Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [73]
Eduardo went to Salvador for two weeks and visited the girls. Juliana is doing well at school. She ranked just below average for her first term. This was considered quite satisfactory by all her teachers, who say she is very bright. She is well-liked so far and is clearly going through what her teachers call an adaptation phase. Juliana herself loves the school.
Of the four other girls who will hopefully be entering the tutoring program, Lidia and Patricia are both attending the fifth grade in public school. Patricia’s father (who has thirty-nine children) has contracted tuberculosis for the third time, so he is not expected to live much longer. Her fourteen-year-old brother has recently joined a local gang. When told that this means that the police will likely kill him, he said he didn’t care. “I’ll die anyway,” he said. We also learned that a man came by Patricia’s family’s home selling books. When Patricia heard the family had sent him away, she was very upset and somehow managed to find the money so that when he came back, she bought a book for herself. Both Patricia and Lidia are excited about the tutoring program and want to start as soon as possible.
Claudia thought Bahia Street had disappeared from her life, even though Rita told her about the tutoring program. Her living situation is particularly bad now that the rainy season has started. Their shack has no windows and a collapsed tin roof; in the rainy season it becomes a suffocating steam room.
I don’t know what will happen with Christina, sadly enough. Her mother had tuberculosis and was told not to work for six months. She has, of course, not been able to do that. She has now started working as a domestic servant for a family (they do not know she is recovering from tuberculosis.) Because this doesn’t make enough money for her to survive and feed her children, she has started working as a prostitute at night. Christina is now home alone except when she is able to stay with neighbors. I will be telephoning friends of the family this weekend to see if they think
she can handle the tutoring program in this situation. She is not going to school, so the worry is that she may be too far behind to be able to catch up. Christina is very bright, but without our help she will soon have to start working (probably selling things in the street or as a young domestic servant). We also have to consider that her mother (who is now twentysix) will very likely contract tuberculosis or AIDS from the intensity and type of work she is doing. Since neighbors want to help, we will probably give Christina a chance (how can we really do otherwise?) at the tutoring program and hope against hope that she can somehow manage to succeed. One idea we are exploring is dividing the family stipend money between her mother and a neighbor who would help look after Christina and make sure she has enough food.
People in Salvador are becoming excited about Bahia Street. Eduardo spoke before a group of about a hundred teachers who expressed their interest in helping. Rita is also exploring what processes we need to do to become legally recognized in Brazil.
I have to say that I am startled by the strength of this response in Salvador. One of the problems I see with many so-called “development projects” is that they often consist of people in a more powerful country telling financially impoverished people in a less powerful country what they should do. Sometimes these projects are useful, and sometimes they are a disaster; it is generally true, however, that they are seldom controlled by the financially impoverished people. Bahia Street is a link of cooperation between people in Brazil and people in other parts of the world to curb cycles of poverty and to learn about each other. Bahia Street is a unique organization in that it is neither a “grassroots” project nor a “top-down” NGO. It is developing with the cooperation and ideas of people in the shantytowns of Salvador who understand the problems of poverty, oppression,