Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [146]
No one is laughing at Juliana now.
So, I leave you with only joyful news. We need these bright spots in our turbulent world. Cherish that you have chosen to be part of it. Hold your delight close and share it with friends.
Shared joy makes us strong.
abraços,
Margaret
afterword
Rita came to spend Christmas with me in 2009 after winning the Ivy Inter-American Humanitarian Award in Washington, D.C.—her second humanitarian prize. She now has lots of friends in Seattle, and we all worried she would be too cold in our frigid northern winter. But little daunts Rita. She found it hard to breathe as the cold air caught in her lungs, but she quickly learned a survival technique: daily doses of Seattle’s admittedly excellent hot chocolate. “Which probably originally comes from Brazil,” she pointed out, “but at least now I finally understand what the word ‘cozy’ means.”
When we took Rita up to the mountains to see snow for the first time, she was bundled in so many coats she could hardly walk. She laughed as she tossed the strange feathery flakes into the air. “Friendship certainly takes us along unexpected paths,” she said.
Yes, I thought as I tossed a snowball at her and missed. Stony paths, swampy paths. . . . I raced behind the car, avoiding Rita’s very accurate snowball with not a second to spare. Steep paths of equality where we can both get out of breath together.
In the three years since I wrote the last line of this book, Rita and I, and a growing community of others, have continued to explore paths that have brought us to ever-changing views and perspectives. The Bahia Street Center in Salvador is still not finished, and it has cost well over the $100,000 that Mario predicted. It is growing, though, as Rita knew it would, in fits and starts as we have found the funds. I am delighted to report that it is now a five-story educational and community center focused on women and girls, complete with garden space behind, which is used for children’s play, theater presentations, and community events.
The lower floor of the building now includes a commercial kitchen, dining for more than one hundred people (the number Bahia Street now feeds twice daily with food bought from local vendors), rat-proof storage cupboards for food, freezers, and individual lockers for each girl.
“The girls cried when we gave them their lockers,” Rita told me. “They said this little locker was the first private space they had ever had in their lives.”
Behind this large area is a “preliteracy” room, painted bright colors and full of learning toys as part of a new program designed to stimulate the youngest girls’ budding minds to better prepare them for reading and learning. The second floor (the entrance floor, as the Center is built on a hill) includes a reception area, combined teaching, meeting, and administration room, a bathroom for the staff, a large toilet and shower room for the girls, and, in the back, a large classroom that has been recently converted into a computer lab. Beyond serving the girls, the lab is also part of a new program to offer computer classes for caregivers of the girls and other community members.
The third floor is home to several classrooms, a well-stocked library, and—yes—a capoeira room, its walls covered with brightly colored capoeira paintings. A few years ago, Bahia Street started a capoeira program for the girls, directed by a baiana capoeirista, one of the best female players in the city. At first, the girls hated capoeira, saying it was too hard, but now their teacher can hardly get them to stop, and they proudly practice in the garden area whenever they can. Last year, in a surprise event she had apparently been planning for months, Rita dedicated the room as the “Margaret Willson Capoeira Room.” The only thing that stopped my tears was Rita’s invitation—read command—to play with her in front of the entire community. Neither of us had played for years. I told Rita our friendship was over. She just laughed and ignored