June 2010 Bahia Street Update
June 1, 2010 | Margaret WillsonI am writing this at early dawn, watching the pouring rain of this strange cold spring, one of the wettest, coldest I can remember. The intensity of the greens, as they enfold, a depth of green that seems to come at not other time than with this heavy misty rain we get here in Seattle.
I spoke with Rita yesterday and she has had a hard week. Her aunt, who she very much loved, just died. Her aunt went to Rio some forty years ago with the wave of Northeasterners who went South in search of work, and she stayed. But she always returned to Salvador to visit the family, and she, with Rita’s mother, became Rita’s models for how a strong woman can lead her life: loving the men around her but not letting them control her, remaining independent at the same time connected to her family and community. Rita said that this aunt was part of what made her who she is.
So, she flew down to Rio with one of her cousins to represent their family at the funeral. Because she is so busy at Bahia Street, she flew down on Sunday and returned on Monday. She arrived at Bahia Street to discover that a young man who has been helping for over a year on the building, a fellow everyone adored, was shot over the weekend. It was over a DVD. He and a neighbor had an argument over a DVD that both he and the neighbor thought was theirs, so the neighbor went into the street, found two assassins and hired them to shoot him. They walked in, shot him and that was that.
Rita had spent much of the week trying to calm the girls and staff, while dealing with her own sadness over both the young man and her aunt. It was hard to hear Rita, always so strong and positive, sounding almost bitter. “It is as though we are insects, as though our lives are worth no more than a cockroach, that we can kill each other so easily without even thinking twice.” She is also stressed because the mother of one of the girls died recently, and she is trying to stabilize a living situation for the child. Also some of the girls’ homes were destroyed in the flooding a month ago—although Rita is grateful that no one was killed this year. (Last year a mudslide caused by rain came down and crushed the sister of one of the girls beneath a wall.)
I worry about Rita’s health. Not surprisingly she has high blood pressure and other effects of stress. She eats carefully, drinks very little these days, does swim-aerobics, but she also has stressful situations daily. I am pleased to say, however, that she is actually taking a two-week holiday in June, a space for regeneration that she does not do enough.
One of the reasons Rita can take a holiday is because over the last few years several young women have become leaders within Bahia Street to the point that they can support Rita and even run the Center for periods while she is gone. Two are young women who have come through the Bahia Street program: Michele is a former Bahia Street student who is working at Bahia Street while also attending university. The other came while quite young to work in the kitchen. Then, with Rita’s direction, she moved to directing the kitchen program, then moved to the administration office as she got her high school degree and learned how to use a computer. Then, again with Bahia Street help, she finally passed her university exams (after three tries—she almost gave up, but Rita wouldn’t let her), and she is now working at Bahia Street in a leadership role while at the same time attending university.
Recently, Rita and the girls wrote an invitation to First lady Michelle Obama to visit Bahia Street if she comes to Salvador because the Obamas mean so much to them. She sent me the letter she had written, asking me to translate it. I would like to share just a bit of what Rita wrote.
In November of 2008, I went to New York to the United Nations, to receive the World of Children Award in recognition of the work of our project Bahia Street…. In 2009, I returned, to Washington, this time to receive the Ivy Humanitarian Award for “extraordinary work” in my involvement in helping young women of the Americas. During this time, I also had the opportunity and honor to see the White House and was even happier to be allowed to visit it to see its interior rooms. At that time, I thanked God that he had been so extraordinarily generous with me to permit me to see this place and to give me the understanding that in the fight for equality and recognition of our black people we had only just begun. Indeed, I left with more strength to continue my work with our young women in Salvador.
It would be an honor for us to invite you to visit our project Bahia Street. I would love for you to see within our city the reality of the resistance of the population that is behind the political and social culture of Salvador, a resistance that has continued to manifest itself through our internationally-known traditional black culture in capoeira, candomblé and local foods. I would be very honored for you to see our work, which is of great importance to the women of our city.
We are in a flurry of activity here in the Seattle, the Summer Beat event that everyone loved so much last year, is happening again June 11 (details are on our website: ) so I hope to see you there. Also, for those who have not heard this incredible news yet, University of Washington Press (UWP) has accepted Dance Lest We All Fall Down for re-release (with an updated Afterword) to come out this October! It has a new cover that echoes the old one. A small group of people is now meeting to get the word out about Dance (if anyone would like to join, just email us), starting with a launch party in mid-October. With this publication, Dance really has a chance because it can now be reviewed, sold in all major bookstores, be a focus of radio interviews—whatever to get the word out. If any of you have ideas, I would love to hear them. You can pre-order it now, through UWP’s website and on Amazon.com.
We are in volatile times, both of the earth and economies. But the violence, fear and destruction of inequality is like climate change; it can indeed destroy us all, but it is also something we can work to change—particularly if all of us—rich, poor, young, old, in whatever nation or state—work together. This is what we are doing at Bahia Street, Rita, myself, you who are engaged through reading this letter and your other involvement, whatever it might be, the girls at the Center—all of us together across borders of difference, sending shoots that are growing into plants that can then become strong trees. It is wonderful to be a part of this. Thank you.
Abraços,
Margaret
Peace Vigil, Night Streets
October 20, 2009 | Margaret WillsonI encountered my identity Tuesday night. It shifts and shadows itself with circumstance and space.
Tuesday night I walked from my Central Area home to the peace vigil at the Federal Building. I left about 9:30 PM, carrying my pillow and foam pad for sitting. I had dressed in my warmest clothes.
Halfway down Jackson Street, I met two men, both also dressed warmly. One carried a bag over his shoulder.
”That’s great,” the taller one said, “you’ve got it down. Even a pillow.”
“Yeah,” said the other, a shorter, stockier man. “I wish I had a pad like that, it looks great.”
“It’s my backpacking gear,” I said. “Are you spending the entire night?’
“Yeah, I got some warm gear too,” the stockier one said, slapping his bag, “but it sure is heavy.”
“That’s a lot for just one night,” I said.
“One night? This is for three.”
“But this is the last night,” I said.
“Last night? What?’ The two looked startled and nervous.
Then we all looked at each other. “I think we’re going different places. You going to the First Avenue Service Center?”
“No,” I said, “I’m going to the vigil.”
“Oh, that’s those protester guys.” the taller fellow explained to his friend.
“What’s the First Avenue Service Center?” I asked.
The two proceeded to tell me that it was where one waits for a job call, done every morning at four-thirty. The stockier fellow said he had been working as a gardener for three years, but was homeless because he couldn’t afford to pay rent in Seattle. He’d lived in Bremerton for a couple of years and commuted, but then the ferries got too expensive, so he came to Seattle. He was sleeping on the streets and the Service Center until he could save up enough money to pay the first and last month’s rent required to get an apartment.
By the end of two blocks, we discovered we had friends in common.
“Enjoy your vigil!” the stocky fellow shouted as we parted at the bus stop.
“And stay warm,” I replied.
“Nice guys,” I thought as I continued on my way.
I wondered if we would have spoken if they had not initially believed that I, like them, was homeless, if instead, we would have exchanged guarded glances and kept barriers firmly in place.
Just then, I traversed Fourth Street. Crossing in the crosswalk with the light, I was nearly mowed down by a police car. He had apparently been waiting at the light, but had now put on his lights and was running the red light, bearing directly toward me at top speed. With my bad eyesight and because he was using no siren, I had not perceived him until nearly too late.
I leapt to the curb, heart pounding, completely unnerved. The police car had continued to aim itself directly at me, unswerving, as though the driver actually meant to hit me. As I stood on the curb, it sped out of sight.
As I recovered and began to walk again, I wondered at the police person’s motive. I had never encountered this kind of behavior before. Had he played his game of chicken because he thought I was a homeless person or because he thought I was a protester on my way to a peace vigil? Either way, the behavior was extremely disturbing.
“Hey there.” An older man with a grizzled, long beard greeted me as he prepared his bedroll in a doorway.
“He definitely thinks I’m homeless,” I thought. I smiled and nodded at him.
As I approached the vigil, the sense of peace was perceptible. Twenty or so bundled figures sat before candles in silence to one side of the Federal Building Plaza. A few apparently homeless people also inhabited the Plaza space, one of them muttering to himself.
One meditator quietly asked another if she would walk with her to the restrooms down by the ferry docks. Her voice carried a mixture of determination and fear. The other meditators sat, bundled in their blankets, most of whom had probably never spent a night in downtown Seattle before, certainly not outside. Then I watched the homeless people who had assuredly known many nights much the same as this one. I wondered how obvious it was to which group I belonged.
I laid out my pad and pillow, sat down. The sounds I heard were the wind, cars and the soft murmurs of the homeless man somewhere behind me, talking to his invisible friend.
Circles of Communication
October 5, 2009 | Margaret WillsonA friend of mine once did a research paper showing how people move through conversations in circles, repeating themes, coming back again and again to the same subjects, the same patterns of speech. Friendships, he found, are built upon connecting speech circles that over time move in increasingly well-oiled rhythms.
These circles of communication revolve on an axis of ritualized phrases, patterns of call and response that reaffirm our position as a member of a community. They bring a stability we take for granted; it is only when the cadence of communication breaks that we notice, when we make a statement to someone for which we expect a certain response and we don’t get it. Much miscommunication between people of differing societies is perhaps related to differing speech rhythms that each takes for granted and then misunderstands.
Some years ago in London, a Brazilian boyfriend brought me a cup of tea while I was at home writing one day. He did this often for me. I looked up from my papers and smiled. “Thank you,” I said.
He turned quickly, said nothing.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
He looked at the opposite wall. “Why do you always push me away?”
“What?”
“You are so formal with me. I am your boyfriend. Why do you treat me like a stranger?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” He walked to the door.
“Wait a minute. Do you mean you are upset because I thanked you?”
Yes, he was. A verbal thanks, he said in our discussion that eventually followed, is what you do with strangers or acquaintances; not with your family, not with lovers. With those who are close to you, you are instead conscious of the balance that occurs when one person looks to the needs of another. Doing things for another person is how you show your love.
“Do you thank your lover for kissing you?” he asked. Thanking someone verbally for acts of love undermines them he said, gives them less meaning; one doesn’t say thank you, one returns love. To say thank you is to indicate that you want to finish the continuum between yourself and the other person: thank you is a form of release, and release is not what a lover wants.
I did not fully understand the distinction he was making at the time, but it set me thinking about US rituals of courtesy. In US society “thank you” is the appropriate response for everything from passing the salt to saving a person’s life. “Please” and “thank you” are fundamentals of social behavior. When a child asks for anything, the standard adult response is, “What do you say?” Then when the child gets what she wants, the adult says, “Now what do you say?” The training practices are as ritualized as the response.
I asked my English friend Jeremy for his opinion on thank you. As a member of the British upper class, I figured he would understand British etiquette and the meanings behind it.
“You do rather overuse your thank you,” he said. “Overused, thank you loses its energy, takes a superficial quality. Something endemic of many parts of American speech I should say. Don’t you agree?” Thank you, according to Jeremy, is used when someone has done something for which you are truly grateful.
The other day in Seattle, a bus driver let me off at a downtown stop. “Thank you,” I said as I descended the stair.
“No problem,” he said.
As I walked down the street I realized I was smiling, made comfortable through rituals of courtesy that both the bus driver and I understood.
Then, later that day, I booked a reservation on the train.
“Thank you,” a computerized voice said.
I sat at my desk and thought about why a company would program its computer to say thank you to unknown customers. Through using this speech pattern, the company was creating an anthropomorphized machine that in manufactured tones of friendliness gave me constructed courtesy, a subtle and powerful manipulation makes the caller respond with an automatic positive emotion. Had I never known people different from myself and had the meanings behind speech patterns brought to my attention, I might never have noticed.
Bahia Street News – July 2009
July 9, 2009 | Margaret WillsonRecently 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.
A Favela Visit in Rio
June 24, 2009 | Margaret WillsonSaturday 6pm
A blonde woman sits on the fake leather couch across from me in the common room of the youth hostel in Rio. She flips her long hair as she turns a page, glances across the room: she is not interested in her book; she is hoping someone will notice her and come up to chat. She is a bit bored and lost, looking for a companion to venture out with her to explore the city. Samba-reggae, clearly selected by the hostel staff who would know and like this music, blasts above our heads, flashing images gyrate from a mute television screen, cigarette smoke. I listen to the shouts and conversation that swirl through the music around us. I hear scattered among the languages the Portuguese of young Brazilians visiting Rio, most of who apparently speak little of the English, French and Spanish that are the predominant languages I hear among the foreigners.
Time and circumstances: how they change us. Or perhaps they meld into our perspectives that we think we have built independently. I have not been to a youth hostel in—perhaps twenty years. In my twenties, as I trekked around the planet, they were havens, refuges where I made friends and found comfort in encountering what I perceived as similar in countries and societies that to me seemed strange. Youth hostels gave me balance. Now, staying in this hostel full of tourists in a country that has become almost a part of my identity, I feel nostalgia, a certain melancholy. I consider slipping out to the street where I will likely find a café and make easier connections than I feel here.
But, I stay, now the observer, smiling at this hostel society that is, and is not, still part of me. The hostel is a half block from Ipanema beach in Leblon which, I am told, is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of the city. It is what I consider a ‘good’ hostel: clean, close to the beach, safe, helpful staff, decent breakfasts, a reasonably pleasant common space. I have my own separate room; most others are in the dorms upstairs.
A slender, loose-limbed man sits beside the blonde woman, asking her in English if she knows the time breakfast is served. A decent opening line, I think. She glances up from her book as if he has startled her from a deep and profound reverie; she deigns to give him a smile. She isn’t sure about breakfast but, where is he from? They will be leaving shortly for a drink, I decide, both pleased to meet someone who speaks the same language at least—selection is not too fussy at this point.
I rise, nod a good bye for politeness sake, they respond for the same reason. Outside, I enter a still, thick twilight that here lasts but the merest microsecond.
I meander past bars: chic, slashes of color, black glass, polished granite and marble. The outside stools of open bars are already filling with drinkers, a dangled high heel slipping from a bare foot, tight jeans just above her ankle, heads thrown back in laughter, painted nails on green and gold drinks: anticipation. I stop at a dimly lit café, order a coffee and sit at an outside table. I am here at the invitation of Anna, an English Program Director of an NGO that is working in Rio. She lives in this neighborhood, so selected a hostel for me near her apartment. I feel coddled and safe. It’s an odd feeling, knowing Bahia so well after all these years, but so unfamiliar with the South, with Rio and this neighborhood that could be a completely different country from the Brazil I know.
I recently heard on the radio that China has just surpassed Brazil in the competition for countries with the most inequality in the world. But this competition rests on economics. Where does the violence come in— how do we account for that? I think of the favela we visited today. Anna wants me to see three. This one is high on a mountainside, an old part of the city, Santa Theresa, planned by a Swiss fellow in the 1930s, I think. A cable train takes residents and visitors up an almost impossible incline where gracious stone houses sit, clamped—hopefully secure—along cobbled streets so steep they would torture any car transmission.
This is where many of the wealthy of Rio used to live. Now most have moved away, their homes moldering and devalued because others fear to come. This is because of the favela that has grown on the back hillside where forest used to stand.
We drive to the mountaintop along roads that curve and twist their way up ravines and along ridge sides. At the top, Anna asks a policeman who is standing beside his glass-windowed security post if we can leave her car at the curb beside him. He generously guides her into a tight parking spot. He can see that we are both foreigners, we are white and certainly middle-class.
Anna cell phones her friend Adriana whom we have come to see. The reception is not good, but Adriana says she will send her niece to accompany us “down the hill.”
Anna frets as we wait, but eventually the niece arrives and we walk down the backside of Santa Teresa on a steep cobbled hillside. One side of the road is encased by a stone wall fifty feet high. We approach an alley so narrow it seems a crack, a portal. I almost expect to see a gate that shuts at dark.
At this entrance of the favela—for this clearly is what it is—stand six or seven young men, calmly doing nothing much, some no more than twelve years old. At least two hold submachine guns, one a highly polished semi-automatic rifle. Two more have pistols hanging loosely from their fingertips. One is missing an arm.
We pass into the alley under the watchful eyes of the sentries who, in their turn, carefully pretend they are not watching us at all.
With the niece leading the way, we pick our way down the passageway, a virtual canyon, each turning more narrow than the last, steps cut into the steep hill, a labyrinth. We walk at the belly of a living chasm of stone and cement. I listen for an echo, but hear the quiet shuffling of soles. I watch for slippage in the wall. In wide pockets, white spaces in the gloom, people sit or stand as they watch us pass. If we meet in the lane, we squeeze flat, sucking in bellies to rub past, smiling in acknowledgment of the momentary intimacy.
We stop before a door, seemingly cut into this wall of nothingness, a single door in the surface. This is Adriana’s? No, the niece tells me, it is not Adriana’s. She is just here collecting food for a party at the church. These are friends who have a freezer she is using.
A freezer? I think. Homes in Salvador favelas do not have freezers.
We step over the threshold into a narrow living room, a solid closed space with no windows, only this door. But, despite the lack of light, the room is homey. The floors are tiled, and the family has a computer on a nice desk with a nice chair where a young boy sits playing video games. Behind the living room, a kitchen and the famous freezer.
Adriana and members of this family, I learn, have jobs. Adriana works for an NGO with which Anna is involved. She is eight months pregnant with her third child. We chat, joke and laugh while she and Anna exchange gossip. She offers us some passion-fruit mousse she made for the church party.
“Should we take this?” I ask, taking the proffered cup with no pause. I love passion-fruit mousse. “Isn’t it supposed to be for the church?”
“I’ve made tons,” Adriana says. She hands another small cup to Anna. I gobble mine down.
“Can we help you carry all that?” Anna asks as we prepare to leave.
“My niece and one of the neighbors can do it,” Adriana says. “Don’t worry. And come back soon,” she says to Anna. “It’s been too long.”
“I will,” Anna says as they embrace. The boy at the computer looks up for the first time. “Bye brancinha (little white one)!” he says to me.
Brancinha? I’m five foot ten and a lot older then him. I make a mental note—which I later forget—to ask Anna about this slang.
The niece leads us back up the twisting constructed canyons. We are all soon sweating in the still, humid and cloistered air. As we near the top, I smell marijuana smoke. The guards are smoking. We walk past them quickly, not overtly watching anything, then burst into the cobbled street.
We hug the niece. Then she turns, waves and slips back into the portal, past the sentries, behind the wall, out of sight.
“It was calm today,” Anna says as we walk up the street toward her car, “but eventually something happens. It’s strange like that, it seems tranquil, then there is an explosion of violence from nowhere.”
“Yes,” I say, “that—and the hugs, gossip and mousse—are about the only parts of here that remind me of Salvador.”
We drive back through one neighborhood after another to Leblon, Anna’s apartment and my hostel. Another world, almost another country, a space of expectant laughter as the sun begins to set.
Next Page »