A group of enterprising friends have taken it upon themselves to fix one of the biggest challenges that come with living in Brazil's favelas, also known as "the slums." The challenge in these massively dense areas, which some first-world countries may never think about, is the simple ability to receive mail.

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The architecture of these impoverished areas is completely improvised. Many concrete buildings or structures within these cities are demolished and then recreated quite often.

Many buildings don't have any official addresses, and mass amounts of concrete structures doesn't allow for mapping satellites to be able to recognize every street. As a result, it's essentially impossible to receive mail.  

Further complicating the situation, most streets among these favelas don't have any official names, so residents simply make up different names, thus causing postal workers to not have to deliver any of the mail to these different areas. 

In an effort to change this situation, a private mail-delivery service called Friendly Mailman, has begun operating in the Rocinha favelas. In order to successfully gain an understanding of the houses and streets, the group has used a very old-school approach - marking everything down with pen and paper.

The group has created their own algorithms to create a code explaining different categories of each structure. For example, according to Vice Motherboard, blind allies with fewer than 12 homes will be considered a condominium.

"A typical sequence goes like this: Wall, Stone, Henhouse, Store, House, Building, Condominium," said Pedro, one of the creators of Friendly Mailman.

The result is hundreds of pages written by hand, which are then turned into a huge map full of codes. This map would essentially be impossible to for anyone to go by without a complete understanding of the logic and codes put into it.

he success of the map, which then led to the creation of their private-mail business, marks the first franchise to ever come up from a slum in Brazil's history. Friendly Mailman has expanded and is currently involved in eight different favelas in Rio. 

Tagsfavelas, Slums, mail, Friendly Mail, Rio, Rocinha