Ana Lucia Vaz*
The first impact
For the first report I wrote in Borel, after the rains on the beginning of April, I arrived in the favela through a contact from the Rede Nacional de Jornalistas Populares (National Network of Popular Journalists), who introduced me to the director of the dwellers' association. I asked if I could interview some of the families. She took me to the local public school's library, introduced me to everyone, asked everyone to leave a single three-chaired table, put me on one chair and placed an empty one in front of me. Soon, there was a sort of a line of people willing to give interviews. I felt as if I were some kind of governmental agent registering them. As soon as I could, I got off the chair, changed places and soon there was a friendly circle where people sat on chairs and tables with kids coming and going behind my back. Slowly I became part of that unknown world.
Then they took me to see their houses. Time and again, the people we met on our way would come closer to participate in the coverage, tell their stories and take the chance to take photos with their cell phones.
Walking around
Last Wednesday, April 21st, I was at Morro dos Prazeres [Prazeres slum] to follow the meeting on the removals, called by the Santa Teresa Dwellers Association. Around 400 hundred people [among dwellers of neighboring favelas, representatives of other favelas - even from Niteroi - ,representatives of institutions, etc] participated. They participated or simply attended to it.
Walking around the stands of the Prazeres Sports Hall, from where a good amount of people from that favela attended the meeting, was slightly awkward. Most of them was still trying to figure out what was going on. But the conversation with them, as always, was very easy.
"I came here because they said they will remove everybody. I don't want to leave here", Mrs. Eleir explained. She didn't sign up for the food support because the registration gave "full power to the city's administration to put the house down", she told me.
Everyone said that the amount of donations that got to Prazeres was impressive. "There are people claiming that they will not buy clothes for a whole year!". Others criticized: "They are trying to buy us".
Even though they did not understand exactly what was going on, my "interviewees" told me their lives, talked about their families, gave opinions, gossiped. All of this before I even introduced myself.
Valda has lived for 10 years at Morro dos Prazeres. She is willing to move from her house, which "is in a hazardous place". She already got the interdiction reports, but didn't ask for the rent support* from the government. She is afraid to authorize the demolition of her house. "What if we don't receive the houses they are promising?" She thinks a bit and completes: "Fear to stay, fear to go..." Her older sun doesn't want to sleep at home anymore. He even had a high blood pressure attack. Her husband lives with someone else and doesn't care about them. She talks for a long time with me, but she is afraid of being photographed. "I don't know, I live in a favela..." I don't take her picture.
While I was sitting beside Valda, the combative speeches made a different sense. Someone called everyone for "a great act in front of the City Hall"! Valda reacted in a very low tone: "What for?!" Yeah, I agree: that doesn't solve any of your problems. "It's like this: one pulls us from here, another from there and us... mean while the net is out of the water and the fish die dry. I wonder how it will be when there is another rain!"
At the end of the meeting, I tried to check information with Eliza Brandão, president of the Friendship Society of Morro dos Prazeres. She was extremely upset. But at the end of the discussions many fought for her attention. Luckily I don't work for a daily newspaper that would force me to be impolite. I got her telephone numbers and went away.
Therapeutic listening
A couple of days later I called the association. Eliza explained me that, in the beginning, the association - in cooperation with the city's social service - distributed food to those who had lost their homes. The interdiction report was the document that proved that the householder was homeless. The city administration took advantage of it, "set a tent in the community and started to distribute interdiction reports. People were interdicting themselves!"
Now with time, Eliza's speech ranges from thanks (to the solidarity of the dwellers, institutions, companies and NGOs that supported and are still supporting them) and complaints against the government, the media and some dwellers who took advantage of the situation. She has also lost her house and hasn't yet received the rent support. She says she still has to cry her dead ones. But she was hit by the threat of removal before she even had time to swallow her own pain.
About the donations, Eliza explains that the association organized the distribution with the help from social workers. But nothing came from the city's administration. Not even the suitable equipment for the firemen who worked in the excavations. It took days before the machines came. Hoes and boots were donated by local businessmen. "I ask myself: if it had been faster, wouldn't we have saved some lives?" In each flood of complaintful words, Eliza breaks down and apologizes. There are few moments in which I speak, only to give her some support and allow her to continue. At the end of the talk, she jokes: "Thanks, you ended up being my psychologist today, right?"
I hung up wondering how to explain her everything I had earned from our conversation.
Therapeutic visibility
In Borel, North Zone of Rio de Janeiro, the place where I made my first contact, the dwellers who agreed to leave their homes or had lost them had to protest to get the report that gives them the right to rent support. One week before the meeting at Morro dos Prazeres, the homeless people from Borel closed the local school to force the city administration to make the reports.
The act was widely covered by the media. According to some of the homeless people, on the same day the agents of the state's department of emergency and rescue (called Defesa Civil) arrived there and, in two days, all the reports on the homes of those who were there were made.
I bought the main newspapers on the following day and the news seemed mostly twisted . They seemed to soften the taken-for-grantedness of the local government. When I returned to Borel, I was surprised: they were very happy about the media coverage. In fact, they hadn't read the papers. I took some to show them. But, for my surprise, they didn't really care. They were happy because they were heard, filmed and photographed. They were happy because they got a lot of donations and managed to have the city administration to serve them.
The so-called human animal
The favela has something wide open and sticky. As if these people with too small houses to keep a door closed also forgot to close the doors of their souls. They leave it all open like that, for us to see, bump and get stuck. Entering a favela and talking with the favelados is like touching these big human contradictions with your own fingers. They make you feel disgusted and uncomfortable. But they also cause admiration. It is like a messed-up mirror without the polish that the middle class likes to give to their social profiles. A horror that enchants and embarrasses.
I keep following the tracks of the homeless people from Borel and the dwellers of Morro dos Prazeres. I don't have the illusion that my reports will change the course of history . A lot of journalists go crazy with this illusion of changing the world through their words. Each day I am more convinced that the power of journalism is really laid on listening. Like the power of the favela is on their flooding humanity. Journalism, enlightening profession from its very inception, can only be revolutionary through the silence, by listening and being transformed by the voice of the other. No one better than the favelado to teach such a thing to journalists who are willing to learn.
*The "rent support" or "Aluguel Social" [social rent] is a fund guaranteed by law to people who are in economic vulnerability after or during a situation of emergency. It means that the government of a city or state must provide citizens with a temporary allowance so that they move away from hazardous areas.
* Ana Lucia Vaz, journalist, master in Journalism (USP/SP), member of the Rede Nacional de Jornalistas Populares (means: national network of popular journalists), journalism professor and craniosacral therapist.
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**Translation: Leonardo Custódio
***Review: Gabriella Vagnoli
