Quarter Year

Favela Tour Part II – The Tour

I´m not really sure where to start, so I´ll start from where the tour began for me – clinging to a motorbike taxi driver as he hauled ass up steep hair-pin turns, dodging busses and people and carts up the snaking main road in the favela. I was wondering how I´d feel when getting to the neighborhood finally, and I was surprised to find the feelings weren´t mixed at all, it was a very pure feeling and after a while I could name it: Relief. Not relief like, ¨Wow! I´m glad this isn´t as bad as I expected!¨ but more like when you´re relieved from your duties. The neighborhood we´re staying in is Ipanema, the fake boobs of Rio, and I was feeling a little sterile from the self-consciousness of it all. So seeing the grit and trash and life on the streets was a relief. It reminded me of Bangkok, of India, even of some grittier places in Europe, and it felt like travel again.

The guide lead us down into the favela, walking from the top of the hill down to the bottom, a couple hours total. This favela fills a little valley with 200,000 people crammed on top of one another, building house upon house upon house, up the hills as far as topography will let them go. All the land is actually owned by the government, but people don´t pay to build there nor do they pay taxes (except on the main road that carried auto traffic). The only thing owned are what people build, and people can build however they want with no regulations. There is the constant sound of construction – hammering, drills. At one point I was standing on the third story of a building looking down at two guys adding a new level to a building. One of the walls ran past the corner of another building – actually touching it – and it appeared the roof of the new one would be limited by where the neighbor had a ledge. I was watching the two guys trying to figure out how to install some kind of wire through this impossible corner, under the ledge. Good luck. Everything seems to be built that way – totally improvised. There was a power pole that was leaning against a building (from the weight of hundreds of people pirating the power) and the solution was to put another pole in behind it, leaving the other one leaning.

From the winding main passage there were a number of smaller passages that branched off, up or down steep, steep staircases. We had to watch our heads whenever we were on one of these little side streets because of the topography (imagine the door at the bottom of a steep staircase, by the time you´re on the bottom step the top of the door might still be eye-level). The ground was rarely easy to walk on – most of the time it was cement but often it was kinda like walking on the side of an unfinished sidewalk or sloped pavement.

The passages we walked through are too narrow for a car, but the guide said cars used to be able to drive there. I couldn´t imagine it – they´re barely wide enough for two sets of shoulders and with the way the buildings block out the sky it reminded me of the old city centers in Europe – improvised, haphazard, body-centric (as opposed to car-centric). In fact, I wonder if that´s how all the cities were hundreds of years ago. The top of the favela was pretty clean, I liked walking there (in fact, I really liked the whole neighborhood) but about halfway down it got really grubby with trash and water running all over the place. It didn´t smell good, either, and walking in sandals was probably a bad idea. Whatareyagonnado, though?

The gangs run the favelas, each favela run by one of the three main gangs in Rio – they bring drugs in and don´t allow internal crime because they need to keep the favela safe for the richer Rio residents to come and buy. Ninety-eight percent of the drugs being sold are sold to residents outside the favelas. The bigger problem in the neighborhood is alcohol. All of this is according to the tour guide, of course, I have no information other than what I heard and saw. Anyway, the point of all this is that if the gangs can control the crime and keep everything running, then why can´t they organize a group of people to go around and pick up the trash? That sounds naive, is it naive? And if not the gangs, then why not the mayor or its residents? I know I sound spoiled, but I´ve wondered this all over the world, including Seattle. Trash is nasty, why don´t communities mobilize themselves to clean up their neighborhoods? Why isn´t there a day, once a month, where everyone goes out and cleans their area? 62nd, Greenlake, the U District… Am I missing something? Isn´t this an issue of pride?

Anyway, there was stuff you´d expect to find in any town – three churches, internet cafes, clothing shops, sandwich places, etc. We stopped and had a ham & cheese sandwich on a roll that was literally taken out of the oven for us. That was damn good. With an orange Fanta, too.

As we walked down, the tour guide shook hands with EVERYONE he passed, said hello, smiled, talked for a bit. Everyone seemed to like and know him, they´d start conversations and joke with him. I think it was part of the business of keeping the tour in good graces with the residents, but also he walked the tour twice a day, and he´d worked there for six years, so I imagine he´s known some of the people for a long time and they´ve actually developed some kind of friendship. They seemed to welcome him and welcome us as well. We were never once asked for money, we weren´t harassed or anything. As far as I could tell, people didn´t mind us being there.

The people were exactly what you´d expect in any neighborhood – kids, moms, grandmas, guys hauling cement, shop keepers, young men hanging around, girls talking, old men watching tv or listening to the radio… just life. A number of times kids would start walking along with us, laughing and talking to us in portugese. At one point a girl, probably five years old, started walking next to Azure and me, and she looked up smiling at Azure and said, ¨Gringa!¨ as if she were pointing to a Penguin! at the zoo. We both smiled and Azure said, ¨Si! Gringa!¨ (it means ¨White girl!¨). Apparently the tour used to give money to help build houses but found out that people would then dismantle the houses and sell the materials. So they started donating to a nursery school, which we visited. Of all the parts, that´s the one that felt most uncomfortable – looking in the window at all the kids did feel too much like a zoo.

I have a couple overall impressions, things that will stick with me. First off, obviously, the structure of the city. It made me start to pay attention to the differences between a regulated, car-centric urban space vs. an organically conceived, body-centric urban space. I felt lucky to be seeing one of these amazing cities bursting with life and energy. I´ve not-so-secretly resented being born too late to see the European city centers before they had keychains made about them, and I feel like that´s exactly what I got to do yesterday. It WAS a beautiful space, it was amazing and impressive to see what they could do without land ownership, and I really liked the physical feeling of being there. I love exploring corners in new cities to look for surprises, and this was a place where you could explore forever and never exhaust them.

Second, there was a very strong sense of community there that was visible even to an outsider. Maybe it was because the passages were so narrow, but it seemed like everyone knew everyone. It was comforting.

Third, the living conditions. They only had water for half an hour every three hours and they walked among trash. The power supply was gerry rigged (jerry rigged?) which probably lead to a lot of blackouts. I didn´t get a chance to see it at night, whether it´s safe, but just last week a little 11-year old girl was shot in the neck by the cops (in a shootout with the gang), and I have no idea how often there are bullets in the air. (Though to read the Seattle papers t
hese days is astounding – it makes me wonder whether I´m safer in the favela than on Capitol Hill or Pioneer Square). I´d love to know more about the security – I wonder if there´s a favela resident who blogs or has written thoroughly about it.

Finally, the outside impression. When I got in the car to go to the favela, we sat with a Dutch guy who said, ¨I hope we see some guns!¨ and a British guy who said, ¨I was going to go last week but I was too drunk.¨ I can see disrespect being a legitimate reason to not have tours there, but I feel that way about every place. Young Brits are the Ugly Americans of the new century.
On the Lonely Planet site a girl wrote that instead of taking an exploitative tour we should try to make friends in Ipanema with a person from the favelas so that we might be invited to their homes. That, to me, seems much more exploitative.
When we asked the tour guide about whether we were exploiting the people, he said that the people of Rio outside the favelas don´t have any respect for the place, that they think it should be bombed so they can start over (I can´t verify the accuracy of his report, though I do trust him). He said that this tour changes people´s impressions of the place, as it certainly did for me. We met a few Rio residents down here who thought we shouldn´t go.
When it comes down to it, I haven´t yet met nor read of a person who´s been on one of these tours that has been critical of it. I found the guide to be extremely respectful and knowledgeable of the place, all the time objective. I really enjoyed it and I´d reccommend it to anyone who can handle the hills.

If you read this far, thanks. I also learned a lot about racism, which I´ll write about on the blog sometime soon, but I´m a little exhausted now.

The tour we went on was operated by www.bealocal.com

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