Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [121]
“Why didn’t you just tell the students to get out?”
Fio scratched his ear. “Well, I told them we’re busy, it wasn’t a good time.”
“I don’t think they understood us,” Rita said.
I felt anger rise in my stomach. “What are we? Some kind of tourist site so these groups can make money off us?”
“It’s not the students’ fault,” Fio said.
“Yes, it is, in part,” Rita said. “They’re just ignorant. They have this sense of entitlement that they can just come in, that because we’re a Third World country, in their eyes, they’re somehow superior to us.” She turned to me. “They’re not all like that. One black American woman, Janelle, she’s good, makes an appointment, only talks to the kids outside class, speaks Portuguese, is very respectful.”
“Are the whites worse than the blacks?” I asked. Both Fio and Rita laughed.
“No,” Fio said, “the blacks are worse, if anything. I think because they’re black they somehow think Bahia belongs to them.”
“Oh boy.” I sat down. “We have to figure out some way to control this.”
“We could start by making a rule that everyone who comes in here has to speak Portuguese,” Rita said.
“But that means most of them won’t be able to say anything,” Fio said.
“Well, if they speak English, you can’t understand them anyway,” I said, “so I agree with Rita. To show respect, they should speak only Portuguese. It undermines your authority as well, them speaking some language that the directors of the Center can’t understand.”
Rita nodded. “She’s right, Fio. And Margaret, we have to be more vigilant with the lists of people allowed to visit; maybe we could make, once or twice a week, a time for visitors to tour the Center. But now I have students coming all the time. I don’t know if you’ve talked with them in the States, given them permission to come or they’ve just found out about us somehow here.”
“I e-mail nearly everyone to say we do not take volunteers because all our staff is local. I should put that on our website as well.”
Rita laughed. “Who would have thought social justice tourism would be a problem we would face?” Just then, three students walked in, one white, two of partly African descent, one of whom was very light.
“Hi!” one of them said in English, “we’ve come to observe some of the girls in their classes.”
“They’re studying now,” I said, also in English. “Rita, the director here, doesn’t permit outsiders in the classrooms. I’m sorry. If you’d like to make an appointment to talk with her, you may. But also, we have made a rule here, that everyone only speaks Portuguese while at Bahia Street.” The young women looked at each other.
“These students came the other day,” Rita said. “Their names are Alice, Isme and the white girl’s name is Jen.”
“Alice?” I looked at Alice. “Didn’t you e-mail me a few months ago, asking about Bahia Street, asking if you could volunteer and visit? I replied that we didn’t take volunteers, but you could contact me again if you wanted to make an appointment to see Rita?” I now spoke in Portuguese.
“She never told me that,” Rita said.
Alice looked confused, so I repeated my question in simple Portuguese very slowly.
“Well, yes,” Alice said in English. “When you said I couldn’t come, I decided I would ask people here, to see what they’d say. Someone here gave me Bahia Street’s address, so I just came.”
I translated for Rita and Fio.
“You don’t understand,” Isme, the lighter of the two girls of African descent said to me, also in English. “You’re white, but we’re black, so people here don’t even notice that we’re different. You look different, but we’re really the same as people here. We can sit in the classes and the girls won’t even notice we’re there.”
Rita and Fio pretended to be busy with some papers on the table. “They do notice you’re different,” I said in Portuguese. “The way you stand, your clothes, the way you move, everything