Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [79]
What we are doing for the girls is beginning to show. We do have a problem right now that we don’t have much money. Not counting administrative costs, the program costs about $1,500 a month, and at present we only have enough to last one month. When Rita walks through the shantytowns, people know who she is. They have heard of Bahia Street, and they bring their daughters and neighbors to meet her, hoping that their daughter, relative, or friend might be a girl chosen for the program. They are telling her that this is the only time an aid project has actually touched their lives. We would love to add two new girls to the tutoring program this year. Bahia Street is small, but in a world where most money goes for materialist concerns, we are making a difference.
Karey from the University of Washington continued to work with us in Seattle this term, and a new volunteer, Mary, has gone to Salvador, where she will stay for a year and a half helping Rita with accounts and with the process of making Bahia Street a legal entity in Brazil.
Here in Seattle, the winter is sliding its rainy, muddy way forward, but just today I noticed crocuses showing their heads and buds fattening on the trees. There is a subtle scent of spring when one wakes in the morning. It may be dark and rainy outside, but we have homes, we have food, and we have a future.
Um abraço,
Margaret
eighteen
a view into the abyss
“I think you have to go to Brazil, Margareth.”
“What? Eduardo, how can I go? And you just got back. What happened?”
Eduardo lowered his head and stared at his hands. He looked exhausted. We were sitting in the living room of the Seattle house I had recently bought. The housing market in the area was booming, so I had been able to sell the ramshackle cottage I had bought on Vashon only a year and a half earlier for double the price. With that money, I had managed to buy a 1905 fixer-upper in a neighborhood of Seattle known as the Central District. Nearly all my white friends in Seattle had told me that this was a bad idea. The Central District was mostly African-American and, for Seattle, inner city. Already, I’d noticed a drug and prostitution business being run out of one house across the street. The real estate ad had called my house a “farmhouse in the center of Seattle.” Maybe, I thought, with a great stretch of the imagination. When I moved in, all of the windowpanes were painted black. And they were all covered with bars—the prison farmhouse look. The backyard sprouted old bathtubs and toilets instead of grass and flowers.
I had set up a desk and filing cabinet in one room for the Bahia Street office. Eduardo and I were sitting on a mattress on the living room floor. I hadn’t acquired much furniture yet.
“I went to visit Claudia,” Eduardo said. “It was so hot, Margareth, that I couldn’t go inside. Most of it doesn’t even have a roof. Did you know that?” I nodded. “Well, it was getting ready to rain, but the sun on the tin roof of the one room where they live, it was terrible. Where do they sleep? They all must just sleep together on the floor! I don’t know how they do it.”
“I know Eduardo,” I said. “It’s bad. But why do I have to go down?” Eduardo continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Claudia’s mother told me that her grandmother died and left her pension to Claudia’s brother. But he has decided to give it to her, so she can fix up the house.”
“That’s great.”
“Yes, maybe. I hope she actually does that and doesn’t spend it