I think I'm stuck in Rio

Oi gente,

Finalmente, acho que eu posso falar Portugues um pouco melhor que quando eu chegou. Não utilizo o pasado...talvez isso limita meu nivel da comunicaçaõ, mas tambem não posso ficar no pasado!

Oh, how I hope the weather will get better now that I'm moving to Copacabana! It's true: ever since moving into Santa Theresa a month ago, I have seen maybe 5 sunny days. Of course, this has encouraged me to get to know different aspects of the city. I've been to the museums, I've started attending a charming music school, I teach English in Parada de Lucas. I even started dating someone...I think :) BUT I want to go to the beach. So, if moving within 10 meters of the black and white wave mosaic sidewalk is what it takes, I'll do it. Also, Santa Theresa is grossing me out. There are red worms in my shower and pigeons are shitting everywhere. I can't walk up the hill without talking to one or another guy who thinks I want him. I give this impression to the men here somehow. Believe me, I'm not trying. But when the security guard at o Museo das Bellas Artes tried to kiss me yesterday, I had to face the facts that something in my comportamento is encouraging these dudes. Não! I'm going to start walking around with inverted eyebrows. But if I do that, and the sun comes out and I get a sunburn, than maybe my eyebrows will get stuck like that, so I won't do it (just a little taste of how I secretly make decisions :)

Most interesting and bloggable, of course, is that I'm "teaching English" in a favela. Well, it is a treat for me. I don't know how my students feel...yesterday they were pretty animated, and 10 animated kids in a 4x7 cement room next to an open sewer is quite a contrast to the black and white mosaic sidewalk of Copacabana! But I like it. They are animated (when I say this, I do not mean that the energy has anything to do with my lesson) and they are funny, but they aren't mad at me because I'm the "teacher" or because I'm bad at teaching. So even though I can't handle them, I don't feel bad. I told Nueza, the director of CIACAC where I work, that basically I don't know what I'm doing and things are just gonna be crazy and she just laughed her smokey laugh and said that's fine (I think that's what she said...). After my final lesson yesterday, one of my students invited me over to her house, where she treated me to a cake she had baked for the occasion and a telanovela. I watched her sisters playing a creative game with a ball and big pieces of cardboard in the street.

I don't know how to explain this...I really really don't want to go on about the poverty and adverse circumstances. I also don't want to gie you the "innocent children brightening the streets of the slum" thing. Because, these are cliches. They are true, but I think it's too easy to think about a place like this in that way. The fact is that this is a commuity that is very poor, practically ignored by the government but still made up of people who participate both within the favella community and outside. It is an interesting relationship, that of the government and the favella. If you have time, look up the UPP. Maybe it's the kind of poverty that is so profound that I can't even understand it's depth or see it completely. Honestly, I don't know. But my days there have been normal, uneventful, and pleasant.

You know a little about favellas already, right? Remember Black Orpheus? Or Cidade De Deus? I haven't seen the bad guys, or at least they didn't make themselves obvious to me. I also haven't seen the musicians or the dancers or the singers. Just a few kids and some funny dogs and Nueza. For me, the starteling part is the train ride to Lucas from Central, which is a 40 minute clanging lurching vendor-squacking view of what happens when you go north in Rio. It's not all favellas, but it is all poor looking. Where there are "real" houses is less "pretty" than the favella, because little hooligans have literally covered every inch of surface space with their tags. I wish I could take a picture of this, but I'm a little wary of using my camera (even though really and truly I don't feel threatened here. It's more that I'm reluctant to take pictures of other peoples' difficult lives). They are these black tags, illegible and tangled. Meanwhile, the favellas are covered with makeshift electricity lines, more tangled black lines in the sky. Honestly, it's not very beautiful to me. The quintesential Rio art print is that of the colorful favella climbing up the hill...Where I'm working, there is no hill, the houses are not painted and many are just crumbling and open. I guess at night when the black knotty aspects are muted out by the darkness, the favellas on the train ride are pretty, like hillside constellations. But, I mean, at night all you can see are the lights.

Speaking of lights, another little light of my weekly routine is the chorrinho school in Urca that I go to on Saturdays. It's at 8:30, that's the only thing I don't like. Four hours of pandeiro, and the I get to watch all of the students play together under the trees in the back yard of this grand university building. It's charming!