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!
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