Day 5: Rio de Janeiro
Day 5, you say? Why not day 3? Well, a twenty two hour delay at the airport meant I have only just arrived in Rio. People seem to have very different views of it as a city. I began to wonder whether I had made the right decision when I watched the Simpson’s on the flight over. It was the controversial episode about Rio. The makers of the Simpson’s were later threatened with legal action by the Rio tourist board after making fun of the city in a show. Apparently, they showed Homer being attacked by street children, before he was then kidnapped by an unlicensed taxi. Then it showed monkeys overrunning an orphanage in the city, before Bart was swallowed by a boa constrictor snake. It also portrayed the police as lazy and the slums as dirty and dangerous. Whether accurate or not, it was funny. But nowhere near as funny as the man next to me seemed to think. He had an annoying and painful habit of jabbing me in the ribs with his elbows each time we hit a funny part.
With this negative and rather disturbing picture in mind, I decided to take in some of the sights and sounds (and smells) of the city.
To say that poverty and wealth sit side by side, cheek by jowl, is no exaggeration in Rio. You pass large, well kept apartments and houses, followed by areas typified by illegal, slum dwellings, or as the locals prefer to call them, favelas. There was one favela in particular which interested me; Rocinha.
We had studied Rocinha at GCSE level – apparently, it is one of the larger shanty towns in Brazil, and also one which demonstrates the various stages that such a place can go through in becoming more developed through self help. I arrived at around 10a.m. This was a bad idea. People were just stirring from their homes and the closely packed in streets were lined with people, sliding and shoving their way through the crowds in the hot, dry and sweaty atmosphere. The thing that struck me was the sheer lack of any organisation in the way the houses had been built. It was a case of anywhere will do. The result was a chaotic mass of housing, with electric wires running overhead in all directions. I felt intimidated. For a start, I was the only Brit here – that was obvious. The second obvious thing was my sheer stupidity. In hindsight it seems ridiculous, but I was trying to find my way around by studying a map. ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ you might say. ‘You’re a self confessed Geography geek. We wouldn’t expect anything less!’ True. But it’s also true that many of Rio’s favelas do not have street names. Why would they? The council aren’t going to be too keen to dish out addresses to people living illegally here. However, this has changed to some degree. U2 sang about the streets having no names, but can you even imagine what life must be like? I imagined an imaginary conversation on an imaginary street (with no name) between two imaginary young people:
Imaginary person 1: Are you doing anything tonight after imaginary school?
Imaginary person 2: No, I imagine not. Why don’t you come around for a game of football (has to be football – the Brazilians are mad for it).
Imaginary person 1: Yeah. That’ll be good. Where do you live?
Imaginary person 2: In the fairly lopsided house. It is painted red. If you go past the first blue house, then the pink house on the left side, followed by the house with a front window, you should come to a red house….
Imaginary person 1: Is that the one?
Imaginary person 2: No…you then turn right, past three pink houses, then head up a hill, then down the other side, go past four grey houses, though some people say they’re more of a light blue. Then it’s on the right hand side.
Imaginary person 1: Great! I’ll see you there.
But you see, he wouldn’t see him. Because he’d be lost. Or he’d go to the wrong blue house…I mean red. See? I’m getting confused now too. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. You wouldn’t be able to get post, you wouldn’t be able to get a bank account for money to be paid in for a formal job, you would struggle to register at school. So thankfully many of the houses now do have addresses. Which means the two imaginary boys could play football together, and both live happily ever after. The end.
Well, not quite the end. In fact, nothing of the sort. Many of the houses are in a terrible, dilapidated state. No running water which can lead to disease if their water source is dirty, many of the parents don’t have formal jobs and have to do informal jobs such as shoe shining for cash in hand. Of course, high levels of illness due to poor living conditions often mean that people here often can’t get to work. This is made worse by lack of bus or transport systems to get them to where they need to be. Some people in Rocinha do have formal jobs, working in the port area of Rio. And equally, it is obvious looking around that many of the areas in Rocinha are improved areas – or periferia as they prefer to call them.
People I spoke to in Rocinha had different things to say. One guy said that there were problems with poor transport, and that at least in Sao Paolo they had built an underground system. Others complained about the drugs problems in Rocinha and that it was being run by drugs lords. I did feel at risk. I did hear gun shots (I presume these were gunshots; it might have been fireworks – it is November).
Rio is certainly an interesting place. Translated, it apparently means ‘River of January’. I tried to go with the flow. I enjoyed it – but I wasn’t about to stay until the new year. It was different to Gateshead. Or Middlesbrough. Very different.
Onwards I go. Next stop, Bangladesh.
