Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [125]
We have twelve new girls, none of whom know how to read or how to study. Rita and the staff are doing what has become a skill for them—helping the new girls adapt to focusing on specific topics. Many of the girls also come with behavior problems. Interestingly, as the group as a whole has grown, the girls who are the core of Bahia Street help the new girls to adjust and feel secure. And this kind of friendship, from girls who have gone through exactly the same confusion the new girls feel, is part of what makes the entire environment of Bahia Street effective.
Our success rate overwhelms even Rita and me: again, all of the girls who took the end-of-year exam passed with grades of 80% or higher. Our teachers, all of whom (except the English teacher) are from the shantytowns or rural interior of Bahia themselves, say Bahia Street is a central inspiration of their lives. I would say that they are also an inspiration to us. Bahia Street now has fourteen full- and part-time staff members in Salvador including teachers, counselors, a nurse, an administrative assistant, a curriculum director, and Rita. When I see the incredible people Bahia Street has drawn to Rita’s side, the dedication, compassion, intelligence, creativity, and street savvy these people bring, I am sometimes not sure what to say. Six years ago we started with ideas, a handshake, one donation, and one girl. It shows that we can make a difference in this world, that we are not powerless. Bahia Street is basically a small grassroots organization and this is what we have done and are doing. We are small, but we have strength. We have integrity.
The Chieftains have finished their songs on the stereo and a blue heron is crying on the lake. This is one of the most beautiful springs I can remember. The early rains brought vibrant green growth and the trees are holding their bloom for weeks. I am stretching my limbs, waking like a bear, sniffing and snorting, ready to pass into the scents of the warm air. The greatest joy of winter is late spring.
The days are getting longer, the dark of winter is past, the time of the tulip has come.
Warmest thoughts to you all, Margaret
twenty-seven
sharing a life boat
“OK, do it.”
“Do what?”
“Buy a building.” I was on the phone to Rita.
“Where’d you get the money?”
“Meps and Barry. They sat down together and decided they could give Bahia Street an interest-free loan. So let’s do it while the dollar is high.”
“You’d better be sure on this,” Rita said. “Because I think I know just the building.”
It seemed I had barely hung up the phone and here I was in Salvador. Rita had made an offer on a building two days after my call. We decided, for a bevy of reasons relating to legalities and registration, to have Bahia Street in the United States legally own the building, which Bahia Street in Brazil would then rent from us. But this meant that Rita couldn’t sign the final papers until I arrived.
This process for transferring of title from the original owner to Bahia Street was, however, incredibly complicated. It seemed that the transaction was being conducted by the nephew of the owner, herself an elderly woman. But, then it came out that the building actually belonged, legally, to the grandfather, now long dead. No one had bothered to transfer the building into the daughter’s name. This kind of thing was common. The commonness of these kinds of lapses, and the familiarity with which they were dealt, did not lessen the red tape we had to negotiate. Rita hired someone, who then hired someone else, to make it possible for us to get through the corrupt city bureaucracy. Even so, Rita and I had spent most of the day and the day before in an office waiting for the one lawyer whose signature would make the transaction legal. Perhaps our agent didn’t pay her enough. I heard the conversations of others when they spoke with her (we were all waiting in one big, ugly room while she, like some lazy queen spider, signed the papers she chose.) People kept giving the lawyer little presents and saying to her,