Across the street from the Health Center was a very much larger building ornamented with a great deal of carved stone in pompous Manueline style.
“What is that building?” I asked.
Dr. Penido had walked on scowling up the street. Somebody else answered the question. That was the lying-in hospital built by the state of Espírito Santo some years ago. A fine building but the trouble was it never opened. Funds ran out … Another Brazilian project.
We walked back to the station down the main street between stucco walls that glowed in the failing sunlight. At one corner in front of a drygoods store stood a sallow man of middle age with the respectable paunch of a father of a family. All he wore was a fake Indian feather girdle and a feather headdress. He carried a bow and arrow in his hand. Now and then he emitted hoarse fake Indian noises and made wardance steps inside of the drygoods box he stood in. As we passed we noticed that he was barefooted and that the box was full of broken glass. It was some wily Syrian’s idea of how to advertise his cotton prints.
The Triumph of the Oldtime Privy
The valley was murky and hot that morning. Brush fires burned on the mountains on either side. Clearing land for new coffee plantations. The ranks of shrubby shinyleaved dark-green trees I’d been looking at in the hollows of the hills were coffee, the doctors said. In the lower part of the valley the planters were doing very well with cacao; up here it was all coffee. New plantings. Many of the trees were just about to come into bearing. In a few years the Rio Doce would be a great coffeeproducing region … if the world market didn’t glut with coffee. “Brazil is the land of the future,” one of them broke in bitterly.
The linecar jerked and jounced over the rails. At every station teams of zebu oxen, four, five, and six yokes pulling in line, were hauling up the logs of peroba wood from the water’s edge. They strained forward in slow unison in a swirl of red dust. Alongside ran barefoot men and boys the color of the dust steering the oxen with shouts and groans and the touch of their long slender wands.
The river wound broad and sullen under a glaze of heat between rocky islets. Now and then we waited on a siding for a long oretrain to grind heavily past.
We were out of the malaria belt. The chief enemy of man in this upper part of the valley was a clever little fluke known as a schistosoma that spent part of its lifecycle in a watersnail. From out of the watersnail came millions of microscopic wormlike creatures that joyfully sought out the feet of a man wading or the hands of a woman washing and made their way through the pores into the blood stream where they hatched out eggs and produced a highly disagreeable disease known as schistosomiasis. The preventive measure was oldfashioned privies. The way the schistosoma got back into the streams and ponds to infect the snails was through the human feces.
“In Aimorés we’ll show you the snails … On my way back from the States I stopped off in Venezuela where they are making progress in poisoning the snails. We are experimenting with that method, but meanwhile,” said Dr. Penido with his ironical smile, “the answer seems to be privies. Here I spent twelve years of my life studying medicine, in Brazil and in the United States” he exclaimed in a tone of mock deprecation, “and I spend my time building privies.”
In the freight yard at Aimorés we found the health service’s sleeping and laboratory car. The sleeper was in charge of a shrewdlooking brown steward named Joaquim. Joaquim had some sort of a rising on his chin which was swathed in an immense wad of bandages and adhesive tape like the false beard of a pharaoh. He served us lunch in the tiny dining section of the car. Dr. Penido announced, laughing his soft sarcastic laugh, that it was just as well the car was there because the Aimorés hotel had turned out so hopelessly unsanitary that he had induced the owner to pull it down entirely and start all over from scratch.
In spite of the loss of its hotel Aimorés was a busy little town full of dusty traffic and new building. House building offers few problems in these parts. A carpenter makes around twenty cents an hour. The valley is full of sawmills and every tiny hamlet has a brick kiln. Everybody complains of the expense and scarcity of cement but they have an abundance of cheap tile and brick. On every street we saw new brick houses going up with tiled roofs, and wellfinished woodwork and beautifully laid parquet floors. From the top of the hill we climbed to visit Monty’s waterworks, about half the roofs of the town straggling out over the valleyfloor beneath us looked new. Right at our feet were the new tiny shacks, some of brick and some of the common mud and wooden frame construction, of the workingpeople’s suburb which in Brazil is known as a favela.
This favela was the best we had seen on the trip. The houses were in row and each had a yard and a solidly built brick privy. “Look at all the privies,” Dr. Penido burst out waving his arms with humorous pride, “An orgy of privies.”
“This is such decent housing,” said Monty, “we shouldn’t call it a favela.”
The Favela: Symbol of the New Brazil?
The word favela as usual set off an argument. Everybody started talking at once.
Favela in Brazilian Portuguese means slum. A favela is a particular type of recent slum that takes its name from the hill near Rio where the first one appeared. The favela is the sign and symbol of the population explosion which has resulted from the success of just the sort of public health measures Dr. Penido and his associates were showing off with such pride.
With the growth of industry, and the caving in of the scanty rural economy, people came crowding out of the back country into cities and towns. In the back country they had lived a barefoot life as ungarnished in every aspect as the little huts with dirt floors they were born in and dwelt in and died in, but at least they had space about them and air to breathe. Except in very bad droughts the rural economy had furnished sufficient food. People lived according to certain standards of civilized rustic behavior. The landowner was feudal lord. Feudalism, when it works, is far from being the worst form of human organization.
In the cities the immigrants find no housing ready for them, so they pick themselves out a back lot and put themselves up a shack out of whatever materials are cheapest and handiest just the way they would back up in the hills. Individual initiative. They cook on charcoal. They can’t read and write so they don’t need much artificial light. The women and children fetch water in gasoline tins from the nearest pump that may be a mile away, just as they would have gone down to the river back home, and they deposit their excrement behind the fence and throw their garbage out on the path just as they always did. The shacks agglomerate into rattletrap settlements, like the Hoovervilles of depression times in the States.
In Rio — this was in 1948—there were said to be three hundred thousand people living in favelas. Today there are nearer a million. You come on favelas in the most unexpected places. In Copacabana a few minutes walk from the hotels and the splendid white apartment houses and the wellkept magnificent beaches you find a whole hillside of favelas overlooking the lake and the Jockey Club. In the center of Rio a few steps from the Avenida Rio Branco on the hill back of one of the most fashionable churches you come suddenly into a tropical jungletown.
In Rio under the pressure of metropolitan life the favelas are even producing a culture of their own. Their religion is one of the many forms of West African voodoo that have taken root in American soil, known there as macumba. The artistic and social center is the samba school. The favelas are the spawning ground for Brazil’s abundant popular music. I was told of a wealthy songwriter who refused to move out of his favela. How could he? That’s where his music came from. If a foreigner turns up on a visit the inhabitants tend to cluster around to show off their favela’s best points. Some of the shacks are well built and prettily painted. The views are magnificent. Their owners take pride in their dwellings and fight like tigers to retain possession of them. The main trouble is the lack of water and light. There is no garbage disposal, no sewerage. The police don’t dare penetrate; but at that you are probably safer in a Rio favela than in Central park in New York or on a side street in Washington, D.C.