Remembering the smell of dried excrement that haunted the favelas of Rio I could understand the real enthusiasm under Dr. Penido’s kidding manner when he stood looking down with the air of a conqueror from the hill at Aimorés, and spoke of islands of public health. I got the feeling that there was more than sanitation at stake, there was the budding of a civilization.
The Rio Doce Valley was no health resort, at least not yet, but I was beginning to feel the excitement of combat, taking part, if only for a few days, in this battle for public health. The diseases had become as personal as people to these doctors. Tagging around with them in the humorous give and take of rough frontier travel, I had begun to feel as they felt, the hostility that lurked in forest pools and in the garbage thrown out back of the hut by a careless housewife, and to exult with them in every puff of vaporized DDT into a damp corner, or in every quinine injection or atabrin pill that was helping drive back the enemy beyond the blue hills that hemmed the valley.
While we wrangled over the sociology of the favelas, Monty was waiting with some impatience to show us his waterstation. The water was pumped up from the river by diesel pumps so that they wouldn’t depend on the light and power system which so often broke down. It passed through filters and chemical purifiers. Better water than many towns had in the States, Monty insisted proudly. Inside, the walls were fresh painted and the machinery looked well tended and the tiled floors were sparkling clean. “There’s capacity for twice the size of the town,” Monty insisted, “up to fifteen thousand people.”
A man was on his hands and knees mopping the tiles as we walked through. I looked at him twice because he was white-skinned and had tow hair. His face was lined and haggard and dirty. It’s a shock to a northerner in this Rio Doce Valley to find the blond offspring of German or Polish settlers living in the same ragged barefoot dirt as the darkerskinned inhabitants.
“You see,” Monty was explaining enthusiastically as he ushered us out on the terrace, “we’re all set except for pouring a little more concrete. Then only the cleaning up and landscaping left to do.”
I asked who the blond man was. He was not interested. “I dunno. He must be a German. I guess they just hire him for odd jobs.”
We stood a while on the terrace to look down into the valley. The sun was setting red into the murk behind a scraggly line of ravaged forest on the crest of a cutover hill. Touched with sultry copper glints the Rio Doce meandered with a distant hiss of broken water among rocks and scrubby islands. It looked a little like the Susquehanna below Harrisburg. An oddlooking black bird with brown markings like a butterfly was fluttering about a clump of cactus.
Down the path from the waterstation to the favela, naked except for a ragged pair of shorts, with a beaten droop to his shoulders, the blond man went stumbling wearily. He never turned his head to look at us. Holding onto his hand was a little towhaired boy three or four years old who was dressed in short pants and a little striped sweater, a sort of grimy replica of what a little boy of his age would be wearing in some distant northern home. Looking after them I was remembering what a geographer friend had told me in Rio: “Brazil is the greatest experiment in the settling of European man in the tropics, but that doesn’t mean it is always successful.”
Islands of Public Health
Above Aimorés next day the valley was narrower and dustier and drier. Fires burned more fiercely in the hills. A streaky ceiling of smoke and dust hung over the river. On steep eroding pastures, which were a network of dry cowpaths, big zebu cattle grazed in herds. Gangs were working on the line. Occasionally we had to stop while the section gang ahead lowered a new length of track into place. The settlements had a raw backwoods look.
At the little stations where the linecar had to wait for the oretrains coming down, there was a great deal going on. There were ferries on the river, flatboats, that traveled on a cable, ingeniously propelled by the force of the current. A shriek of mechanical saws came from the sawmills. Carts were bringing in cut firewood for the railroad or bags of charcoal to be shipped to the charcoalburning iron furnaces up the valley. At every siding the oxteams were churning the dust as they dragged the trunks of peroba trees up from the water’s edge. At a place called Conselheiro Pena three men were maneuvering the great logs up onto a platform with a team of eleven yokes of zebu oxen, and rolling them onto flatcars. Their only tool was the slender poles they used to handle the oxen.
At a place called Timiritinga, which, so the station master proudly explained, had just changed its name from Tarumirím, there was a long wait for the daily passenger train down from Valadares. Monty and I roamed through the ankledeep dust between the two rows of forlorn low houses of plastered adobe, looking at the pigs and the scattered garbage and the open square of sunscorched weeds that was laid out for the praça to be.
“You see,” Monty was saying dreamily, “this work can be expanded indefinitely. We are just in the shape now where we know how to do things … We’ve had five years to make our mistakes and to work up a system. We’ve got the blueprint and all we need to do now is expand it. At first it was all by guess and by God as they used to say in the Navy … When my contract expired I went back home and intended to stay but I got to thinking that this work was about as important as a man could find to do and I said to my wife could she stick it … with the baby and everything … and she said she guessed she could … so back we came. And now when we’re all rearing to go down here and Brazilian organizations are really interested in putting up money for more public health work, it looks as if the American end was petering out, as if there wasn’t much interest in Washington. The folks back home are forgetting about Brazil.”
We went into a little bar to get one of the tiny cups of strong black coffee that are sprinkled through every Brazilian day. An incredibly tattered young white woman with her hair in a ratsnest and her breasts blobbing out of her grimy dress brought us our coffee. There was a tobaccocolored man with a felt hat and a mustache sitting at the only other table. Right away he told us that Timiritinga had not only changed its name but it had just this day been created a city. Now there would be money to appropriate for public health.
We heard the siren blow from the linecar. That meant that the driver had his orders to proceed. Swallowing the scalding thimbleful of coffee we hurried over to the station. Our friend with the mustache followed us all the way to the linecar explaining how much the people of the new founded city of Timiritinga wanted Sespe to help them with their sanitation. “You see,” Monty nudged me excitedly as we settled back in our seats, “you see, it’s like that all over.”