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.
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.
Global Violence: Connections between the US and Brazil
May 7, 2009 | Nancy BaconAddressing poverty in Brazil– or anywhere for that matter– involves holistic solutions that bring citizens from all of our countries together to work for equality and better quality of life for everyone. One example of how we are all interconnected lies in the relationship between drugs, guns, and violence here and the same issues in the shantytowns of Brazil. Seattle International Foundation president Bill Clapp recently wrote in the Seattle Times about the connection between the drug trade in the US and the drug trade in Central America. Interwoven with the drug trade is violence and the gun trade, and how U.S. legislation regarding guns affects our neighbors to the south. Gun violence is a huge challenge for impoverished shantytown residents. A recent article in the Global Politician discusses the connection between violence and a depressed economy. To quote that article: “To make the matter worse, countries in Central and Southern America top the league for gun homicides, with Colombia suffering from a mortality rate of 50 deaths for every 100,000 people, according to United Nations figures. The statistics for gun deaths in Honduras , El Salvador , Brazil , Venezuela , Guatemala, Jamaica and Ecuador are only marginally less. For many ordinary citizens of these nations, however, the quality of life is getting worse due to the constant fear of the firearms. In the increasingly desperate towns and villages, people are killing one another in record numbers and the social costs of gun violence are alarming.”
New book on aid in Africa echoes Bahia Street lessons
May 4, 2009 | Nancy BaconNew York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reviews Richard Dowden’s new book entitled Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles and quotes Dowden as saying: “Aid agencies, Western celebrities, rock stars and politicians cannot save Africa. Only Africans can develop Africa. Outsiders can help, but only if they understand it, work with it.” Further in support of Dowden’s thesis, Kristof speaks in favor of grassroots efforts with local knowledge and support, concluding that “We could do much more to support such efforts, with us Westerners serving as aides and financiers to African social entrepreneurs.”
I could not help but think about Bahia Street while reading this review. We have long stated that we are providing financial support and invited advice to a community of individuals — lead by Rita — working for social change within their own society. I appreciated reading Dowden and Kristof’s views on aid in Africa because it speaks to the types of partnerships across cultures that best end poverty for our world’s most impoverished people.
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