Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [63]
We caught the bus to our next interview. Juliana was an orphan being raised by her older sister. She seemed older than her eleven years and was very bright. And she could read.
“Shall we start with her?” Rita asked as we boarded another bus toward her house. “She has the best chance of entering directly into a private school, her sister is supportive, and Juliana is an impressively dedicated student. When we get more funds, we could tutor a couple of other girls—maybe four?—until they can read and do math well enough to get into a private school themselves. Juliana could study with them after school, to give her extra help as she needs it.”
I nodded. It all seemed rather haphazard, but I saw no different way to proceed.
“We only have money for Juliana right now, but, yeah, when we get the money we could include a couple of others.”
The four other girls we chose included Christina, a tiny, beautiful eight-year-old who was a neighbor of Lula and Zezé. Everyone in the neighborhood said she had always wanted to learn to read. I went to interview her alone. When she saw me, she burst into tears. Apparently her mother had always told her that if she didn’t behave, the “big bad gringa” would take her away. Great. So, big white me arrived, asking if she would like to go to school with me. She screamed and ran away. It took hours for her mother and friends to calm her. Next time, I thought, Rita goes to visit her.
Another girl was Rita’s eleven-year-old neighbor, Claudia. She, her mother, and five siblings all lived in one suffocating room with a caved-in tin roof. Neighbors told me that the year before, Claudia’s mother’s ex-boyfriend had raped Claudia. The neighbors heard her screaming and chased him out of the neighborhood, shouting that they’d kill him if he came back. So, he hadn’t. Claudia said she wanted to study, probably because of Rita’s influence, and to get a high school degree. Her mother said she supported the idea of Claudia going to school, but kept asking if she herself would make anything out of this.
The third girl was Lidia, the very bright daughter of a capoeira teacher I knew. And finally, Patricia, who lived in Alagados, a favela built on rickety piers over a bay that, after years of having no toilet facilities, had become a cesspool. I’d been there once before to consult a Candomblé Pai de Santo. That time, I’d walked barefoot on the broken filthy walkways, feeling for secure footholds. This time, I was relieved to see, we did not have to walk along the piers. An Italian nonprofit had paid for the hillside above the bay to be plowed up. Huge amounts of sand were being poured into the bay, and one - and two-room brick houses were being built on the sand. I considered the environmental havoc of this plan, but presumably the area was so polluted that nobody cared. The idea was to get the houses off the water and to put in some kind of sewage drainage system—which would still go straight into the bay, but not so close to people’s living spaces.
A sociologist friend of Rita’s who was working with the Italian project had told us about Patricia; over the year and a half she’d worked with the project, she’d taken Patricia under her wing and was trying to teach her to read. She told us she thought Patricia was one of the brightest girls she’d ever met. Patricia’s family, or extended family—it was unclear how many of the numerous children and young people working and hanging around the one-room brick house they were building with the Italians’ help were family—all seemed to have some kind of interest in the house. Patricia’s father looked very old and frail.
I was told he had tuberculosis. He kept shouting at the people working on the house and asking us what money he’d make if his daughter went to school. Rita and I glanced at each other and then ignored him. It was the politest response we could muster. Patricia was even smaller than Christina despite being three years older. Malnutrition, Rita told me. Patricia told us she wanted to be a banker.
Rita and I next