First of all, I didn't quite expect each favela to have such a strong, wholesome-seeming sense of community because that's not what the world generally focuses on when discussing such places. People were extremely friendly, some of the kids' parents, who were very kind and grateful, came around at the beginnings and ends of our English classes and the kids always really wanted to learn. Like I mentioned in Part I of this post, walking at the bottom of the favela reminded me of a U.S. movie from the 50's--everyone playing outside and laughing, the whole world seeming truly happy.
Nothing is ever quite that simple, though. Just a short distance away, near the two entrances to the favela, groups of policemen sat in cop cars or stood in the streets, menacingly holding their machine guns, staring at all the happy little people playing just a few meters away, ready to "pacify" if necessary. It wasn't unlike the armed, uniformed men I'd seen so many times in our small city in Mexico, standing outside of grocery stores and banks--surprising and seemingly misplaced at an American's first glance, but eventually blending in to form a typical part of the backdrop.
For the most part, we all met up at the bottom of the hill each week to go up and walk down together afterwards. Classes were going well and this small group of teachers became good friends of mine. Oftentimes, after the classes, we'd head to the small garden near the top of the favela, where the decorations and seating had been beautifully hand-constructed out of recycled garbage. We'd look out over the beaches and mountains down below and enjoy the sun for a few minutes before heading down the mountain.
We often stopped at a small restaurant, about halfway down, to have lunch together. I was a little shocked the first time we went because we walked in to see that the only guests there were eight uniformed men with machine guns. Every other time we went, though, it was empty. We ate there almost every week and we always had a nice time, discussing how we could improve our classes and talking travel tales, linguistics and cultural issues. My sensitive little stomach had trouble with the food once or twice (though Dawid swears I'm crazy) but it always tasted good and the people who run the restaurant were very kind, just like everyone we met during our time there.
One week, after we all had lunch together, our Brazilian friend started leading us down a different route than normal.
"Are you sure about that?" Dawid asked.
He shrugged, "What?"
"I thought it wasn't safe to walk down this way."
"It's fine. You guys are with me." Everyone knows and trusts one another in these communities so, if you're with someone from the community, people generally trust you, too.
We kept heading downward. We walked past people as we went, including a scantily-clad woman who was trying to come up the same set of stairs we were going down, but seemed to be passing out as she was walking. She'd take a step, then lean against the wall, closing her eyes, before realizing she needed to keep moving and would try again to continue forward.
As we got closer to the bottom, Dawid turned to me and said, "Don't look around if you don't want to see anything crazy."
"Are you being serious?" This guy is full of jokes and sometimes it's hard to tell when he's kidding.
"Just don't look around."
I kept my eyes mostly forward, with only one quick glance to my left. All I saw was an alley with some people but I didn't look long enough to really see anyone or what they were doing. As we passed by, a man yelled something (that I didn't understand) to Dawid in Portuguese and our other friend yelled something back. They all laughed and we kept walking. They later told me that the guy was joking around that Dawid looked like David Luiz, a famous Brazilian soccer player (a joke my younger brother had made before, too).
When we were a bit further down the mountain, I was told that "the guy that yelled 'David Luiz' had a huge machine gun." Good to know.
We, of course, made it safely down the mountain and then headed off to the beach to rent stand-up paddle boards and enjoy the rest of our Saturday afternoon together.
***********
The more time I spend getting to know people in these and other areas, the more I believe that people are all the same everywhere and that people are all good, but the less I believe that people are given anything even close to equal opportunities in life. The problems that people in Brazilian favelas are facing seem, to me, exactly like the problems that people of color still face in inner-cities in the U.S.--the standards of living, including access to good education, have been crap in these areas since the day slavery was abolished in both countries, yet the systems are still not changing enough to allow these people to fully integrate into either society. The systematic racism and poor quality of the education systems in areas with less money are glaringly obvious and seemingly very similar in both countries.
Realizing that, and all its implications, has been the most difficult part of entering a favela.
***********
There was also a time that I came back to work after an hour-long break and my student asked me if I'd eaten lunch."Yeah, I took a little walk through the market over there and grabbed something."
"What market? Where?"
"The one over that way."
"Across the plaza?!"
"Yeah."
"My little teacher!" (She'd taken to calling me that early on.) "Are you crazy?!?" She proceeded to yell at me for having walked around just below "one of the most dangerous favelas in Rio" and said I should never go over there.
Okay, it's true that sometimes that favela has issues but: 1) It was a market below the favela in the middle of the day, 2) I'd been there various times before and everyone was always super nice, 3) I was able to buy my new niece some cute outfits and 4) I don't think rich (okay--upper-middle class) people need to be so damn scared of poor people.
I realize that people who live in favelas sometimes steal rich people's iPhones and so on in Rio.
Fair enough (and I mean that in multiple ways). They're just phones.
I've also come to learn a very important lesson: that every decision we make is made out of either fear or love. There are no other options.
Individuals acting out of fear--honest and understandable though it may be--is, I think, the root cause of every conflict we have. When we're scared of each other, we don't try to understand each other. When we don't try to understand each other, we begin to see the other as less--less human, less correct, less intelligent...the list goes on.
Being too scared to go to Rio, to a favela or to a poor area anywhere in the world is silly. It's decision-making based on fear, rather than love. Decisions based on love lead us to friendship, to compassion, to trying to understand one another, to seeing ourselves in the faces of other people, even those who look completely different than us on the outside, to seeing everyone as equally good and to wanting the beauty in your own life for everyone.
Decisions based on fear improve problems in zero ways. Avoiding people who scare us (that is, people who are different than us) and staying within our comfort zones are decisions based on fear. The only purpose they serve is to skew our perceptions of other people and the world, making everything seem negative and scary. Our minds feed off of what "could happen" rather than what is actually happening; we focus on what we imagine these other people might be ("different" and "scary") rather than what they are: the same. Staying away from people who are different than us guarantees that we miss both learning and teaching opportunities.
**********
One last thing I've learned from talking about my time in favelas...
Once back in the States, something about a conversation that I had with my brother about the time I spent in favelas and the "mission trips" that he'd gone on made me feel crazy uncomfortable. I can't say that it was him or me...I don't know...but I hated the attitude of the whole conversation. It sounded like two people who thought of themselves as somehow better than those they were working with. It was like we thought that we, for some reason, knew more than the people we were "helping" and I think that attitude is a major downfall (we all know power corrupts and I'm wondering if this, the whole self-righteous thing, is the corruption that comes with the 'power' of being considered a volunteer). I know that neither one of us meant to come off that way but that's how it sounded to me and it was awful.
These types of opportunities should be empowering learning experiences for everyone involved; I don't think any volunteer work should be seen as someone "higher" helping someone "lower." I think being honest and self-aware and realizing that, while I may happen to have been given different opportunities in life, I am no smarter, no wiser, no more hard-working and no more deserving than any person that I am given the chance to work with. My beliefs are no more correct or important than anyone else's and are not something for me to try to encourage other people to believe. Every experience is a learning opportunity for me as much as it is for anyone I "teach."
This, like every other lesson I've ever learned, is easier said than done. Time to set some new goals, then:
1. Learn! Educate myself, both intellectually and through the eyes of the people affected, on the root causes and possible solutions of these problems. (Yes, I realize that will take years.)
2. Make decisions based on love, not fear.
3. Be careful not rob people of their rightful dignity by inadvertently thinking of them as anything less than myself, simply because they've been given fewer opportunities.
No comments:
Post a Comment