Women of the Favela Part 6; Rose Angela

Rose Angela's daughter Jackaline and her son Arnaldo

          The women of Perus spend everyday fighting for a living. Maria has a son and a Grandson, Josette cares for her bother, Ann has four kids and twenty-seven orphans, Eliane and Aliane look after themselves, but Rose Angela…Rose Angela is mother to the whole town.

            She moved with her husband Rico from the Amazon basin in 1990.  They built a home on the outer rim of the legitimate neighborhood and for several years lived well.  Rico worked in the city and Rose Angela sold homemade goods.  They had a daughter, Jakaline, and then a son Arnaldo.  As the Favela expanded, many of their neighbors fought against it, calling in political favors, making threats.  But Rose Angela decided to become a community advocate, fighting for the people in the favela, not against them. 

            As the head of our congregation’s Relief Society, she became a prominent figure in the community.  She organized aid for children suffering from malnutrition, parasites, or other treatable diseases.  She led vaccination drives, blanket drives, brick drives, and blood drives.  When a mudslide buried the western edge of the Recanto she was the first on the scene, with a shovel in her hand and a hymn on her lips. She was an ideal, the kind of person I had always imagined working in the favelas. As her name implied, Rose Angela was an angel. 

            One day in the Recanto, we were preaching door to door. We banged on a particularly large gate and a woman answered.  She was young, made up, and scantly dressed.  When we told her who we were, she cocked her head sideways and asked, “You from Rose Angela’s Church?”

            “Yeah,” we answered excited that she knew of us. 

            “She works with my husband.”

            “Yeah, who’s your husband?”

            “Buchexa.”

            We stood eyes wide, mouths open.  Neither of us had ever met the man nicknamed Buchexa, but we knew who he was. He was the local drug lord. This woman must have been one of his several “wives.”

            “Buchexa? Your husband is Buchexa? And he works with Rose Angela, the woman who does all the community work?”

            “Yeah,”

            “I think you must be confused. The Rose Angela from our church does charity work she…”

            “I know who she is.  She feeds the poor, tends to the sick and all that. Yeah, who do you think gets her the medicine?  Who do you think gets the concrete for building, the money for school uniforms?  No one does anything in Perus without my husband.”

            I didn’t say anything.  I just stood there with my pale blank face.

            She smiled.

            “Buchexa likes Rose Angela, and he doesn’t mind you guys working the Recanto, but he better not see you talking to me.  Give me one of your pamphlets and I’ll stop by your church sometime.”

     Later, at church, Rose Angela just laughed.  “Of course I work with Buchexa.  How could I not?” 

            “But he sells drugs, and extorts, and he feeds off the suffering of the people.”

            “No more than the police do, or the government officials.  He extorts money for protection but so do the police.  I’ll bet government workers make at least half of Buchexa’s clientele.   Elder, who would I work with if I refused to talk to criminals? I work with corrupt people and good people on both sides of the system.” 

            “But,”

            “Look, Buchexa is a bad man.  He only helps me in order to buy the people’s loyalty, their protection, their silence. But someday he’ll be killed.  An underling, or a wife, will murder him. Or maybe he’ll finally lose influence with the police and they’ll take him down.  But the good we do, the children we save or educate, the mothers we help, the homes we build, they’ll be here long after.”

            I shook my head.  She touched my arm.

            “I like you,” she smiled, her constant motherly smile, “but you are still very much a child.”

            Rose Angela’s greatest efforts were to improve public health care, a difficult cause. The government had built Postos de Saude (Health Outposts) and they were open twenty-four hours a day, but the clinics are not locally controlled.  They were built and supplied based on the town’s official population.  No one in the Recanto counted. Rose Angela told us she had sympathizers in the government but it was impossible to convince them that Perus’s problems were more pressing than any other slum’s.  

            Rose Angela herself was waiting for a kidney operation, and when her son fell off a bridge crossing the river and cut his head, the system was not there to help her.   The ambulance could not navigate over the Recanto’s muddy, unpaved roads.  My companion and I took turns carrying the boy over the tracks to the outpost. The nurse called us to the front of the line, because Arnaldo’s head was still bleeding.  They had run out of bandages, so we tied a cloth to his head, securing it with my companion’s necktie.  He needed stitches but not badly enough. A doctor could not be spared.  

            Rose Angela held her son, and sang to him.  An old woman at the front of the line was being turned away.

            “But my body hurts, I can’t sleep at night, I…”

            “I’m sorry but we’ve been through this before.  The doctor says you’re not sick.  It’s just old age, all in your head.”

            “But,”

            “Please there are other people in line.”

            “Mrs. Gonzales,” Rose Angela called, motioning to the old woman.

            “Oh, Rose Angela they won’t…”

            “It’s okay, I’ll come by tomorrow morning and we’ll work it out…”

            The night after the raid, when Rose Angela arrived at the church covered in dirt and soot, and gathered the women together to sing, she picked an interesting Hymn. I had heard it several times as a child but never expected to hear it in Perus.  The hymn is called “Come, Come Ye Saints.”  Mormon pioneers, a century earlier, and a world away, sang this song as they pressed across the plains toward their new home in the wilderness. I sat quietly, listening to the women sing.

            I was from another world, a boy, a dumbstruck American teenager, yet the hymn connected us.  The toil, the pain, the love, the charity, it was all part of the human story, the human experience. The hymn calls to pioneers both ancient and modern, to those who travel physically or spiritually, to Brazilian mothers and American teenagers:

            Come, come ye saints, no toil nor labor fear;

            But with joy wend your way.

            Though hard to you this journey may appear,

            grace shall be as your day. 

            ‘Tis better far for us to strive,

            our useless cares from us to drive;

            Do this and joy your hearts will swell—All is well! All is well!

           

            Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard?

            ‘Tis not so; all is right. 

            Why should we think to earn a great reward,

            if we now shun the fight?

            Gird up your loins, fresh courage take. 

            Our God will never us forsake;

            And soon we’ll have this tale to tell—All is well! All is well!”            

           

            Two weeks after the raid, I was transferred to the country and soon returned to Utah.  Our house seemed massive and luxurious.  So many rooms filled with so much stuff.  It made me feel sick to my stomach.  I had trouble going to the supermarket, so much food, so much excess. I still can’t set foot in a shopping mall without feeling woozy. 

            The world in Utah was so different from São Paulo that, at times, my memories of Brazil seemed unreal.  As if they are part of a book I had read or a movie I had seen. But when the speaker in my church asked our congregation, “Can you imagine what our pioneer ancestors must have gone through? What they must have endured to lay the foundation for our happiness today?”

            I shake my head and whisper.  “Yes, yes I can.”

           

            I returned to Perus four years ago. I had been home from the mission field for three years and I was returning to attend school at a university in Rio de Janeiro.  One Friday, I took the ten-hour bus ride down to São Paulo.  I could only stay a few hours in Perus and I wanted to spend them visiting Rose Angela.  I stopped on my way up the hill in front of the church.  It was fenced off, under construction. As I stood back, just remembering, a man walked by.  I didn’t know him but he recognized me.  He stopped and asked if I were a missionary. I told him I had been. He introduced himself as Pedro, Eliane and Aliane’s father. 

            He told me his daughters had moved to a neighboring town to live with their aunt. He had given up drinking and was going to church.  In fact, he was the youth-group leader and saw Luã almost every day.  He could tell me about all the members of the congregation.  Maria still lived in the old Favela. Claudio had lost his legs to the elephantiasis, but he still sold flowers. Their son had bought them a shop near the train station. Josette was going to school to be an English teacher. Ann still worked at the orphanage. He didn’t know anything specific about the orphans. His daughters were doing well. They didn’t wash clothes anymore; they were too focused on school and boys.

After the Policia cleared the Recanto, the government stepped in to improve conditions in the old favela.  They were covering up the river. Soon it would be a proper sewer.  And they were expanding the school. 

            “Rose Angela will be glad about the river,” I smiled.  “She always said it bred disease. Do you think she’d be at home? I’d like to see if…”

            “Elder,” he interrupted.

            “My name’s not Elder anymore you can call me…”

            “Elder,” he shook his head. “The surgery didn’t go right.”

            After almost a year and a half of waiting for kidney surgery Rose Angela, the champion of the people, the angel to the sick and downtrodden, died on the operating table.

            Later on the train, as it twisted through the green hills back towards the city, I sat quietly looking out the window. I thought of the favela. I was trying to press the image into my mind, trying to make it real, to keep it with me.

            “I like you,” Rose Angela told me, “but you are still very much a child.”

To the humming of the electric train I whispered the last verse of Rose Angela’s favorite hymn:

           

This is the only photo I have of Rose Angela

            And should we die before our journey’s through 

            Happy day! All is well!

            We then are free from toil and sorrow, too;

            With the just we shall dwell!

            But if our lives are spared again

            To see the saints their rest obtain,

           Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell—All is well!       

            All is well.

Sister Selma

Really funny Brazilian Nun.  (I did the sub titles)


She tells a joke...and then you laugh...got it?

Watch here

Or on Youtube

Women of the Favela Part 5; Eliane and Aliane

            The orphans were not the only children in Perus without parents.  The twins, Eliane and Aliane, are not orphans by the strict definition.  Technically they have a father, but in all my months in Perus I never met him.  We always talked to the girls on their front patio.

            “Dad doesn’t want religion in the house,” Aliane smiled, nodding her head toward the dark front window.  The girls told me their father is not a bad man, just lazy.  He is not cruel, but not kind, he doesn’t work, but he doesn’t bother them. He doesn’t scold or forbid or shout.  He stays indoors watching their small T.V.

            “And he drinks?” I asked them.

            “Yeah,” they giggled together. “He drinks a lot.”

            “What about your mom?”

            “I’m Eliane’s mom,” Aliane answered quickly.

“And I’m Aliane’s,” Eliane added smiling.  The answer was rehearsed. They must have given it many times.   

            The girls, since age ten, looked after themselves.  For three years they’d run a small laundry business out of their home. The picture shows the twins standing surrounded by their day’s work.  They washed clothes by hand for a year before they saved enough to buy a basic washing machine.  Daily, they lug bags back and forth over the railroad and across the highway. They work everyday except Sunday and they never miss church.  They’re mothers to each other. 

            “It’s not so bad, we make good money.”

            “Except for our hands, the water dries them out.”

            “Yeah but Rose Angela gets us this medicated lotion, it helps a lot.”

            I nod my head. Of course Rose Angela would help.

           

Women of the Favela Part 4: Ann and the Orphanage

After a few weeks in Perus, my companion and I decided to volunteer at a local orphanage. Ann, a member of our congregation, worked part time as an orphanage administrator. The first time we visited we schemed up a surprise party. Without telling Ann we went door to door on the east hill gathering used toys. We wrapped them and bought the ingredients to make a huge birthday cake. As we opened the door to the orphanage, I realized our mistake. The large house overflowed with toys. Toys lined the tiled halls and clumped in corners. The metal cupboards were bursting with bags of beans, rice, and sweets.

“Everyone sends toys,” Ann explained, “Everyone gives food and candy to orphans. We’re funded by three separate American charities. You can bake your cake, but do it with the kids. That’s what they need. Someone to be with them, to talk to them, to ask them their names.”

She was right. The kids didn’t look twice at the toys we’d brought. Instead they grabbed our ties and made us chase them around the house. My companion stood on his head. I did a cartwheel and banged my foot on a windowsill. The children were hard to understand, they talked so quickly, but I tried to listen and catch their names. The tall girl with short hair is Marilyn. Tiago and his brother Rico are the oldest. The three little boys are all named José so they go by Ninja, Cotóco, and Pequeno. The little girls giggled too much to tell me their names. The serious one, in the red tank top, the one who only laughed when I banged my foot and only smiled for the picture is João. (Photo 5 Orphanage)

As the cake baked, Ann leaned against the old sink and told us about the problems facing the orphanage.

“We have enough funding,” she explained, “what we don’t have is someone who can do the work, who can actually care for the children. There are six of us working here, I come almost every day, but no one lives here full-time. I try to be a Mom to the kids as much as I can, but I have four children at home that need mothering.

“The children come to us at different times, for different reasons, mostly without any documentation. We think João was five when he came, but were not sure how old he really is. He came alone, with nothing but the clothes on his back, he wouldn’t tell us where he came from, or who his parents were. He just showed up. Seven years later all we really know about him is that his name is João and his favorite color is red.”

The administrators have a hard time finding openings for the orphans at school. A child from a wealthier family, or with connections like Luã, could enter school at five. But the orphanage lacked organization and connections. Of the twenty-seven children, twelve were school age but only seven attended. The others waited.

As she spoke, Cotóco came crying into the kitchen. Ann picked him up and explained; “Each year we put the kids on a waiting list. If there are no openings then they move up in priority for the next year, but some of them are set to enter first grade at age eight or even nine. They won’t graduate until they are nineteen or twenty.”

But graduation is an unlikely dream. Since the orphans have to leave the orphanage at eighteen, they will inevitably have to quit school and seek work.

“But these kids are lucky,” Ann almost laughed, “there are a lot worse places a kid could end up. There are…”

I held up my hand to stop her. I wasn’t ready to hear details about inner-city child trafficking. The orphanage was disturbing enough.

We ate the cake, João smiled for the picture, and then we left. We went back almost every week trying to give each child as much attention as we could. I was always expected to do cartwheels.

Front row left to right; Cotóco, Giggling girls 1,2,3,4. Elder Conner(Me), Ninja

Second row left to right; Pequeno, Elder Jarvis

Third row left to right; Tiago, Rico, João, Marilyn

Top row left to right; Beatrice, Elder Glover, Elder Stayner, Cintia, Ann

Women of the Favela Part 3; Josette and her Grandmother

In the favelas rural and urban lifestyles often clash. In the photo above a boy, Luã, stands near the river. Behind him a herd of stray horses grazes. No one knows who brought them, but they must have been too costly to keep and were set loose. They roam the town eating out of dumpsters and blocking traffic.

Stray livestock was a common sight even in the most industrialized quarters of the city. The two other pictures show a herd loitering in front of a used car lot and two horses chomping at a garbage sack.Ironically the horses adapted better to city life than many Northerners.

Josette and Luã’s grandmother, the woman slumped in the pew, never adjusted to city life. She moved with her two grandchildren from Natal soon after Luã was born. (None of them ever told me what happened to Luã and Josette’s parents.) From the beginning their Grandma hated city life. She tried to farm but people trampled and built on her garden. She tried to keep chickens but the neighbors stole them or they fell prey to stray dogs. Over the years she gave up everything but five beehives she kept on their small patio, and the drums of animal lard she boiled down into soap. Eventually she took to watching T.V. and mumbling quietly to herself about the old days. Josette was left to keep her family afloat.

Luã would follow us as we worked in the neighborhoods. He taught me to build and fly my first kite. He always talked about his older sister, but after a month in Perus I still hadn’t met her. When she finally came to church one Sunday, she explained to me why she was never home. She was a substitute teacher. The schools in Perus are free, and a major draw for emigrants, but they are dangerous, under funded, and desperately overcrowded. (Not forty-students-in-a-single-classroom-overcrowded, like I’d seen in Utah, but too-many-students-to-fit-in-the-building-overcrowded.) The schools run in four shifts. From six to ten in the morning, then from ten to two, two to six, and finally from six to ten at night. Most teachers work two or three shifts but Josette, as often as she could, taught all four, a fourteen-hour day.

When I was in high school in Utah, the whole country reeled to see the school shootings at Columbine. In the few months I was in Perus, there were two shootings at the school, each was reported only once in the local news.

Josette’s situation was rough but hopeful. She could use her job to study, she spoke English well, and she was applying for a scholarship funded through our Church’s “Perpetual Education Fund.” As a substitute, she could also use her connections to help Luã. She could get him textbooks, notepads, pencils, even a calculator. Luã is a good boy and, like his sister, he works hard. They’ll survive. But many children in the system don’t have their advantages.

Women of the Favela Part 2; Maria

Maria and her Granddaughter Lauren

The first day I saw the Recanto I wasn’t scared at all. The old electric train wound its way through green hills. Shantytowns lined the tracks. Shacks clumped together in the low valleys. Despite the crowded train, the incessant heat, the unfamiliar Portuguese babble all around me, I burned with excited. My first assignment in the city, just what I’d been praying for. The Recanto dos Humildes clings to the edge of Perus, a town fifty miles or so north of São Paulo. It would be wrong to call Perus a suburb, though it may have started that way. Rather, Perus is a microcosm of the city, a mini São Paulo, facing all of the major challenges of the metropolis, only on a smaller scale.

At the train station I met my new companion. (Our missionaries always work in pairs.) He came from California and had been in Perus for six weeks. He helped carry my bags and led me into the town. I followed close behind him as we tunneled through the crowed alleyways. People pushed passed us. Chickens squawked in cages and vendors shouted over each other. Above our heads, clotheslines crisscrossed from window to window. Murky, pungent water trickled over the uneven asphalt.

“We’re going to Maria’s house for lunch,” my companion told me, looking back over his shoulder. “She’s a good cook but after, we’ll have to help her husband Claudio wash his legs. Try not to stare.”

“Stare at what?” I asked but he didn’t answer. We stopped in front of a large gate. It was solid metal, ten feet tall, with spikes on top, not at all inviting. My companion clapped loudly and called,

“Maria! It’s the missionaries.”

The gate swung inward and Maria answered, her smile shining, her granddaughter in her arms. Maria was as warm and inviting as the gate was ominous.

Maria and Claudio have been members of our congregation since they trekked down from Piauí, a state in Northern Brazil. When she met me she cried. I was surprised and sorry, not knowing what I’d done. But my companion laughed, and then Maria laughed.

“Don’t worry about it Elder, (all the missionaries are called Elder) I always cry.”

“It’s true,” my companion agreed, “Everyone calls her Irmã Chorona, (Sister Cryer).”

“Yes, Irmã Chorona,” she smiled, “I always cry, but never because I’m sad.”

She told me she didn’t cry the day they left the North with all their possessions on their backs, but she cried the day they arrived in their new home. She said she didn’t cry when her husband couldn’t find work, but she cried when he bought a wheelbarrow, filled it with wildflowers to sell, and returned home with his first day’s earnings. She said she didn’t cry when her husband’s legs started to swell and crack, and he could no longer push his wheelbarrow, but she cried the day he gave up drinking and started going to church. She didn’t cry at funerals, or at hospitals, but she cried every time a new missionary came to visit.

Slowly, over black beans and rice, interrupted many times by tears, Maria told me the history of their own little metropolis.

Perus is one of many favela-towns surrounding São Paulo and provides a textbook example of the country’s social stratification. The World Bank rates Latin America as, “the most (economically) unequal region in the world, and Brazil is the most unequal country in the region.”

In most areas the slums flood over the wealthy neighborhoods. The shacks fill every open space, built up against skyscrapers, in parks, or freeway medians. But Perus provides such an interesting example because the areas of rich, poor, poorer and poorest are clearly defined and divided. The highway, the river, and the train tracks, run together for twenty miles or so, out of São Paulo. At Perus they part, dividing the town into four distinct sections. Panning the town from East to West you pass through the entire spectrum, from rich multi-storied brick houses on the hill, to tiny slanted plywood shacks on the muddy riverbank.

The rich, legitimate part of town covers the hillside east of the highway. A poorer neighborhood fills the area between the highway and the railroad tracks. From the tracks to the river the town tumbles into the old favela, a jumbled conglomerate of houses, shops, narrow alleyways and twisted roads. Beyond the river sits the Recanto.

According to Maria, the legitimate Perus was built in the 1970’s. Businessmen came, looking to get out of the city, and the highway was built to give them a speedy commute. Poor workers came as domestic servants or shopkeepers, and the government built them the railroad.

“No one built on this side of the tracks until the nineties. We were some of the first. When we got here it was a dump.”

“Literally,” my companion smiled and Maria nodded.

In fact all the land west of the tracks and east of the river was government owned and designated as a landfill. The land beyond the river belonged to an absent, and essentially faceless owner who, everyone assumed, lived in the city.

In the early nineties, slum populations in São Paulo exploded, overflowing into areas like Perus. The people carved a neighborhood right out of the landfill, building their homes with anything they could find.

“You’d be surprised what those richies throw away,” Maria says gesturing to the corrugated steel roof. “We dug this out of a mound down by the river. I insisted on real clay brick for the walls, but the Oliveiras down the alley, they built that house out of blue water barrels. Every month they cover up one or two with concrete. Whenever they can afford the cement. ”

Originally lines and pipes crossed over the tracks bringing pirated water and electricity. The Favela itself was graded from poor to poorer, with the poorest families living closest to the river.

“The river became an open sewer,” Maria said shaking her head, “drugs, violence, disease and death, they were everywhere.”

Government officials in every major city in the South faced the same dilemma. They could barely estimate how many people lived in the favelas, let alone provide for them. By 1995, Perus’ actual population was at least ten times the official head count. Half the town stole electricity and water. Children flooded the schools, and there was absolutely nowhere to send the people.

“What about the government housing?” I asked. On train rides through the city I’d seen the massive concrete apartment complexes, lined one after another like wasps nests. Called COHAB’s (co-habitation units), they must have been a massive undertaking.

“The COHAB’s,” Maria snorted. “They’re so much worse than the favelas.”

Despite the scale of the COHAB project, it fell desperately short of its goal.

“I’ve been to see them,” she went on. “My cousin lived in a COHAB for three years. Horrible, Elder, just horrible.”

She told us how large families from the North are crammed into one-room apartments. How the housing complexes breed organized crime, and are often the most dangerous parts of the city.

“People only move to the COHAB’s if they have to, if they get in trouble with the government or something. They move in, get in debt to the drug lords and the cops, and can’t leave.” She told us that many of the people in the Perus had fled the COHAB’s, often leaving behind all their possessions and bolting in the middle of the night.

“It’s true,” my companion added. “There were COHAB’s in my last area and we weren’t allowed anywhere near them after dark.”

When the COHAB’s began to fail the government tried to entice people to move back to the countryside. Brazil built a new capitol city, Brasilia, built in 1960, as an early effort to draw people into the country and away from the urban coast. In the 1990’s the government granted enormous subsidies to Northern ranchers in hopes of bolstering the agricultural economy. Today Brazil has one of the largest beef industries in the world with over190 million cattle. But cattle tycoons and foreign investors dominate the industry. The grants helped Americans get 39-cent hamburgers but gave few opportunities to farm workers. With no schools, no hospitals, no infrastructure of any kind, for families like Maria’s there was no going back North.

In the mid 1990’s, the government tried land reform; giving the favelas to their inhabitants. In Perus, they paved a few roads, built power lines, basic sewage systems, and even a primary school. The neighborhood was laid out poorly, and hastily built, but it was a neighborhood.

These land reforms, meant to ease the favela problem, only exacerbated it, causing a new major internal migration.

“At first the flow of newcomers was steady,” Maria told us, “but word reached the North that the government was giving away land. For a sharecropper or a plantation worker that’s like saying they discovered a gateway straight to heaven. The people flooded down.

“ But the government could hardly be surprised,” Maria, laughed. “The promise of free land always brings waves of people.”

These people came in the same way Europeans flooded through Ellis Island, or American pioneers pushed through the west. Many Northerners actually came to São Paulo in wagons, trailing livestock.

Maria and Claudio were both born from a long line of sharecroppers and plantation workers. São Paulo was going to be their ticket out, their “better life for their children.” For fifteen years they dug a living out of the old garbage dump. They raised their son Paulo and built a life, all on the money Claudio brought in from selling flowers. Every day for fifteen years he wheeled his barrow down to the train station, and every night he brought back beans and rice to his wife.

They succeeded. Paulo went to school, got a job in the city, married, had a daughter, and built a small brick home in the Recanto, just west of the river. But not every emigrant would succeed and as the years went by it became more and more difficult for newcomers.

Roses from the Ashes, Women of the Favella; Part 1- Introduction

This is the beginning of an article I wrote last year. It's rather long so I am going to post it in installments. Let me know what you think.

Roses from the Ashes; Women of the Favella

We heard the sirens long before we saw the lights. We looked down the five-lane highway that twisted away from the town and disappeared into the green hills. I had no idea what the sirens meant. As a nineteen-year-old boy, raised in the mountains of Northern Utah, I could not imagine what the shrill wailing foretold. But the people of Perus knew. They knew what was coming, they knew it was pointless to resist, and they knew they had no time. The Policia Militar, the Brazilian Military Police, were coming to burn the favela.

We were not in the favela that day. A fellow missionary and I were working across the railroad tracks, on the hill above the Brazilian slum, in the legitimate part of Perus. Still, from our vantage point we saw everything. We saw the SUV’s tear around the last green hill and into view. They were big and white, with Policia Militar, glaring on their sides, in large black letters. Men with machine guns (machine guns!) hung out of their windows.

Most of the people scattered like roaches, fleeing toward the river or back into the town. Others did not run. They huddled in small groups, just waiting.

The police reached the edge of town, and swarmed across the open field, toward the slum. It didn’t take long. The groups of slanting shacks, huddled together like their frightened owners, fell easily into dead heaps and the police torched them. In explosions of blue sparks, the police cut the wires that piped stolen energy across the river. Like reapers at harvest, they cleared the ground.

The Policia did not chase the people who ran. They brandished machine guns but no one fired a shot. No reason to, the people did not resist. Why should they? They had, after all, so little to lose and the next favela would be exactly like this one.

A hot wind whipped across the burning field, lifting ashes across the river, and up into the rich neighborhood. We tasted the soot in the air. Flakes, like black snow, dusted the houses and smudged our white dress shirts. I was just a boy. An American teenager dropped as a missionary into one of the poorest places on earth. In the year and a half I’d spent in Brazil I’d learned the language, learned to talk and live with the people and, certainly, I’d grown to love them. Yet on that day, as I sat helpless on the curb, watching their houses burn, I was oblivious. I could not understand what had happened, much less why. I knew people who lived in the favela. I’d eaten with them, laughed with them, worshipped with them. Was I not one of them? Was this not my neighborhood burning?

As we sat on the curb in the drifting soot, my missionary companion and I, we were too afraid, too awestruck, to go down and cross the river. The sun set orange and red against the black smoke. Intense and focused, the sunset was a violent, beautiful sequel to the day’s burning destruction. We waited until the last SUV disappeared down the road. Then, in the coming darkness, we ran to the church house.

Lights shone in every window. Organ music, a slow gentle hymn, floated out into the darkness.

Maria was there. Her son and daughter-in-law were helping her husband Claudio up the steps. His heavy, swollen legs oozed an opaque mucus, a late stage of elephantiasis. Josette comforted her grandmother who slumped in a pew. Where was Luã, Josette’s little brother? Ah, he was playing in the hall with the twin girls, Aliane and Eliane. Where was their father? Not here. Ann rushed forward to help Claudio up the steps; none of the orphans were with her. Good. That meant the orphanage was safe. The fire hadn’t crossed the river.

Where was Rose Angela? Of course, she would come last. She would be the last to leave the favela, the last to retreat. Rose Angela would be counting all the children, helping all the elderly; she would be caring for the entire town. Soon her daughter Jakaline appeared out of the night cradling her little brother. Only eleven years old, Jakaline, carried her brother like a mother would. She walked as a woman would walk. She set Arnaldo down gently, calmly, her eyes glistened wet and heavy. “Mom told me to come here,” she said glancing backward into the night. “She’s still down in the Recanto.”

O Recanto dos Humildes, that’s what the locals called the favela. It means the “Refuge of the Humble,” not the only favela in the town, but the only one built on land with an owner whose political connections could have it cleared.

Only ten families in our congregation lost their homes in the fire, but everyone came down to the church house. As I expected, Rose Angela arrived last, her white smile shining out of her round face, smudged with dirt and ash.

I trembled with sadness, or anger, or perhaps fear, some intense emotion I was too young to be familiar with. Everyone else seemed calm, lounging about on the floor or in the pews, as if on their own porches. They talked, told stories, even laughed.

Until that night I thought I’d grown accustomed to life in the favela. I’d seen hardship, sickness, poverty, even death. I thought I understood life there. I thought I could share in anything they’d have to face. But I was from another world. Two places couldn’t be more different than Perus and Layton, Utah.

Rose Angela gathered the women together before the pulpit to sing, and as I looked from woman to woman, from face to face, I felt more like a foreigner than the day I stepped off the train.

Photo: View from above Perus. Edited by DBC www.connerstudio.blogspot.com

Brasil

These are some vignettes I wrote about Brazil.

I sit on a hard thin bench, in a tall thin church, on a strangely cold morning in Sao Paulo. Light from the stain glass windows cuts through the darkness of the chapel and lands on the cold marble at her feet. She stands before the altar, her head bowed, her hands folded lightly. Slowly her head rises, her dark hair framing her pale olive face. She lifts her hands, palms turned upward. She begins with a single note as thin and delicate as her own tiny frame. Her song floats about the room like a mist. The saints in their niches and the stone carved angels lean in to listen. She worships God with gentle praise and delicate passion. The roar and crash of the metropolis outside fades into a silent reverence. Her eyes close, dark wet lashes. Tears on her soft cheeks, sparkle in the sunlight, like crystals.

The stench hangs on the man like a cloak. His breath rots with alcohol. He throws his arm around me and sits us down heavily on the curb. “I tell you one thing,” he slurs, smiling a broken yellow smile. “You guy’s got it right, you Americans, yeah. You need to take me back with ya, ya know, I’m a good worker, I’m a God’s man. I’m a God’s man, but I drink.”

He laughs, then sighs and rests his head on my shoulder, his eyes close.

Overhead a firework explodes. He jerks upright. “what was…who…oh…you know you Americans got it right, none of this crime, eh… but you guys got war yeah…in the states you guys got war… and… and Bush…and yeah. Well I’m going there one day…I’m a good man…I’m a God’s man, but I drink.”

He shakes his head and squints up at the sky. “I drink cuz I…well I drink…” His voice cracks. “I drink.” He shakes his head, “I drink”. His head falls into my chest, his body quivers and sobs. He wails like a child. I wrap my arms around him. He sniffles and wipes his face against my shirt. After a time his wailing dies down to a whimper, then he is quiet, his body still shivers slightly. I hold him and look up at the sky. More fireworks explode but he doesn’t t stir. He sleeps quietly in my arms.

A silent scorching day, a tiny farmhouse, miles down a dirt road, somewhere in the vastness of the Brazilian countryside. I sit at a hard wooden table. The windows and doors all stand open but not a hint of a breeze enters the house. Marriana, a small awkward eight year old, hands me a glass of warm tap water. It has the sweet taste of earth. She sits across from me. She rests her head on her hand. Her small face is smudged, her hair tangled wildly on her head.

“Was that your Dad outside?” I ask.

“My brother,” she answers and then adds idly, “I haven’t seen them in years, Dad left before I can remember. My brother watches me and my sister. My mother left last spring.” She sounds almost bored. I say nothing.

Suddenly she looks sharply up at me. “Do you love your mom? More than anything else I mean. More than…well…more than anything else?”

“Well yes…” I start but she goes on.

“She was going to give me a dress, for my birthday, it’s in December, at almost Christmas, so she said she’d get me a dress, it would count for my birthday and Christmas, but it would have flowers like the one on the lady in the magazine, but yellow, and smaller a’course, but she was going to buy it, not make it, she was going to buy it at the store in town for me.” Her eyes fill with tears but her voice is unchanged.

“She left on a Saturday. The next day was Sunday and she sometimes takes us to church on Sunday, my brother never goes but my mom takes me and my sister, even though we don’t have dresses, mom has one, and she was going to get me one for my birthday, and Christmas, but she left on Saturday and on Sunday she didn’t come back, so we didn’t go to church again… I love my mom… more than anything else”

She stares right at me. Her dark eyes are overflowing but not at all like a child’s. Her voice never cracks, there is no sobbing or gasping, her tiny lips don’t even quiver, her tiny voice is light and even. Tears roll down her cheeks but she doesn’t wipe them off. She just looks at me, her eyes dark pools. I stare down at my glass. Outside the heat rises in waves off the baked earth.

Music fills the hot, humid darkness of the night. The Favella is dancing. Bombs explode. I let myself in through the crooked gate, and pick my way over the rubble. I cross the sprawling garden and go down the crumbling steps. AnaSilvia’s form, dancing and swaying, is silhouetted against the light from the house.

“Irmã como vai?” I call from the darkness.

“Tudo bem!” Riselia calls from her chair at the doorway. “Come and dance!”

“Not tonight sister, but I could use a glass of water.”

“Cold?”

“Of course.”

I sit on the dirt beside her. She reaches out her hand, wrinkled, brown and strong. She pats me on the head like she would a child. She sends a little one to get the water. I sit with my back against the house, sip the water slowly, and together we watch the dancing. Her grandson, Jaime, dances with AnaSilvia. Their bodies seem to float on the thick night air. They dance close, his hands on her waist, her head back, eyes half closed

“Your grandson’s girlfriend is beautiful.” I say, setting down my glass

“Yes, Yes” she answers after a moment. “you know, they’ve known each other since they were children.”

“Really.”

“She lived next door, it was hard for him after his parents died and he came to live here. She took care of him.”

“Will they be married?”

“He loves her very much. They’ll be married when he finds work. Now that they’re older he wants to take care of her. Buy her a house maybe. You can’t get married living with your grandma, can you?”

“He’s a good boy.”

She reaches out a hand and places it on my shoulder. Her other hand, she presses to her lips. Tears fill the creases on her worn face. She nods, “Yes, he’s a very good boy.”

I cried only once in Brazil. The day they burned the Favella. The military police came at sunset. I was on the hill across the train tracks, in the neighborhood, above the slums. We saw their trucks. We saw the flames spread through the huts. Ash filled the hot air like devil’s snow.

When the police were gone, the land cleared for its owner, we met the people at the church. We sang. They cried, then they thanked God, then they smiled and sang and laughed. I walk home at sunset. I cry at the sky as it burns intense and focused. I’ve never seen such a sky.