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By Root 731 0

even one year of good education they would get good jobs, leave their favela, and find everlasting happiness. They kept saying they wanted “good” education, not just an elementary schooling or learning how to read well enough to become a waiter. They wanted education that would lead them to professional jobs. Was that possible? Did they understand the huge undertaking they were requesting? Not only on a sheer academic level, learning first how to read and write, then learning math, then geography, literature, geometry, pre-med, but also culturally. These people didn’t really understand the purpose of a library. Most had never been in a restaurant or cinema. Many had never even been to the center of this city. But still they saw their way out as “good” education and professional jobs.

And everyone was telling us to focus on women. This delighted both Rita and me, the feminists we are. “The boys at least can sell drugs,” one man said. Everyone laughed. Rita didn’t. Neither did I. “Why can’t women sell drugs?” I thought to myself. But they didn’t, or very few did. I knew that. Instead, they sold themselves, either as maids or prostitutes. Either way, they gave up their souls. Mothers sent their eleven-year-old daughters out to the streets to sell whatever they could and then beat them if they didn’t return with cash. After all these years of living in these favelas, of seeing desperation and disintegration of the human spirit, this still haunted me. What was happening in the mind and soul of a mother who would do this?

“You educate a boy, and when he is a man, he’ll just walk away,” a woman told us.

“Yeah,” another woman added. “He’ll get himself some good job, a middle-class, white girlfriend, and walk away from his children and the mother of those children. And we won’t see him here in the favela ever again.”

“It’s true,” a man said, laughing. “It’s true. That’s what I’d do.” He looked at the group of us talking. “So, if you want to make things better here, you should look to the women. If anyone’s going to do anything, it’s them.”

I told Zezé and Lula about this conversation. Lula had been trying to get his pension since he had reached retirement age. He had worked as a bus driver for thirty-five years, but the company was trying to deny it to him. They said he really hadn’t worked long enough, that he took several years off in the middle, and that his starting date was five years later than it actually was. But Lula had kept thirty-five years of pay stubs and had hired a lawyer.

“Lula will win,” Zezé said as she laid out plates for Sunday lunch. “He knew this kind of thing would happen when they first told him about the pension when he was twenty-five. I just feel sorry for all those people who aren’t as clever and prepared as he is.”

Zezé and Lula had bought a small piece of land near the beach about an hour out of Salvador. This was where they planned to retire.

“It’s too violent here,” Lula said. “We want to be able to walk, see the sky, listen to the birds as we did when we were young.”

But when the developer realized to whom he had sold the land—Lula had used a lighter-skinned, more middle-class friend to complete the transaction—he suddenly decided that the land he had sold them, near the entrance of the development, was a mistake. He couldn’t really sell that piece, he said. It had already been promised to someone else. And despite the fact that the entire area was up for development, he had no others to sell either.

“He’s a racist,” Lula said as he spooned himself some beans. “But all the papers are signed. I think he’s stuck with us.”

“So, should the project be to educate girls?” I asked Zeze, Lula, and Jorge after lunch. “What about you, Jorge? You’re working as a security guard. Wouldn’t you resent that?”

“My girlfriend,” Jorge said, pouring me a beer, “she will do much more than me. She’s smart. She wants to be a doctor. Educate girls like her.”

“Girls are stronger,” Lula said. “Boys are stupid, they get shot. Women hold society together.” He glanced at Zezé. “Men just try