But education in Brazil would be worse if it weren’t for the thousands of invisible educators dedicated to changing the system, such as everybody at Bahia Street. Today I listened to a speech given by one of Chico Mendes’ daughter.  (Chico Mendes was a national environmental hero, activist and union leader in the Northern state of Acre. He was brutally assassinated in 88 by the local ranch mafia). The clarity of her speech and message was amazing!  She obviously received  high quality education in the middle of the Amazon forest.”

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

Rita has begun an evening class for 22 high school students.  She determined at the end of last year that more support was needed to help high school-age girls get the education they need to get into university.  They are receiving education in math, science, biology, and chemistry, as well as mentoring and social support as they have less time at the Center and find their own way in their public high schools.  We are funding this program through donations and a grant that we received from the Oak Foundation in Switzerland.

And lastly, those of your in Seattle– mark your calendars!  The 2nd annual Summer Beat dance party is scheduled to take place on Friday, June 11th, at the Youngstown building in West Seattle.  All funds raised will support Bahia Street’s mission ending cycles of poverty and violence in Brazil.  More information to come!

Rita also reminded us that they had just celebrated the Day of Saints Cosme and Damião, twin saints who represent prosperity in Salvador. It is the custom that people provide food to the poor on this day. The Bahia Street Center prepares a huge feast and opens up the Center to the whole community. It is believed that providing food ensures prosperity to the future– you increase your own luck for the future if you give away food. Rita takes this opportunity to thank the community for its enduring support. She invited the children from a neighborhood project, Sinal Fechado (“Red Light,” representing the traffic lights at which many children work), to come for a meal.  In fact, Bahia Street receives support from a donor to help Sinal Fechado throughout the year in order to extend Bahia Street’s infrastructure beyond our Center to other places of need within the community in which the Center is located.  Below are some pictures of the Bahia Street girls preparing the ocra for the main dish of this festival, Caruru, and the Sinal Fechado children eating the meal. Caruru is food that is eaten following certain rituals, the main one being that the kids get to eat first! It is actually quite delicious… a supporter of ours put the recipe on their webpage.

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.

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.