PICTURES - The Favelas

A lady who showed us inside her home. Her other children attend Frutos.
The space where a home used to be, before it collapsed.

The trash & contamination in the water below the favelas.

CASAS DOS MENINOS

Good news! Vini (the program director) said lice wouldn't keep me from working at Frutos, so I didn't miss a single day with my children. Working with them this week has been marvelous. I don't think I realized how empty I felt without their loud "BOM DIA!"to greet me every morning & their warm hugs & smiles throughout the day. I already knew that everyone in Brasil is obsessed with soccer, but I didn't realize that extended even to my youngsters. At the ripe age of 2, we whipped out some soft, small soccer balls & the kids had a BLAST kicking them all over the classroom. The "soccer" of sorts kept them occupied for over an hour, & I must say, that's a first with any activity. Plus, it gave them the much needed opportunity to run around & use energy without disobeying the rules & ending up in time-out. With 30 toddlers & only 3 teachers, it's hard to regulate constant movement because activities like that get out of hand rapidly, so "soccer" was the perfect solution.

On Tuesday night, instead of following the drums & dancing on the street like we normally do, we found a really sweet outdoor club with live reggae music. The whole club was a giant slope, with huge concrete steps like the kind you would expect to find at a football stadium. The stage was at the very bottom, so that you were overlooking the 12 people onstage all claiming to be part of the band. At the highest part of the slope, the venue backed up to this beautiful & intricately decorated church that looked as if centuries had passed since it's original construction. Not exactly what you would expect to find in combination with throngs of dancing people & live reggae music, but I'm not complaining. It was awesome. The band played some Bob Marley (they love him here) & that really got us going, as you would expect. It was pretty funny noticing some of the Brasileiros around us as we belted out "Don't worry, be happy!" because we could tell they were watching our lips & listening to our pronunciation to make sure that they were saying the words correctly. Words, of course, that are in a language as foreign to them as Portuguese is to us.

Later in the week, we went on a fantastic & slightly disturbing tour of the open market. Apparently, the 60-70% of the country in poverty never shops at grocery stores & only shops at this so-called open market. Let me say without a doubt that I have never been happier to be a vegetarian. The raw meat, including a full pig's head, smelled so wretched that I thought it was quite an accomplishment that I made it through the entire tour without losing my lunch. I took pictures because I didn't think anyone would believe that I was surrounded by that much dead animal. Of course, the entire market wasn't meat, but that was the most disturbing part, and the smell wafted throughout the market, making it impossible to forget that people around you are buying rotten meat & fruit. I was appalled by the poor quality of the food that people pay money to eat. Our tour guide was awesome - he told us all the about voodoo religion that has been passed from Africa to Brasil & told us about his world travels. Literally, world travels: he has been to almost every country in the world since he left home at the age of 19 with the dream of becoming a bullfighter. Truly a remarkable person.


& now, to address the picture...first off, I'm blog/technologically challenged & just realized that I could post pictures here, so I might try a few more entries with some pictures after this. But this particular picture is where most of my beautiful children live. On Friday, the other volunteers at Frutos & I had the opportunity to tour the favelas, or the flooded areas where people build homes on stilts with scrap wood & anything else they can find. The Brazilian government has taken out a lot of the flooded areas over the years & now tells everyone that they no longer exist, but this is a boldface lie. I walked through them. I walked on boards where I feared I would simply fall through into the murky water below, full of contaminated trash & human waste because most people use the bathroom straight into the water through holes in the floors of their homes. & with each step, I imagined my toddlers walking along these very boards, and maybe falling through, which happens all the time. The only reason the government gets away with this lie is because they took out all the favelas that you can see from the street, but ignoring the favelas that you must take paths to find. One of the women giving the tour showed us where her house used to be, before it collapsed. Now she & her 3 children live in a favela (which are all one room) with her father-in-law. That's 5 people living in one room on stilts. The things that I saw...it just puts everything in perspective.

I'll try to post more pictures soon!

LONG OVERDUE - weeks 4 & 5

I am sincerely sorry for my absence in writing, but I think you all understand that for the last week, my thoughts, & consequently my writing, hasn’t been directed at capturing my time in Brasil. In the words of James Taylor “You must forgive me if I’m up and gone to Carolina in my mind.” I’ve been gone to Carolina in my mind, but it’s time that I return to Brasil, because my work here is needed and it’s not even close to complete.

The St. John’s festa was out-of-this-world. The newspapers estimated that about 200,000 people filled the streets of Pelourinho and I believe it. We could hardly move through the throngs of people, the street vendors, the make-shifts stages, the drums, and the dancing. In Brasil, it’s not a party unless you’re dancing, and that makes for a good time no matter what. One of the girls who was new to the house wore a gold necklace out and some boy ran by and ripped it off her neck, but some of the other guys in our group bolted after him and held him down until the policia arrived. The police beat him sideways until he was bruised and could barely stand. This boy, who was probably only 12 or 13. Even though he is a thief, it was still hard to watch. He has learned, I’m sure, from birth that stealing & begging are his best chances for survival, & it's impossible to past judgment on someone who has more poverty than I can even begin to imagine. Luckily, after a trip to the police station, Christy got her necklace back & the rest of the night was smooth sailing.

The weekend of June 28, which marked the halfway point of my time in Brasil, I went to Lençóis with a few other volunteers & some kids studying abroad in Salvador from Texas. I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to make the journey, because frankly, it involved spending a fair bit of my quickly diminishing bank account & a 7 hour overnight bus ride. We arrived at 6AM on Friday morning, & despite my exhaustion, the morning sun glowed warmly over a river, glittering as it flowed downhill over slabs of smooth, peach-colored stone. The banks of the river were lined with a rich green forest, untouched & uncharted, & dotted with a few quaint hostels. Immediately, I knew I had made the right decision. We all of Friday hiking over rocks & boulders, up mountains, through rivers, & past waterfalls, taking pictures all the while. However, if you see my pictures when I return, I must assure you that they don’t even remotely do the place justice. Just being there – out in nature, away from the grim of the city – was exactly what I needed to renew myself for my last four weeks in Salvador. Although I love the work that I do here, it’s nice to escape. I need nature, to feel the power of the raw Earth beneath me as I walk, not the paved city streets or the sinking sand of overpopulated beaches. Friday was slightly colder & overcast, great hiking weather, & Saturday was nothing but blue skies & sun, making it a perfect day for lounging by the river & diving in the random holes that formed nature’s ready-made swimming pools. I left Sunday morning glowing, & not just from the sun, but with the kind of content peace I only get from being in nature.

For the past 2 weeks, my kids have been on vacation, but the other volunteers & I have been working at Frutos on various projects. First up was the garden. Like all buildings in Salvador, the preschool is gated & surrounded completely by tall walls, but the area inside the walls bore a striking resemblance to small forest. Luckily, the trash policy here requires one to do nothing more than pitch the discarded material over the wall & onto the side of the road, where a tractor will later, and only marginally successfully, pick up the trash. The system is inefficient at best, but it certainly made the making of the garden easier, because all the weeds, shrubs & small trees that we ripped from the ground were merely thrown over the wall. After clearing the area, we made rows, bought seeds, & planted a variety of vegetables, along with some of the flowers that we salvaged from the previous “garden.” It was wonderful working alongside the owner of Frutos, an elderly woman who obviously loves that place. In fact, I think she actually lives in a small room on the second floor. Even though she speaks no English & I can only catch bits & pieces of her Portuguese, I am certain that she is one of the most amazing people I will ever meet. Anyone who is able to devote their entire life to helping children who have so little is among the gods. In my opinion, she’s up there with Mother Teresa. Upon completion of the garden, we started cleaning the building, which has terrible water damage because the roof leaks everywhere when it rains. We cleaned & organized the classrooms, as well as the library. Looking through the library, I was baffled to run across such authors as Nietzsche, Aristotle, Lewis Carroll, & Paulo Coelho. After sifting through the mass of books, only a very small portion were actually suitable for pre-school aged children. As a government funded agency, I guess Frutos has received donations or something, but it really makes me wonder about the allocation of resources. On Friday, we were supposed to go visit the children at their homes, but I was very disappointed to discover that because of the rain, we wouldn’t be going. I would have loved the opportunity to explore where my children live. It’s a little frustrating to know that I missed out on that because the culture here is such that everything comes to a halt when water falls from the sky. Still, I am not Brazilian & thus will never fully understand the culture, so I cannot criticize that which I do not understand.

On our day off last week, we caught a 45-min bus ride to a deserted beach called Flamingo which is absolutely breathtaking. It was as beautiful as Morro de Sao Paulo, the first island we visited. With that kind of beauty & the peaceful, salty breeze, how can you not feel like you’re in paradise? The best part, however, was the lack of vendors. The beach within walking distance is lovely, but crowded and full of vendors who constantly target us, as Americans. Not that I can blame them, because we do have more money than the majority of the people in this city, but it still gets pretty irritating when you just want to r-e-l-a-x & catch some rays.

I feel like this entry has been a bit hard to follow because I am trying to fit in 2 weeks worth of information, so please, be patient with me. Today was eventful, actually, because my children finally returned to school & I discovered that the vague itching sensation of my scalp is lice. I was absolutely overjoyed to see them. The children, not the lice. Their smiling faces were enough. I just hope Vini (the program director) doesn’t make me miss too much time at Frutos when I tell him about my little bug issue tomorrow morning.

The next three weeks here will fly by, I just know it, & when I look back I will wonder what happened to all the time. Five weeks ago, if you told me I would feel as I do right now, I wouldn’t have believed you. I have hurt, I have missed, & I have loved. It's amazing the pull that this place has over you. It's almost like, you don't realize how amazing this experience is until it’s over. The last week has been my hardest, by far, but now, I know I'm going to make it. As much as I want to be home right now, I know I should be here. It's comforting to be needed, and my work is much needed. I also know if Adam was still here, he would want me to be helping these children, & loving them, the same way he loved all the swim teams he coached. That keeps me going. The love that you all are sending me, that keeps me going too.