can make a difference. Not that it’s easy, not that I’m proof of ‘that when you want it, you can’, because when we want it, we can’t always do it. But my placement in this space is proof that the fight that our predecessors and our ancestors fought was a fight that was worth it”, he concludes.

Do you follow Manoel Soares’ work in the morning? Did you already know the story of the presenter or do you have a story similar to the ones he experienced? Leave your answer in the comments and inspire others.