Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [108]
I walked around the neighborhood with Tatiana with a light step, knowing that these girls, at least, had been lucky. They looked after each other. None had ended up someone’s slave or alone like the Brazilian women who had rung me in Seattle—or the even worse stories I had heard.
The girls all sent money to Tatiana. With it, she had bought the property across the street and built four apartments. The original house now had another floor. Tatiana had also established, and now ran, a little street bar down the road, selling drinks, peanuts, and other small snacks. With her newfound status, she also seemed to have acquired herself a very attractive younger boyfriend.
“You always had the core of a businesswoman in you,” I told her, “making something from nothing as you sold sonhos, those sweet dreams, from the crumbling front window so many years ago.”
“We’re strong women,” Tatiana said and laughed.
To a Mailing List of 200: February 6, 2001
Dear Donors, Friends, and Volunteers,
I now sit in the Seattle Bahia Street office where a chill sun warms my back through the window. So far removed from the intense heat I just left. Salvador was all in preparation for Carnival, with workmen stringing lights along the avenues, huge bleachers rising on Campo Grande, and a certain anticipation moving alongside the hot wind that passes your shoulder and touches your cheek.
These last few weeks were possibly the most fulfilling time I have spent in Brazil. Not for the sightseeing or the swimming, but for the connections of solidarity and united purpose. The Bahia Street Center is in an old Portuguese-style building with a music studio in the basement and a family who lives on the top floor. Bahia Street has the middle floor with three rooms and a kitchen. It has old hardwood floors and tall, wooden-shuttered casement windows. All are in bad shape with paint peeling and cracks in the plaster, but the girls have been decorating, covering one entire wall with newspaper and magazine clippings. On the other walls are their own drawings. At the back is a small kitchen with a stove and a secondhand refrigerator that Rita has procured. The main room, which has a door leading to an open back walkway and a large window, has become the classroom. Rita bought ten desks, and at the front is a blackboard, along with a strange-looking plant the girls have placed there for decoration (strange because its one spindly stem sprouts a single sickly leaf at the top. Rita says she thinks the girls relate to it in some way).
Of all the girls, Christina did not pass her exams due to problems with her family. This means she cannot return to the private school, but we have placed her in a public school which has afternoon classes that follow our tutoring sessions. She will go to the tutoring each morning, then be taken by Bahia Street volunteers to her public school so we know she gets there. Because of family conflict, we have also, with her mother’s permission, placed Christina and her brother with Rosa, the nearby caregiver who looked after her before.
So, with the new Bahia Street Center, we are enrolling twenty girls this year. This is possible, in part, because of increased donations and also, in part, because Rita has secured for all younger girls a much appreciated 40 percent reduction in tuition from the school. We now have five teachers in place at the Center. Three teach the older girls math, Portuguese, science, geography, and history while two tutors teach elementary skills to the younger girls. Sally, an English woman who lives in Salvador, gives English lessons to the girls (and to Rita who is studying English as well). Sally is charging Bahia Street a fraction of her usual fees in support of the program.
Geldon, the math teacher who started last year, was teaching a summer preparatory math class for the ten older girls. We decided to hire two male teachers this year, not only because they had excellent qualifications, but because it seemed important that the girls have male role models as