The wolves of Rio

The third major problem that Rio must solve, HAS to solve, is its horrific violence. Make no mistake, Rio is a city at war. Every single citizen of Rio has the mentality of life-during-wartime. It is a war of the traficantes (drug smugglers). Traficantes versus each other, traficantes versus the military police, traficantes versus the protection gangs, traficantes versus anybody unlucky enough to get in their paths; younger and younger traficantes without any hope of any kind of a life, without hoping of even living out of their teens. Traficantes versus the world.

Every day brings some new sad horror. Even in my first ten minutes in Rio, sitting in the airport waiting for the baggage carousel to start up, I overhead the following exchange between two women seated next to me:

Woman 1: "So what brings you to Rio? Are you here in vacation?"
Woman 2: "No, I'm here to join my husband because his son just got shot here."
Woman 1: "What??"
Woman 2: "My husband's son, and a friend, were in a Range Rover and a couple of guys pointed guns at them, shot them both and tossed them out of the car. The friend died. He was a very famous martial arts expert. My husband's son is still alive but he's in intensive care. He was shot 3 times."
Woman 1: "I'm so sorry."
Woman 2: "Guess how old they were. The two guys who did it."
Woman 1: "How old?"
Woman 2: "Eleven and twelve."

(I later found out the murdered Brazilian was Marcos Jara, a well-known ju-jitsu trainer who lived in the US and was visiting Brazil for the holidays to see his family. He and his American friend were just driving out of the city to visit lovely, bucolic Paraty - a town I have visited myself. Marcos happened to stop his car to get something out of his trunk... and he just happened to stop right in the middle of a dangerous favela. He was jumped, and they were both shot. O Globo has an extremely sad article about his mother, who said: "He was my oxygen. I no longer know how to breathe." He was killed on Christmas Day.)

I am always on alert when in Rio, but overhearing this miserable conversation put me on extra alert. Good thing because a night later, last night, I was almost jumped myself. I brought it on myself, of course - first by coming to Rio in the first place, and second: I was out too late, as usual, and was walking along a street that I shouldn't have been walking along, as usual, and had been too cheap to take a taxi all the way home, as usual. I'd taken a combi (little minivan) almost all the way home, but hadn't realized that my friend's new apartment was further off the combi route than I had thought; so I was walking just the last couple blocks from the combi stop back to her place.

The street was empty of people and quite dark, but was also quite wide-open. I could see pretty far in all directions and there was a pretty steady flow of car traffic along the street, including a lot of taxis that I could flag down if necessary, so I wasn't too worried. Still, though, it was a VERY empty street and rather dark and I knew it was a bad area, so I was on Extra High Alert, constantly glancing in all directions.

Like most gringas in Rio, I dress for this kind of situation, as follows: I wear only a tiny bag that looks as if it could not possibly have anything interesting in it (though actually it has the teeny-tiniest camera I could possibly find to buy. But it looks, from the outside, like it has nothing at all in it.) I wear it slung across my chest, not over one shoulder, so it can't easily be pulled off. I wear NO jewelry, NO watch, NOTHING that could possibly interest anybody. I wear shoes I can run in. And last, I usually do not walk with other Americans or, worst of all, American men (they are absolute magnets for thieves) - the last thing I want is to be in a crowd of loudly chattering English speakers.

So I was zipping along the street, using my Extra Fast, I-Know-Exactly-Where-I'm-Going Rio walk, feeling extremely exposed and vulnerable and on super-high alert, glancing in all directions.

I thought suddenly: This is what it's like to be a prey animal. To be, for example, a deer in the northern Rockies (which I had just been to) - now once again the home of wolves. Lots of wolves. A deer living in the wild like that spends its entire life constantly on guard. Constantly knowing that at every moment, there is somebody, somewhere, watching; assessing whether the deer looks like a good easy meal.

I actually had that exact thought in my head: "I'm a deer!" - when the traffic died away, all the cars suddenly disappearing in one of those odd traffic lulls, and a lone man on a motorcycle came by, and he turned his helmet and looked at me. I immediately saw that he was a wolf. I saw his helmet turn, saw him assess me, saw him decide to veer all the way across the 3-lane street and charge me head on and charge right up onto the sidewalk coming toward me at TOP SPEED. Right onto the sidewalk, right at me, accelerating. I could not see his eyes, just that blank black motorcycle faceplate as he reached out toward me. I did not have even the slightest hesitation. I knew the moment his helmet turned that he was a wolf, and I was a deer, and deers RUN, so I RAN. I ran FAST.

The entire world suddenly clicked into a fascinating three-dimensional game. All the objects around me - garbage can, small tree, series of concrete pedestals - suddenly took on extremely interesting characteristics as Potential Motorcycle Obstacles and seemed almost to glow. And I could see potential running paths emblazoned around them: the trajectory of the motorcycle coming at me vs. the various trajectories I could choose to run on. So just as his bike was leaping up onto the sidewalk, I was accelerating too and I was choosing a course. I ran obliquely at him, and I shot just past his outstretched arm, just out of his reach, at an angle, so that I was quickly far beyond him and he couldn't turn his bike around fast enough to get me.

I shot around the corner and bolted across the street to a central meridian that had some more helpful trees. More Moorcycle Obstacles. More potential running paths stretched out all around me. Which to pick? Where was he? Should I run in circles around the tree hoping for more cars to come soon? Or can I make it to that distant garbage truck, and those 2 garbagemen, that I now can see two blocks away? Does he have a gun, or is he just a pursesnatcher? I saw him starting to turn his bike to face me. I plotted a new course. (Run around tree.)

But finally a lone cab was coming - and the cabbie actually pulled over and got out to yell at the guy (99% of Brazilians are incredibly helpful. It's the other 1% who are the problem.) - and normally I would have thanked him and gotten a cab ride, but somehow I had so much mental and physical momentum by then that I could not stop running, and all of a sudden I was 2 blocks away at the garbage truck.

The two garbage truck workers hadn't seen any of this and just thought I was lost. They greeted me with a surprised "Ah, você está perdida!" (oh, you're lost!) Far behind me the biker gave up and left. I scooted the last block back home.

Oddly I was, and still am, not the least bit startled or spooked. I just went home and had some toast and cheese and read my cheesy sci-fi book, like usual. Like any gringa in Rio, I am always waiting for stuff like this to happen, and this was just the latest of a number of close scrapes, though this was the first time I've been targeted by somebody moving quite that fast, and requiring quite that much of a sprint. In retrospect I think he was probably just a purse snatcher, and what most likely made him give up was that he saw that my little, and very uninteresting-looking, bag was diagonally across my body and not easily snatchable.. and I had no jewelry at all ... and I was running pretty fast.... In other words: I looked like a fast deer, and not a particularly tasty one. So the wolf chose to continue on, to look for a slower, and tastier, deer.

Why was poor Marcos Jara the unlucky deer, and why was I the lucky deer, this weekend? I don't know. He was a world-class jiu-jitsu expert; but he was facing a gun. All I can do is run, and I'm not even very fast - but luckily for me, it was just 1 guy and he had no gun. Really I think it's just luck. All I really know is, beware of the wolves.

But then there's the filth....

And on the filth front, I'm sorry to report that the waters of Copacabana and Ipanema beaches are the very most disgusting that I've EVER seen them. The waves at Ipanema are an opaque, muddy yellowish-brown that was absolutely appalling. I couldn't believe it. I went to the water and cupped some in my hands, to see if I was imagining how dirty it was, but no - even just a SINGLE HANDFUL of water is detectably yellowish-brown. Ick. You know it's bad then.

It didn't smell, so I wonder if it is not raw sewage exactly, but possibly the algal bloom that often follows raw sewage. I can't imagine that there can be anything alive in there. Poor fishies.

Everybody was still swimming anyway. So in the spirit of what-the-hell Rio boldness I went swimming myself. I'd just dunked under once when I got an attack of the heebie-jeebies and fled back out of the water instantly. I was in the water for maybe 30 seconds and woke up the next morning with a bright red skin rash all over my legs. Coincidence??

So, sadly, it looks like I won't be swimming at Ipanema this year, or at least not unless the currents change. Well, I'll take that as just a good excuse to go down to Recreio and visit my friend Kat now and then at her Surf-n-Stay hostel.

Even so I didn't really appreciate the scale of the problem till this morning, when my Salvador-bound flight did a huge, slow bank over the entire city of Rio. I looked down and my heart sank. I have seen this before, but somehow it seems much worse now. Guanabara Bay was SOLID FILTH. It was SOLID brown, the ENTIRE Guanabara bay was SOLID brown. And speckled with constellations, galaxies, universes, of millions upon millions upon millions of tiny white dots of floating garbage and plastic.

Well, Guanabara Bay is an enclosed bay - I knew it was badly polluted - but how about the oceanfront beaches, Copacabana and Ipanema? Was my experience at Posto 7 of Ipanema just an isolated one? I was hoping to see a spot along Ipanema that might be a little cleaner. But we banked over that entire stretch of coastline and I was appalled to see a solid band of yellow-brown water that extended offshore for approximately a mile. It was HUGE. You could see clearly where it met cleaner Atlantic water further offshore; there was a clean, undulating line a mile offshore, where brown met blue.

I could see tiny spots around certain points of land where the blue color fought back, fought closer, almost reached the land... almost... but not quite. Even Barra da Tijuca, beach of the rich, was rimmed with brown.

We flew over rivers that were pouring opaque brown paint into the sea.

We flew over Rio's once beautiful Lagoa. Not only solid brown but DARK brown.

We flew over the Cristo. The top of his head was just visible, sticking up through the low cloud that often hovers over the Corcovado. He has a very clear view of the Lagoa, and Copacabana, and Ipanama, and Guanabara Bay. Oh, how he must weep.

How can this horrific environmental catastrophe possibly be salvaged? Is it beyond hope? Is there any realistic hope of turning this around? There must be. Bodies of water can be brought back from the most horrible pollution. We did it in the US, once upon a time, back in another lifetime when the United States was once the environmental leader of the world. Back when we past the world's first endangered species act, the Clean Air Act -and, prodded by the infamous 1969 incident in which the Cuyahoga River of Ohio actually caught fire, we passed the Clean Water Act. That law has produced some near-miraculous turnarounds in water quality. Even New York City Harbor has some oysters again. (And the Cuyahoga is pretty clean now.) The Clean Water Act isn't perfect and the US still has some horrible problems - take one look at a satellite shot of our once magnificent Chesapeake Bay, our largest estuary, now almost entirely a dead zone, to see what I mean. (And see the New York Times' current expose "Toxic Waters" if you're really interested.)

But seeing Rio's waters makes me realize how far the US has come. As bad off as the Chesapeake is, it is nothing like Guanabara.

Well, if the Olympics don't cause some real action on this, then nothing will.

The Metro reaches Ipanema!

I've just wrapped up a quick 3-day visit in Rio before zipping to Salvador today. The 3 days was just a little preview to the much longer stay in Rio that I'll have in January & February. I haven't posted anything yet because I didn't have much email access this time in Rio - because I was staying with my friend Chris again, who no longer has email in her apartment because she is HOPELESSLY, HOPELESSLY ADDICTED to Facebook on her Blackberry and can't be bothered to tear herself away from it long enough to use the old-school regular Internet.

The Brazilians seem to have discovered Facebook en masse during 2009. I noticed it mid-year when I suddenly got a flood of dozens of friend requests from all kinds of Brazilian friends who had sniffed out my profile somehow. Banga friends, Monobloco friends, friends from I don't know where, escolas, blocos, all suddenly on Facebook. (And when the Brazilians all pile onto a social networking site, watch out. Nobody knows how to socialize like the Brazilians! Brazilians have long been the acknowleged rulers of Orkut, Google's social networking site - an astounding 50% of Orkut's users are Brazilian.)

I've got to say I notice little signs of technical improvement like that everywhere now. Rio is impressively wired and just about everybody (except me of course) seems to have some kind of internet access. All the escolas now have websites (even though they're often filled just with cryptic, flowery, incomprehensible passages about their history, and fail to have certain basic information like the address of their quadra). Even the poor favela kids in the escolas seem to know about the net now, and mug for your video cameras hoping you'll post it on Youtube. (Properly pronounced "ee-uu-too-bee" of course).

What really startled me, in terms of technological improvements, was the subway. For ages, Rio's been slowly ambling through an interminable series of delays in slowly getting its main subway line to reach all the way through Copacabana and, eventually, to Ipanema. For the whole five years I've been going there they've been casually chipping away at the planned Cantagalo station in far Copacabana, and occasionally tossing a shovelful of dirt out of the site of the long-rumored station further in Ipanema's General Osorio plaza. I used to ask Brazilian friends when these stations will be completed and they would just laugh.

Well, last year Cantagalo finished! I was amazed! I thought, well, at that rate it'll probably be another five years before the Ipanema station is finished.

Imagine my shock: The Ipanema station is OPEN!!! I walked up to General Osorio plaza and there it was, a lovely gleaming white dome leading down underneath the plaza. My jaw literally dropped. And it is beautiful. Lovely and huge. I noticed they've also switched the entire subway line (at last) to using rechargable permanent magnetic cards. The place looks impressively high-tech. I saw they'd put a huge sign up in front of it that announces proudly that Rio spent THREE HUNDRED MILLION REAIS (about 180 million dollars) on this one station.

And I thought: The Olympics. That's why this station suddenly was finished so fast - they had to prove to the Olympic committee that they really could get major infrastructure built FAST.

It made me look at all sorts of other aspects of Rio with a new eye. I noticed the airport is subtly improved - lots of new little shops, a new bookstore, a nice cafe. Lots of new buses. They've nearly doubled the number of subway cars. (Still not nearly enough, but oh well.) On a smaller note, they have also had a minor, but critical, technical breakthrough in ventilation of crowded bars - most of the clubs in Lapa have suddenly acquired a ceiling-mounted battery of most excellent tiny silver fans.)

What else will the Olympics bring? What everyone is wondering is - will Rio pull it off? Will they manage to really fix up the city? What everyone is hoping is that the Olympics will be the catalyst for major improvements that will be long-lasting, long beyond the Olympics, much as happened with Barcelona.

There are 3 formidable challenges: the infrastructure, the violence, and the filth. Well, so far so good on the infrastructure. The filth: that's going to take some work. (more in next post). The violence: that's the hardest of all. (more in the post after that.)

Anyway. I kept taking the subway to Ipanema over and over again just so I could pop out of the station right in the General Osorio plaza and say to myself "I'm in Ipanema!!" Ipanema to Lapa, Lapa to Ipanema, Ipanema to Lapa, Lapa to Ipanema, over and over again. "I'm in Ipanema!" "Hey! I'm in Ipanema AGAIN!" Let me go on record as saying I LOVE THE GENERAL OSORIO STATION IN IPANEMA. And now I want an apartment in Ipanema worse than ever... an apartment of my VERY OWN. (no, it's not enough to have an apt. in Salvador; I clearly need one in Ipanema too!)

Lapa for Carnaval!

The rumors are true - I've recklessly quit my job again and am heading back to Brazil. Three months this time! It'll be my last use of my Brazilian visa, so I might as well do it right.

This time I had the bright idea that it would be fun to stay in Rio's main music district, Lapa, for the month of Carnaval. I happen to have a friend who has an apartment for rent right in Lapa, so, I wrote him, and he wrote back, and it's available, and I booked it, and I paid him, and it's for real! I'm staying in Lapa! For the 5 weeks around Carnaval - fantastic!

I'll do a little hopping around before that - New Year's in Salvador in my own apartment with friends, a couple weeks in Laranjeiras or Flamengo with still other friends, plenty of beach time before and after the Carnaval season. But I'm so pleased that my main spot will be in Lapa for Carnaval itself. All the music clubs are there, and so many of the bloco rehearsals and classes, and I will be much, much closer to the escolas, and much, much closer to Santa Teresa too (one of my favorite areas of Rio). My bloco Bangalafumenga has moved its rehearsals to Lapa this year. Can-not WAIT. I'm listening to my Brazilian Portuguese podcast lessons every day... I already have my Brazil suitcase all packed. (Literally. It's totally packed and ready to go.)

This move is a big one because I also am leaving Portland and leaving my job. Basically I will not have a permanent residence for three months. So, not only am I packed for Brazil, I've already moved all my stuff out of my house, and nearly totally packed up my office at work. I've got a big going-away party planned on Saturday (actually it's not planned at all, but I went ahead and invited the whole world anyway). Then a couple days in Seattle, a couple days in Boston with family, I fly out late on Christmas Day, and the day after Christmas I will be on Ipanema beach. Settling in for a three month stay.

Want to come along? :) It's all waiting for you.