and asks whether he can listen to music. He plugs in to bossa nova,
bobbing his head while three girls laboriously type their names,
followed by doting sentiments (in Portuguese) about Carla: “i love
aunt carla”; “aunt carla is beautiful.”
Bona Espero’s girls, outnumbered three to one by boys, rarely
smile, even when I train my camera on them; in photos, all look
vaguely defiant. When they deign to play with the younger kids, it’s
time for head games. Nelida, a nine-year-old girl with blunt, squared
features and a hopeless crush on Sebastian, notices one morning that
eight-year-old Luis has snagged Sebastian’s attention. She runs over
to Luis and whispers, “Aunt Carla says we are not to speak to the
adults.” It’s a lie, but Luis leaves off, puzzled and chagrined; it’s hard
to say whether he believes or fears her. His sister, Luisa, at ten, is a
self-appointed behavior monitor, endlessly barking orders at her
younger brother and three small cousins.
The third girl is Vera, compact and afro’d, three shades darker
than all the other children. Ursula tells me she’s from one of the
local villages founded by fugitive slaves. Over a century later, their
descendants still keep to their villages. Vera walks about clutching a
platinum blond Barbie doll. Instead of playing with the others, she
sits at lunch giggling maniacally for attention. After July’s
midwinter holiday, Ursula explains, Vera won’t return; in the court’s
view, she’s regressed at Bona Espero and had best return to her
mother. Sometimes with little warning, the mothers come back for
their kids, having persuaded some social worker or other of their
fitness to raise the child. And by dinnertime, mother and child are
gone.
“Do you ever feel like fighting to keep them?”
Ursula chooses her words. “The mother is sacrosanct,” she says
reverentially, which I take to mean, “This is not a fight I could win.”
“We never say a word against their mothers. We hope the kids keep
in contact and give their mothers some money when they start
earning it. But often they go years with no word from their
mothers.”
The next morning I lug a suitcase I’ve brought, full of school
supplies, to the dining hall; three girls vie with one another to unzip
it. I pick out a piece of red paper, fold it in eight, and trace a paper
girl straight out of the fifties: hair in a flip, pointy A-line skirt. The
three human girls lean over my snapping scissors in a hush; clearly
they’ve never seen anyone do this. As soon as I unfurl the first octet
of dollies, both girls and boys set upon the construction paper, each
picking out his or her own color. Luis, first in line, picks blue. I fold
the paper and start to draw a girl—“Ne!” he shouts in Esperanto,
“Faru knabon, ne knabinon!” (Make a boy, not a girl!) Twenty-four
paper girls and seventy-two paper boys later, I suggest gluing the
paper kids together and festooning the hall. No way; each kid clings
tightly to his or her paper friends and will not give them up.
All but Rafael, who is sitting quietly, crayoning a smiling face on
the round yellow head of each paper knabo. Those who notice grab
crayons and follow suit. By the time all are drawing faces, Rafael
has found, among the scraps, the unmistakable shape of a shield and
glues one onto each of the eight boys. A few minutes later, he holds
up his work for our admiration: “Rigardu!” (Look!) He’s proud of his
paper phalanx; these boys will stick together, and they are all
protected.
He’s not always so busy. Sometimes, as the children drift back to
the dorm to wash for dinner, Rafael sits alone with his daydreams,
petting Samba. When I picture him twenty years from now, I see
him working for a software firm, drinking Starbucks, surfing the
Net. On his screen, a beagle eating with chopsticks.
* * *
Sometimes their names are hard to grasp. There’s a vogue for hand-
me-down English names—Washington, Wellington; some, like
Adenilson, slightly foxed. Ursula says parents pinch names they hear
on commercials or telenovelas. She recalls one boy named Armani,
another named Sony, and a little pixie named Erlan, after a
chocolate bar. When it came time to get Erlan some documents,
Ursula changed her name to Tanya. “It’s the same number of
letters,” she explains, as if this clarifies anything. “Nowadays, Tanya
has a degree in animal technology and she works for the
government. If her name had still been Erlan, then what?”
Then what, indeed. “How many kids live here now,” I ask, “as
compared to ten years ago?”
Ursula gives me a look of disgust. “People always ask, ‘How
many kids live here?’ We don’t breed chickens here.” Then, in
English: “Quality! not quantity!” Still, the numbers are dramatically
lower these days. In 2006, twenty-seven kids lived here; now the
number floats between twelve and fifteen. Staffing has become very
difficult; young teachers drift away to the cities. And Ursula and
Giuseppe, though rugged and energetic, are forty years older than
they were when they arrived. Fewer children means fewer conflicts;
fewer all-night trips to Brasília to treat a child’s snake bite.
“Isn’t the average child a lot younger these days?”
“You’re right,” she says. “In the nineties, we had a lot of thirteen-
to fifteen-year-olds. They’d start having sex at home and their
parents would ship them off to the ‘orphanage.’ But it wasn’t a
solution. We have no walls here; they can just run away—and a
couple of them did.”
“And if the point is to make them literate, how many of the kids
can read and write? Half? A quarter?”
“More than that,” Ursula starts to say, then reframes the question.
“There are degrees of success. By grade four, they’re all literate,
which gives them options not open to their parents, who can’t make
out the sign for the bakery. Then another group make it through
grade eight; a smaller group find their way to the end of grade
twelve in Alto Paraíso. About twenty are now teachers; others work
for the government, for television companies, for the police; they
run gas stations, just about anything. About 10 percent go to higher
education.”
That sounds like a lot, except that in Brazil “higher education”
can mean any kind of educational or training course. During my
visit, Ursula learns of a bill before the government to drop the motto
“Order and Progress” from the Brazilian national flag. Apparently
there has not been enough of either to bring the rate of functional
literacy above 50 percent. Instead of seeing the bill as a concession
of failure, Ursula finds the news cheering. “Revolutionary!” she
chirps, since dropping the motto will finally make the flag legible to
all.Before the bus from Alto Paraíso arrives, Ursula teaches
geography to six older kids on her veranda. Today they turn to a
lesson on their state, Goiás, but once they’ve all shown they can find
it on the map, Ursula changes gears. “It’s an unhappy thing to sit