2009 July

Bahia Street News – July 2009

Recently my yoga teacher read a quote from The Velveteen Rabbit, a book I remember from my own childhood.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.

In our current world of mass information, where daily we receive an overwhelming barrage of unconnected detail, what makes a person real? Is it when we come to know them, see the pain of their vulnerability mixed with a joy of their success, when they become more than a figure or statistic? When someone finally loves them?

After hearing the quote, I found myself thinking about the ‘real’ and about one of the Bahia Street girls whom I shall call ‘Rosana’ (to protect her privacy).

Rosana is now a strong tall, blossoming young woman of about 14 or 15. I watched her when I visited the Bahia Street Center in Salvador in May as she shepherded the younger girls in place while they waited to play a game of capoeira. She made sure each was placed correctly, watching over the smallest girls, and smoothing the hair of others. I asked Rita about her.

“That’s Rosana,” Rita said. “Of course you’ve seen her before. She came to Bahia Street at least five years ago. She’s a remarkable girl.” Rita told me the history— that when Rosana’s mother was pregnant, she didn’t want the child so she tried to make her pregnancy fail. Her efforts made her sick, so she went to a public clinic, where they removed the very premature infant, treated the mother who survived the ordeal, and released her. The mother left the clinic, thinking the infant had died, but, remarkably, it survived. After a few months, the clinic returned the baby to her. The mother protested, saying her own child had died. This child was not hers and she didn’t want it. But the clinic left the child anyway. The mother, frustrated at being landed with this infant she did not want, gave her to some neighbors nearby. The neighbors took the baby girl, but they were also very poor and paid little attention to her. After some months, the mother’s mother, the child’s grandmother, heard about what happened to the infant and went looking for her. She found the child, now almost a year old, lying in a filthy wooden toolbox at the back of the dilapidated neighbor’s home. The child was covered with bugs and dirt, almost starved to death.

The grandmother took Rosana back home and began to care for her as best as she could over the protests of her daughter and her daughter’s other children who all did not want this extra child. The mother continued to insist that Rosana was not hers and refused to care for her. Rosana was left alone a lot, malnourished and beaten. Since she did not react much to outside stimulation and talked little, everyone considered her mentally retarded.

Finally, when Rosana was about eight or nine years old, her grandmother heard about Bahia Street and brought her to the Center, asking Rita if she could accept her into the program. So, despite the fact that Bahia Street had taken all the children it could for that year, Rita said she couldn’t refuse. “Rosana has two things in her life,” Rita said to me, “her grandmother and Bahia Street.”

Now after about five years, Rosana has grown. She is strong, intelligent and makes good grades in school. But equally impressive, she has become a caregiver and a leader among the girls younger than herself. She shows generosity, she brushes the younger girls’ hair, she braids it, and she makes sure that they are safe at school and not bullied by other girls. She nurtures them. She also bosses them around (much like Rita, I thought, since Rita bosses everyone around at the Center, fierce and caring at the same time).

I also thought of Camila, the girl whose father was assassinated some years ago. She is now in her final year of high school, getting good grades, and comes to Bahia Street often to help and mentor other girls. The university exam system in Brazil is changing this year, and instead of having a final standardized university entrance exam, students will be assessed on yearly standardized exams throughout high school. This makes Camila’s chances of getting into a good university next year very high.

The Bahia Street Center is now a five-story building. This year, Rita has installed banisters on all stairways, installed closed cupboards for food (to keep out cockroaches or rats), and added two more classrooms and a large set of lockers, one for each girl. Rita said some of the girls started to cry when they saw the lockers, saying the locker was the first private space they had ever known. The Center math teacher, an African Brazilian who himself grew up in the shantytowns, has recently been asked to teach at University because of his excellent teaching skills (he is also continuing at Bahia Street). The Center now feeds about 200 people a day in two meals including the 60 girls, the teachers, various caregivers who come in for food, and some community members who are hungry. Rita informed me that the mother of one girl who has run into hard times and was basically starving (her daughter was also very malnourished), has also been coming in daily. Now that she is stronger, she is beginning to sell items on the street to sustain herself.

May also brought a very special group of people to Brazil. Susie, who has been working as the Bahia Street Trust’s voluntary director for almost ten years, was finally able to go to the Bahia Street Center for the first time to see the program she had helped to create. At the end of the trip, the group had a final party at Rita’s apartment—making caiparinhas together—at which Rita and I both talked about how much these years of working together have meant to us. Rita said that she has always been reserved around foreigners, not opening up to them, so when she first met me that is how she reacted as well. But, in time, she began to realize that I believed in her, and that this belief continued over the years we worked together. “Most all foreigners,” she said, “When they come to Bahia to work on projects, they want to take over, to control it themselves. Over the years, as Margaret and I have worked together, she has never done that. She has believed in my ability to be a leader. And, in time, I have grown to believe in her as well. Over time, through Bahia Street, I have come to know that foreigners can treat us here with equality, that we can all work together. This has huge meaning for us all.”

“This is real Margaret,” Rita said to me. Maybe it hurts sometimes, as the Skin Horse said, but this world that connects us all is real. Thank you all for being a part of Bahia Street and for helping to make it possible.