Roçinha, Brazil
Day 1, October 19, 2007

I arrived at dusk in my hometown of Rio and, on my way to where I shall stay for the next week with a family friend, I saw the street where I lived as a baby.   Gavea, one of Rio's many hillside neighborhoods, starts at the base of the mountain for which it is named. At 6:30 this morning I went with Graça, my hostess, to Escola Americana , the private, international school where she works, just about a mile further up the mountainside. The school is set in beautiful Atlantic forest, and a very high wall separates it from the street and the favela, Roçinha, that perches on the hillside above and spills down into the surrounding hills.

About two years ago the school had been planning to move; but armed warfare inside Roçinha resulted in more than 120 people killed. The streets had been filled with police armed to the teeth. Now things have settled down to a certain degree. Many people who have worked for years at the school as cooks, janitors and security guards have lived in Roçinha all their lives. The school is about 70 percent very wealthy Brazilian children and youth, and 30 percent kids whose parents work for international companies--primarily oil companies--who pay the tuition for their employee's children. On the donor wall, Chevron's name appears at the top of the list of school donors.

At 7:30 Sister Rita, the nun who was to orient me to community projects in Roçinha arrived. Sister Rita is with an order of nuns, and lives by herself in Roçinha where she does social and educational work.   She brought with her the mother of Thiago, the thirteen-year-old boy whom I shall interview for the Children Growing Up in Cities book.

Nothing in Sister Rita's way of dressing indicates she is a nun. She exudes an inner joy that makes laughter a big part of her conversation. Thiago's parents came from northeastern Brazil to Rio when Thiago was a baby, as many people seeking work and a better financial future do. His mother (whose name was one I had never heard before and I can't remember it) now volunteers at the child care center where she had her first job caring for small children when her own son was only two. She took him to work with her daily and he essentially grew up in this day care center until he was old enough for school. Now Thiago volunteers in the after-school program for grade school children that is based in this same child care center.

I look forward to meeting Thiago, who I am guessing has many extraordinary qualities. At the end of grade school in Roçinha, he took the competitive exam to enter Dom Pedro II, a federal public school for secondary education that is the most sought after school in Rio. (My two cousins here both attended, and they fit more easily the average student profile--the sons of a university professor--and both now have PhDs.) Thiago was one of 350 children taking the exam to occupy one of 15 places. He placed second in the exam without ever having taken one of the many courses that prepare more well-to-do students to take this test. Thiago has a demanding school day himself, but volunteers two or three days a week at his old day care center as a tutor and playmate. His mother told me she was thrilled when he entered the school until they sent home a list of all the books and supplies she had to buy. The public high schools here require students to purchase their own books. It is one of the many things that prevent adequate education amongst the poor, as books alone cost about $200 US per year.

The night before I arrived in Rio I had seen a movie with my young cousins that is front-page news in Brazil, "The Elite Troupe" about the special "green beret" section of the military police in Rio. More people have seen this movie than any film in Brazil's history. My cousin told me it wasn't all that violent, but I felt like hiding under my chair and frequently just covered my face with my hands. It shows the training and day to day work of these police who do the hand to hand combat in Rio's favela's in an effort to end the drug trade. Frequently the team of one drug lord battles with automatic weapons against another drug lord's henchmen to control a community. The night I arrived in Rio the news showed one of these battles going on with police helicopters and the policeman who died trying to save a baby caught in the crossfire.

When I asked Sister Rita about how she felt living in this environment, she said she asks God for protection each day as she leaves her home and simply trusts that if she treats people with kindness, that kindness will spread. She said that she knows that, if it is her day to die, that is with God.

So off I went with her and Thiago's mom to meet the people at the day care center. We caught the bus right outside Escola Americana and in a few minutes we descended into the favela, which is the largest in South America with 250,000 people living in precariously built homes creeping up and down the hills.

As I walked down the street to reach the day care center, I saw beautiful little birds singing enchanting songs from cages. Sister Rita told me they were all illegal to sell, and I wished I could buy them and set them free, but they are from Northern Brazil, not native to this region, so they would have little chance of survival if I let them loose. Over my head ran the most complex jumble of electric wires you can imagine going between buildings in every direction. They do not meet anyone's code.

The day care center remains locked at all times. The ground floor has the babies from 6 months to almost 2 years--about twenty little ones. They were in their clean playroom when I arrived, babies sitting and watching, toddlers walking. There was little for them to do, but everyone was clean, most were smiling. The room next to the playroom has all the cribs where they nap after lunch and behind that is a small kitchen. Up a flight of stairs is the "toy room" that has a dress-up corner, shelves of well used trucks, some lego, and board games. The different age groups of children, except the babies, each have a turn there daily to play with the toys, supervised by a cheerful young woman. On the same hall there is a bathroom, the two offices for administration, and the room with desks for after school homework help. Then, one walks onto the roof of the babies' room and there is a small outdoor play area used mostly for running and playing with balls Up a few stairs higher is a roof patio that has a small wall and a patch of   earth, with four trees and space for a bit more planting. Four steps up on one side is the kitchen and a small dining room for twenty children.   On the other side of the patio there are classroom spaces for the two-, three-, and four-year-olds. There are also two empty rooms that they hope to soon redo so they can put the babies up there out of the way of the street gun battles that sometimes occur.

I saw no guns anywhere in my short walk to the day care center, and I had no sense of being in danger; but I would not consider going there without someone from the community with me. A young couple from Roçinha who have two children of their own run the day care center. Both of them are Afro-Brazilian and have university degrees. Christina, the director has an education degree. Femino, who seems to be the assistant director has a degree in geography. We spoke a bit about the work of children's sense of place and way-finding. He told me that he has frequently seen very small children able to lead adults around the many contorted pathways of Roçinha and that the little ones know their community often better than adults.

This day care center was the first ever developed in the community. It was started by Jesuits in the 1960s. (Roçinha itself began to develop with squatter huts in the 1930's). Now there are ten community day care centers and forty others in people's homes; but, with 250,000 people, one can only imagine that the need for such service far surpasses the available spaces and that the facilities are pretty minimal. Certainly they don't meet any American or Canadian standard for adequate toys, outside play spaces, training for staff, etc.. Sister Rita told me that this day care center is the only one in all of Roçinha that has a tree. None of the others has any green space at all or room to plant anything. Roçinha is built on steep hillsides with rooms added to squatter buildings one on top of. During bad rain storms there are often landslides that kill people in these favelas because the buildings are constructed on steep, unstabilized slopes.

The day care staff gets paid 400 reais a month — about $200. More than just the directors have college degrees. Cristina told me that last year the city of Rio didn't send any money for salary or food for the children for 3 months. They all worked for free to keep the center open as the mothers depend on this service to be able to go to work. The city pays, when they pay, 150 reais per month per child to cover all the costs of food, salary, toys, building up-keep, etc.. So the directors spend a great deal of time looking for outside funding to help meet their expenses. Escola Americana families donate a lot of powdered milk. There are families that even have birthday parties for their own kids and say, "no gifts, just powdered milk for the day care please".

Three cooks prepare food for the 160 children in a kitchen that certainly isn't industrial, but has a stove, sink and frig and a separate room of shelves as a pantry. The quality of the food impressed me. They served all the children rice, beans and a stew made of a cows stomach [tripe] with squash, onions, carrots and a salad of lettuce, cooked beets and raw tomatoes with bananas for desert. The children ate everything on their plates and many had seconds. I was amused at the staff who took me to taste the cow stomach dish, something not in my normal list of favorite foods--(the staff didn't want to eat it and much to my amazement ordered Japanese veggies from a restaurant instead). The dish was very well seasoned, but the texture was a bit beyond my capacity to chew. However, they said they serve this or liver once a week because it is so full of iron. I had rice and beans and some of the Japanese veggies, and the deli food that traveled quite a few miles to reach us, really was not as well prepared as what the children ate. I saw the menu for the week, and they have a good variety of proteins and vegetables. In the morning and afternoon the kids have milk, with bread and jam or cookies in the afternoon. Basically, the children receive a much higher quality of food here than in an American grade school that serves mostly a variety of fast foods. (I have found that the food in Santo Angelo schools also much better than what is generally served in public school lunch in the US.)

Each age-group of children has lunch separately, then goes to have a nap in their school rooms on little mats with a sheet under them and to cover them. While the little ones slept I played with the grade school children who come after their half day of school. We were in the toy room and used a variety of board and card games to do English. The play teacher handles the kids very well and everyone behaved cooperatively while we did things in little groups. One little boy I played a board game with could count well to six, and his play partner couldn't , so when he rolled the dice he counted out his moves and I helped the other little boy as did the boy with language skills.

Research done in Chicago in subsidized housing complexes shows lower violence and more creative play for children in the greener areas, so I suggested we increase the garden on the roof to include more plants and make recycled planters of pop bottles to put in the classroom windows. Femino measured out the space with me and suggested we cover it all with plastic mesh because the people above the day care throw trash out the window onto this school patio. I asked him where I could buy seedlings because planting seeds with a 2 year old is pretty challenging, and he suggested an open air market of organic foods on the other side of Rio by the Gloria Hotel.

One of the young men walked me up the street to the bus around mid-afternoon. I headed back to Graças because we were going to attend an evening activity with a conference of teachers from private international schools from all over South America. So within an hour of leaving Roçinha I walked into the Intercontinental Hotel, (5 stars) and looked at the display of Stern jewels, an amazing parade of semiprecious stones set in gold. Brazil always offers up these extremes to shock and confuse me--enough jewels in one window in a hotel to provide ten day centers with everything they could possibly need for a year.

With the teachers we went to the Cidade da Samba (Samba City) to tour this center for making the floats, props and elaborate costumes of Rio's 12 Samba schools. One of the young men with whom I have worked in Santo Angelo for 6 years wants to mount a social project in the community where he lives based on a samba school because he won first place in the samba parade at carnival this past spring as the best leader of a samba school in Santo Angelo, so I figured I better go learn what I could about this whole process to see if I can support him in this effort.

I put on a big headdress with all the others and danced the samba with a batucada band, women in huge twirling costumes, women in pretty much nothing, and men in white suits and hats... I had never been up close with a woman dancer wearing only spangles in the private parts and large headdresses. These women have gorgeous bundas (bottoms) that seem to have taken dance lessons. I found it quite fascinating to see such well carried out choreography in anatomy that one normally doesn't see, except at carnival and on beaches. Besides teaching bundas to dance, the Samba City runs workshops to teach people from favelas how to sew costumes, to weld metal to make floats and sculptures, and how to clean a hotel room, all this directed at making those who are jobless more employable.

At the organic food fair Saturday I was given plants for the garden from two different social projects and an offer of organic soil and compost delivered for free. Today I sat down outside a Gavea restaurant while Graça went inside to get a quiche to take to my aunt. Within minutes I discovered that the woman on the bench with me was the sister of the engineer in Quebec with whom I have been communicating via email for the past 6 weeks because he is part of Engineers without Borders. I had emailed him for some help with my project in Southern Brazil. The circles of life are tiny and vast, and I'm fascinated to discover what I shall learn in this next week.