Rio de Janeiro to New Delhi: Poverty and Pride of Slum Life
If sitting on the Copacabana, sipping beer and gazing across the idyllic Rio coastline is not heaven on earth, then it is astonishingly close. The weather is invariably stunning, the water glistening and all watched over by Christ the Redeemer himself. I can’t claim to be a beach lover, but nowhere has been closer to converting me than the Copacabana. However, this is all a matter of perspective.
Because my Brahma wasn’t served from an Irish Bar wedged into the sand in the middle of the beach. It was brought to me by the array of people that trudge up and down the beach, a case of beer on their back, an assortment of sunglasses and key-rings in their hands. Every hour, of every day, they are there. They carry bracelets and miniatures of the Sugarloaf, they carry sunglasses and corn on the cob and when they aren’t carrying them up and down the beach, they carry them home. To the Favelas.
The Favelas are the slums of Rio De Janeiro. Largely built on the side of the mountains that serenade the city, they soar into the sky, a morass of colour and chaos screaming for your attention. There are around 1,000 slums in Rio and they are called home by an estimated 1.4 million people, greater than the population of county Dublin. So widespread is disease within them that life expectancy for their inhabitants is 48, 20 years below the national average.
When Rio hosted the 2016 Olympics such an egregious situation became more dismal still. Residents were regularly raided by armed police in pathetic and futile attempts to curb the Favela’s long entrenched drug problem and worse still, the Government erected a ‘wall of shame’ running for five miles from Rio’s international airport. Ostensibly, its purpose was to advertise the upcoming Games but in truth it hid the tens of thousands living on the side of the motorway from athletes and spectators entering Rio. It was shameful, cowardly and utterly disgraceful. Gangs and guns make the laws in those cramped corners of Rio but that is hardly surprising when the state’s only interference in these peoples’ lives is to literally hide them from view. A tour (organised by the residents as a means of bringing money to the area) through one such Favela confirmed as much.
A proliferation of gang signs bedeck most street corners, and it’s abundantly clear that there are few areas that aren’t actively contested, even less that could be legitimately described as safe. This even on guided tour, presumably a relatively sanitized insight into slum life. It is truly and thoroughly a cramped, sweltering and claustrophobic way to live. Personal space is surrendered as you enter, rooms are tight while the lanes that separate them are tighter still. Smells of food, both rancid and cooked, waft around each corner and the same paths down which we were guided act as showers for people with an outside hose and an opportunity to dry clothes for others. At one point we were ushered onto a rooftop to appreciate Rio’s admittedly astonishing city-scape but having witnessed the poverty of those living all around us, admiring scenery felt odious, almost objectionable.
As we retreated out of the Favela, our step was checked regularly by children, football in hand, as they danced down the steps to their own Maracana, laughing and leaping, shouting and skipping. Their jerseys were often torn, their feet unadorned by shoes but to see the glee etched on their faces knowing now was the time for football was a beautiful sight.
What’s remarkable about travelling in a country as diverse as Brazil is the plethora of experience, each as alien to each other as to life back home. The Amazon rainforest, the Favelas of Rio, the Copacabana. Each remarkable and memorable for different reasons but it was the people we met in those Favelas that lodged in my mind more than anything else. That was 2015 but just last year I spent a month teaching in a slum of New Delhi, India. The surrounding landscape was not carved by God himself as in Rio, but it was the similarities I found more interesting.
The profusion of elaborately painted buildings, so chaotically cobbled side-by-side and stacked high like a Jenga endgame. The cramped conditions, sickly smells and curtain clad doorways that were at once inviting and sinister. The litter, the sewage, the stifling, suffocating heat. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the snug Hindu Temple adorning the slum’s entrance and the women’s stunning Saris the similarities would have been disconcerting. Seeing the children for the first time however, was a thoroughly heartwarming experience, and remarkably reminiscent of Rio.
There again was the happiness, gloriously uninhibited by the backdrop. My succeeding weeks in that school would only see my respect for those children grow as I became increasingly intimate with the desultory nature of their normal. The school’s rusty gate-cum-door with an ill-fitting lock, the intricacies of which I never quite worked out. The one-legged teacher that navigated the classroom with what was more a tree trunk than a walking stick. The series of steel rods at the back of the room which had been commandeered by the children as a ludicrously dangerous trampoline. All these things are true and on another day can bring disaster, but in another sense they are tremendously misleading. They speak to a dystopia, a poverty stricken land beyond hope’s reach. In my experience, a slum is nothing of the sort. It’s when you go there, and see the smiles that rush through the door every day, see the parents that burst with pride collecting their children from school, that you realize how miss-guided it is to conclude that life in a slum is nothing more than destitute.
After my last class in New Delhi, the teacher I had been assisting invited me and my French colleague to have lunch with her. We slalomed through the slum for 10 minutes before arriving at her home, a small room in which she lived with her Mum. There was a table for preparing food against the back wall, which doubled as a bed come the evening and trebled as a sofa when we arrived. There was a miniature Hindu shrine at the entrance, a fan whizzing in one corner and a light-bulb flickering in the other. For half an hour we exchanged stories of our own times in school, my impressions of India and the teacher’s fasting in preparation for a Hindu festival taking place the following week. It was a beautiful experience and an education for me in human decency and warmth.
Life in a slum is of course tremendously difficult but those that live those lives are extremely proud to do so and well they should be. I don’t intend this piece to descend into cliché laiden drivel, and there’s no greater cliché than ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’, but as is the case for many such tropes, it is undeniably true. Perhaps nowhere more so than in a slum.
At the end of the visit, motivated by my ignorance of slum life, I tentatively asked if she pays rent, and to whom.
“No, I pay no more”, she assured us “I own here now” and her face beamed brighter than that flickering light-bulb could ever hope to.
