Minitor Carneiro

Meet Minitor Carneiro. Or Noel Almeida as some people still know him. An IT graduate and avid footballer who has even played for the national team at school level, Carneiro had his revelation when he came across capoeira during his college days. The combination of acrobatics, music, instruments in a martial art form "blew his mind." It took him very little time after that to decide that capoeira was going to be his life. And a great life it has been for the past five years.

As a child, Carneiro's big dream was to travel the world and capoeira is helping him with that – he has already made trips to Israel and Brazil to learn capoeira. The ability that capoeira has given him to connect with the larger, global capoeira family across regions, languages and cultures is one of his biggest joys in capoeira and now he is training at our capoeira center in Italy fulfilling his dream. And staying fit while broadening his cultural horizons is the icing on the cake for him.

Carneiro's motto in life is "to try to know if you can and even if you fail, it's an experience that you can learn from," or as he calls it, learning through experience. The reason he plays capoeira is because of the immense joy he gets while discovering that he can move in a certain way, sing or play an instrument. Capoeira has taught him to always stay positive and have patience that today is today and tomorrow is going to be a new day. He believes you should try your best at whatever you want to achieve and one day it will happen. Persistence is the key.