Freefalling

Freefalling

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

More Brazil

NOTE: Sorry - formatting's shot again... OK... so we'd got as far as the guy on reception telling me about the organisation his neighbour had started... On that same day I wondered into a juice bar, sat down with my açaí (awesome Amazon berry made into a sort of frozen smoothie with granola and banana... so good) and noticed a poster advertising an apartment for rent in Olinda. I asked the woman behind the counter and it turned out to be her place... the price was good, it had a swimming pool and it would be free in just over a week... It kind of felt like opportunity was handing me some signs. I decided to go with it. The next day I went to visit the organisation with Allison (the guy from the hostel - it's a guy's name here). Even better, we went on a day when they were holding a demonstration in the community against violence, so I got to join in with a march around the streets of Peixinhos (the community), blowing a little pink whistle, dancing to the drum music and stopping traffic on the dusty, crowded main street. I met Monica, the social worker at the organisation, heard about the different programmes they run including a social enterprise for young teens; a daily education program for children; a psychologist available to all children, young people and families; an intergenerational project with a group of local mothers and adolescents; and an anti-violence project in local schools. We agreed that I would just come and hang out for a week to get to know how they work and what they do. I figured I'd find some other organisations in the area and try to do the same with them, but in the end it worked out rather differently. I decided to go away for a week and come back and get stuck in when the apartment became avaliable, so I headed up to Praia da Pipa in the next state up. I spent five days just relaxing in hammocks, swimming with dolphins and kayaking in mangroves. It's interesting how my brain works, because I'd done a fair bit of 'relaxing' before this, but because I felt kind of purpose-less as I flitted from village, to town, to city and back again it felt like a sort of empty relaxation. In an odd way if I don't know what I'm relaxing from, then I find it kind of hard to really do. But now, with a plan and a purpose ahead of me I felt like I was taking a solid block of chill time before going headlong into my first 'work' since I left Berry Street in March. It was all the more glorious for the fact I had something to do. On a Friday night I headed back to Olinda. There is something really special, when you're travelling in a totally unknown place, about returning to somewhere familiar. It has a comfort disproportionate to the reality - I had only spent five days here previously, but it suddenly felt like coming home. That night I had to stay in the hostel again, because my apartment/studio wouldn't be available until the next day. So I booked into the same place and then took myself out for a Friday night on the town (which, for me, is a decidedly un-raucous affair). I headed up to Alto da Sé, which is the highpoint of the old town and where all the fun happens on the weekends. Stalls line the square selling a local dish called Tapioca. Kind of a cocnut pancake with all manner of fillings. I chose cheese and prawn... And then spent a week recovering. Long story short I just barely managed to move into my place as I got hideously sick. I rode it out for three days, but on day three when I still couldn't keep food down and felt my energy fading fast I was sent to Emergency (which made me cry - there is nothing so lonely as being properly ill in a foreign country and nothing so frightening as going to Emergency in a country with questionable hygiene standards) where they put me on a drip and within an hour I was significantly better. It still took another 3 days before I was able to eat properly. So I missed the week I had scheduled with the organisation, but something sort of amazing happened and I put it down to my first protein intake coupled with the euphoria of wellness... On the Wednesday I ate some beef - a tiny amount at a reputable shopping centre foodcourt (I've spent a bizarre amount of time in shopping centre here). On the Thursday I woke up feeling so well and so full of energy that I could have kissed every person I met... Instead I went on a mission. I had a couple of addresses for an organisation I was interested in meeting with. Only one of them looked decipherable, so I jumped on a bus and went looking for them. The Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas da Rua (National Movement of Street Children) struck me as the kind of organisation I might find interesting if I could just find them... and I did! Tucked down a largely industrial street in one of the worst inner-city suburbs of Recife there they were. I stood gawping at the gate for a while and then thought, bugger it. I'm going to give this a go. Armed with my dictionary and my still-very-crap Portugues I banged on the gate and got to meet with the Coordinator. A round and energetic woman, she was obviously destined for this kind of work - her name is Socorro, which litteraly translates to 'Help'. Socorro explained to me that the organisation operates like a peak body or advocacy unit for the organisations that work with street children and with communities around Recife and Olinda. She told me that in some ways a lot has changed for street kids since the 80s and 90s and in others ther have stayed the same. I noted that I hadn't seen as many kids on the city streets as I had expected to see and she told me that, in part as a result of all the killing in the past, the inner-city numbers had significantly reduced. But what had happened instead is that all the associated social issues had shifted out to the communities and now the deaths and violence and drugs continue in the suburbs instead. We organised for me to attend a couple of activities in a Recife community with the Movimento and a day of activities with kids in the city office. I managed all this in Portuguese! On a high I headed over to the original organisation in Peixinhos. It's called Grupo Communidade Assumindo a Suas Crianças, which means Community Taking Responsibility for its Children Group... GCASC for short. As fate would have it the organisation, and in fact the whole community, had no mains water for the day (something I now know to be a frequent occurence, as I write they are over a week into a lack of consistent running water) so all the kids had been sent home. This meant that I was able to meet with Monica and Anjinha, the Coordinator to talk about whether I could come the following week. This turned into a much bigger conversation. The two women began a long explanation of what it is like living and working in the community of Peixinhos, and what it is like for the families they work with. They told me that they are celebrating 25yrs of working in the community this year, but their frustration is that very little has changed. They are still seeing a disproportionate number of adolescents dying on their doorsteps as a result of violence, often drug-related. They are still living in a community divided by drug trafficker's territory boundaries. Every year they are still supporting families who lose homes, furniture, health to the floods that come as the rain fills the filthy river running through the community and it bursts its banks rising to at least waist deep in a huge number of homes. They feel like they're operating in some kind of vacuum while the world outside Brazil is told that this is a country on the up, economically booming: An Emerging Nation. My mind was a-buzz. I had only three weeks left in Olinda and I wanted to be of some kind of use to these people if it was at all possible. I have reigned in my need to save the world, but I felt like I could at least offer some sort of support. So I suggested a project... I suggested that we could do a photography project with the intergenerational group of mothers and young people and that I could take the photographs back to Australia to raise awareness, and maybe some money if we were lucky. And I started to think big. The group of mothers that the young people work with are no ordinary group. They call themselves the Mothers of Longing. They are all women who have lost children to the violence in the community. Some of them have lost more than one child. Some have lost more than one family member. They meet every Friday and I've now attended two meetings with them. I want to explain this without sounding trite or over the top, because the experience for me was profound. These women gather in a room at 2pm on a Friday and there is a feeling that comes into the room with them. The weight of their sadness is so heavy, so completely hollow and devastating that it is almost as if you can see the very holes in their hearts. Over the course of the three hours they are together a very slow, but absolutely vital change takes place - they begin to lift, some even laugh, they connect and start to participate. By the end, while the holes in their hearts are no doubt as chasmic as they were when they arrived, they are not overwhelmed by them as they leave. They hug each other with real affection and fierce emotion and they wish each other well as they head off to their homes and, often, the grandchildren they now care for in the absence of the children who were once their parents. So what I am now doing with this group is this: I am visiting the mothers in their homes with the young people and together we are exploring what, for them, represents the good, the bad and the ugly in their community. Then, together we are working out how to represent those concepts in photographs (safely... we can't safely photograph the shootings and drug taking). I had hoped the mothers themselves would take the pictures, but the time constraints mean that there hasn't been time to train them to use the cameras, so we are doing it all the best way we can. So far the conversations have been both devastating and fascinating. My dream is to hold this exhibition back in Melbourne and make it big and special and successful. I would LOVE to be able to bring a couple of representatives from the community over to present the exhibition and to share the reality of where they come from. It won't change the world, but it might mean that they feel seen and heard... and sometimes that's important. Having made the commitment to this project on my day of protein-induced euphoria, I had myself a not insignificant panic the next day (when the euphoria had given way to just feeling normal). My usual reaction would be to back peddle out of this, or to kind of half do it. I am terrified of letting these people down, but I am also terrified of being the kind of person who backs out of things or onloy half does them. I think it's time I tried to do something properly. Something extraordinary. So I have a week left here now. I have to say that Olinda, Recife and Peixinhos have pushed me hard and made me think. I didn't love Brazil before, but I feel like I have started to understand it better. I feel like I understand what it means to stand on this ground, rather than just use it to get from place to place. I'm still so frustrated with my Portuguese, but I can feel it improving very slowly. It'll probably be almost brilliant just as I leave! As with the last post, there are a million other stories in between all the detail here... I am looking forward to boring people when I get home! Beijos Amigos - Até mais Lozzie xxxxxxxxx