It’s currently raining as I’m sitting here by the window typing.  When we arrived in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, it was clear, warm, and humid – two nights ago a storm system moved in (while I was standing in the street, naturally), and it’s no longer clear nor particularly warm – but maybe that will help my laundry dry

Anyway.

I told Natalie last night that I’m still processing Rio.  In many ways, it reminds me of Istanbul: a former grand city that has grown well beyond its original boundaries and expanded into a modern megalith, but if you poke around in certain areas you can find bits of historic grandeur that stand as testament to what the city once was.

Every city has its ups and downs.  Natalie and Joe have gone to some length to warn people about the potential dangers of Rio—not necessarily scare-mongering, although their attitude is similar to the one I use when I take people to Cairo: I’d rather get them over concerned and have them feel like it was all for naught then to have something happen and be told, “You never warned me about this.”

Tuesday morning, I met up with Natalie for a stroll along Copacabana Beach.  I wanted to shoot some photos of the beach, and I dare say that some of them came out particularly well (although, apparently if one wants the young and beautiful crowd, one goes over to Ipanema.  Point noted).

We were meeting up at 12:45 to go up to one of the favelas – shantytowns – to visit with Nos do Morro (pronounced, “noys du mo-hu”), a group that works on theater, music, and other projects with the community there and is wildly popular.  Natalie and Joe had asked if I would be willing to serve as the “official” photographer for the visit since a group of Americans carrying flashy cameras and stuff in a slum is bound to attract the wrong kind of attention.

So, after strolling along Copacabana and getting sand all over my feet, I came back to the apartment I’m renting for the week and got changed, stopped at McDonald’s to grab a quick lunch, and headed back toward the hotel, which is all of about 10 minutes away, and a good chunk of that is waiting for traffic lights (people actually wait for those here.  It’s totally freaking me out).

My usual route is to walk three blocks over to Avenida Atlantica, which runs along the beach, and then the four or five blocks down from there to the hotel. And I’m strolling along, not walking entirely quickly (not to get too personal, but we’ve been walking a lot and there are some chafing issues), but not slowly either.  About halfway down my route is the site where they’re building the new Sound and Image Museum, and there’s a guy standing out front.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asks me in English.

I do not, as a rule, respond well to people who come up to me and strike up a conversation on the street.  I find them suspicious – in Egypt it’s because they usually want your money (most often by vent of actually asking for it), but it raises my hackles.

I made a mistake here, and it’s a pretty neat tell for someone engaged in less-than-honorable practices. If I keep my mouth shut, people think I’m Brazilian.  A number of people have, while standing in line at a store, or at a restaurant, tried to engage me in Portuguese.  The mistake I made was glancing at my watch, thus demonstrating that I spoke English.

I felt a slight thump and the wind of someone moving very quickly by me.  Son of a bitch, I thought – did I just get mugged? I didn’t really stop walking, but felt at my pockets.  It seemed as if everything was still in them – my bag was zipped shut and clasped closed, and it would have been impossible for someone to get in it that quickly.  I looked behind me to see a guy skipping down the sidewalk, looking behind him at me and laughing.

“No, ta OK,” the man in need of the time said.  “Ta locou.”  He’s crazy.

At this point, every warning bell in my body was ringing loudly. Pocket check would have to wait till the hotel. I sped up, and kept walking, ignoring the guy.

“Amigo,” he called.
Oh, right.  The time.  “Uh, doze e meia,” I said, and kept walking.  It’s 12:30.
He continued to follow me.  I was, at this point, more concerned with getting away from him than listening to what he was saying – except that he kept saying something about “pantalon.”  I’d probably walked a block or so when I finally decided to examine my pantalones – pants – which were fine.  I kept walking, and he fell further and further behind, still saying something about my pantalones.

That was when I glanced down and saw that the top of my right shoe was completely covered in a large brownish-green blob of fecal matter.  And I saw the paper towels in his hand.  “Let me help,” he was starting to say.

Bull. fucking. shit.

Realizing that this was when the grab would take place, I sped up faster and told him, “No, ta bem.  Ta bem.  FORA!” (“No, it’s fine.  It’s fine.  Go away!”)  He finally realized that I wasn’t going to stop and spun off.  I walked the remaining block and a half to the hotel.  Right outside, I fished my phone out of my pocket and called Natalie.

“There’s a bathroom on the first floor in the back by the restaurant,” she told me, and I removed my shoe at the lobby door and carried it in my hand.

The most embarrassing part of the whole incident—which, you must understand, has taken far longer to write about than it did to actually occur—was that the restroom wasn’t in the back by the restaurant, it was in the restaurant.  I walked past people eating lunch with a shoe covered in dog shit (I’m choosing to believe that dog was the source and would prefer not to be corrected on that, OK?).  I cleaned off the shoe as best I could – and went to meet the group, step-padding through the lobby as I delayed putting my shoe back as long as possible, since part of cleaning it off involved it getting soaking wet.  (I also forgot to take the emergency credit card out – I keep it under the insert, but that, at least, was inside a ziploc bag.

And so, off we went to Nos do Morro.  (And, for the record, I don’t walk that way any more – I’m sticking to the interior of Copacabana since there are more people around.)

Nos do Morro is in Vidigal (that’s pronounced “viji-gal,”), one of the more than 600 favelas that have sprouted up on the mountains all around Rio (and in other cities as well – even in Belo Horizonte, we passed favelas on the way out of town).  Favelas are shantytowns that are largely unpatrolled by police or any other form of authority except for the drug cartels that frequently run them.  In Rio, they frequently have the best views as they spring up on the hillsides – new arrivals go higher and higher.  From where I’m sitting right now, I can see the rooftops of two of them.

So, I’m segueing from a story about how I almost got mugged to a story about how I went to a favela.  Chris, is anything good happening down there?  Should we be worried?

Well, no, actually, because the favela visit was part of the good.  As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things the group is doing on this program is visiting organizations that work to provide a sense of community among the least empowered people in Brazil – and the favelados are down there at the bottom.

At first glance, Vidigal seems like any other lower class neighborhood – in fact, I made assumptions based on what (admittedly very little) I know of race and class in Brazil and thought that it would be populated by mostly black and indigenous people.  Wrong.  The population in the favela is like everywhere else in Brazil – that is to say, it’s as mixed as the US because Brazil, like the US, is a country that was settled by Europeans and others coming from around the world.  In the 1920s, there really was no qualitative difference for a poor European immigrant looking to get out — New York, Rio, or Buenos Aires were all equally attractive options.  All three were at about the same level of development – it’s the rest of the 20th century that’s been the source of the uneven development.

Anyway, the director of Nos do Morro, Guti Fraga, is a force to be reckoned with.  Although he didn’t spend much time with us, Natalie related that one of the quotes he puts out there is that, “’To be or not to be’ is a difficult question when all you know is not being.”  Nos do Morro—“We of the Mountain”– does theater, film, dance, music classes for anyone in the community – and they come.  Natalie and Joe have told the story about their previous visit—to set up our time on this trip—where they went up to the top of the hill for a community talent show.  Apparently the biweekly event is now drawing over 400 people, and the cartels are very supportive—it’s a viable alternative for those who don’t want to be in the drug trade (frequently the only option).  People who’ve gone through Nos do Morro have worked on nearly every film and television project in Brazil and beyond (all of the actors in the film City of God, for example, were Nos do Morro alumnae).

We got to sit in on a theater class with a group of kids that was alternately exhilarating and uncomfortable – the teacher was pushing them hard and they got into some deeply personal territory that was a bit “Should we be here?” for us.  The group enjoys deep community support, although they need ‘real’ funding for various projects.  And at the end of the day, we got into our little bus and were led out of the favela feeling as though we’d seen something special.  And then we were cruising down the beachfront in Ipanema, feeling the massive disconnect between the people on the hill and the people down below.

Today we’re visiting Afro-Reggae, a similarly minded group that was founded in a favela up north toward the airport.  Films have been done about Afro-Reggae, and they just opened a brand new cultural and community center—I’m thinking this will be one of the highlights of the trip.