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August 27, 2007

I came to Rio de Janeiro expecting to learn a lot of Portuguese, and I haven't been disappointed. After five months of pure Spanish in Buenos Aires , I had forgotten almost all of the Portuguese I'd learned in three semesters at Harvard.

You can't live in a city whose populace speaks a foreign language without learning words and phrases anywhere and everywhere. The way I've been learning, however, has been the most shocking thing of all.

I expected my incidental vocabulary to improve a lot. It has. And while I've learned the words for almost all the fruits and vegetables at the grocery store (any American living in Rio for long periods of time will tell you that's a feat – there are dozens of fruits and vegetables at every local market), I've picked up most of my new words at work. They're not as pleasant as abacaxi, the word for pineapple, or maracujá, which means passion fruit.

Instead, I've now memorized the Portuguese words for “rape,” “drug trafficking,” “abuse,” “beat,” as well as the more derogatory terms for male and female homosexuals. These are the words the teenagers with whom I work routinely return to in formal discussions of their own lives. The first day I was lost: I flipped through my Portuguese-English dictionary throughout the first two-hour class session, unable to string together the students' stories. Now I know, and I find myself listening, simultaneously enraptured and saddened, as these teenagers tell some of the more tragic stories of their own lives.

There are several tales of sexual abuse within families – fathers raping daughters, stepfathers developing illicit relationships with stepdaughters, much older male relatives raping very young children. There are scores of tales about domestic abuse between parents and children. Several of the girls in our program have children; many of them are married by 16 or 17. One girl spoke of being raped by her great-grandfather at age five – while her mother was in the room and did nothing to stop it. I hear these stories often, if not from the kids, then from the other counselors and teachers with whom I work.

My vocabulary has grown immensely, and along with it has grown my knowledge of and disgust at the neglect the favelas receive from the national government. The kids with whom I work live in some of the 22 favelas on Ilha do Governador in Zona Norte, the less glamorous and often overlooked part of Rio de Janeiro. Zona Sul, home of the luxurious beaches and neighborhoods of Leblon and Ipanema, sees an extraordinarily high concentration of foreign tourists looking for stunning beaches, delicious Brazilian food and luxury hotels and apartments. There are homes and apartments that go for several million dollars in Zona Sul; there are apartments in the favelas, by contrast, that cost 50-75 dollars a month. Entire families live in them. Many of these homes have no plumbing or indoor toilets.

Zona Norte is the poorer, more favela-dense part of Rio de Janeiro . There are huge favelas in Zona Sul – Rocinha, with about 250,000 to 300,000 residents, is the largest favela in South America – but the ones in Zona Norte are more peripheral to the city and less visited by those outside of Zona Norte itself. Every time I go to work, people on the buses and on the streets stare at me. Who, they wonder, is this supremely white, red-haired girl wandering alone through these streets? I look foreign enough in Zona Sul, but I feel like a giant highlighter when I'm in the favelas of Zona Norte, where few Europeans and Americans go for anything other than a superficial tour to see “the favela lifestyle.”

There is nothing glamorous about living in a favela, and the surge in favela-based tourism is a disturbing development in Rio de Janeiro. What about such abject poverty, violence, and, oftentimes, utter desperation makes the favelas a tourist attraction? I have only been in Rio de Janeiro for two months, working in the favelas and exclusively with people who live in the favelas of Zona Norte. Still, I feel like I am helping myself more than I am helping the kids: such is the nature of brief volunteer projects, because true impact requires years of steadfast attention and dedication. I have eight weeks, and I am constantly overrun with guilt – irrational guilt, I suppose, but guilt nonetheless. Guilt that I hear these stories and feel as though I can do nothing to help these people, save tell them stories of my own life and country that help deconstruct the popular view that life in the United States is perfect and problem-free. I am constantly torn between silence and speech, wondering if I should talk to them or whether I should just listen, if that is what they need most. Thus, watching vans of Americans and tourists pour into the favelas to take pictures and to pinch their noses at the unpleasant smells that permeate the settlements makes me angry and defensive, proud of the people I know from the favelas and embarrassed by my own country's need to focus on and gawk at the problems of others while so neglecting our own.

I have been told countless times by friends from home and people I've met here in Rio de Janeiro that I am “brave” and “fearless” for doing work in the favelas. I'm not. I have American friends here who do projects in the favelas, and we all agree that the people we've met in the favelas here are some of the most genuine, wonderful and generous people we've ever met. The praise for bravery should be directed at those who live in the favelas, and do so despite dangerous drug trafficking operations and persistent (and violent) police intervention. Maybe 1-2% of a given favela is involved in drug trafficking; the rest of the residents are simply poor Brazilians looking to, quite literally, carve a way of life out of the architecturally transient and fragile communities in the favelas. These are people whose government denies them: the favelas are not considered official national territory, and most middle-to-upper class cariocas have never even been inside one.

Favelas grew from nothing to bustling and densely populated mini-cities after the 1950s and 1960s, when massive migration from the country's Northeast led to the establishment of many of Rio 's favelas. These residents are still considered illegal “squatters” on city land, and most police cars, taxis, and buses will not go inside. Police enter to make arrests, make raids and fire guns. The biggest to-and-go from the favelas, save for residents, comes from NGOs doing social and educational projects inside the favelas themselves.

I've seen and helped with kids playing soccer, completing fashion projects, doing capoeira (the distinctive Brazilian martial arts dance), learning decimals and fractions, and preparing for their first job. There is nothing brave about my work, nor have I found anything frightening or alarming about it. At the end of the day, these kids are just kids, just like the ones who play pick up baseball and basketball in the suburban neighborhoods of the United States . Yes, the setting is different and the stakes are higher, but they, too, just want to kick a ball around and laugh with their friends. That organized tours give outsiders a “glimpse of life in a favela,” as if it were alien and un-human, is disrespectful to a segment of Rio 's society that already gets so little recognition for anything other than delinquency.