View of Rio de Janeiro. Image via Wikipedia.
Brasil is a challenging place. I guess relocating to any “developing” country is. It’s now been a couple of months since we moved here, to Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. We have spent that time adjusting to the crippling bureaucracy that needs to be negotiated at every turn and makes no sense at all for the most part. We’ve bought overpriced furniture and appliances of poor quality, waiting several weeks for their arrival, only to then wait several more days for someone to arrive to “assemble” each piece at additional cost. We have had to pay thousands more dollars in “extra costs” for our shipment from the States to be released from customs where it is currently held hostage. We still have no hot water in our apartment. Thankfully it’s not necessary in this heat. And thankfully, we were able to find a wonderful apartment, even though we pay more here than we did in New York.
Don’t get me wrong — we love being here (they don’t call it Cidade Maravilhosa "Marvelous City" for nothing) — but it quite shocking to see how much I’ve become accustomed to the convenience of living in the U.S. where people can give you a time and date — never mind actually showing up, where you don’t need a social security number to pay cash for a couch, where appliances don’t usually break the day after you buy them, and where you don’t have to notarize and authenticate every move you make, as additional “expenses” continue to accrue and accrue with every purchase. We have been waiting two months (and are still waiting) to open a bank account. We needed to get a “home visit” from our bank manager before they would even consider allowing us to open an account. Apparently, until Lula came into power eight years ago, the general public (sans owning class) did not have access to opening even a simple savings account. There is no mortgage lending here that has any resemblance to what we know (and I’m not talking sub-prime), and one either buys in cash or secures personal loans through guarantors (usually family members) that are land-owners in the same city (even to rent our apartment here we had to provide a guarantor with that standing).
I’ve traveled through war zones, lived in jungles and deserts, hitch-hiked across dodgy-as-hell continents, and lived for years in developing countries, but it’s not the same now: trying to live as a middle-aged woman with a family and mother of a four-year-old. After living so many years in the States, I realize how extraordinarily bourgeois I’ve become, how entitled I feel. Costs in Brasil are extraordinary compared to those in the U.S. What may cost less than $5 USD can no doubt sell for over $100 USD here (I’m not exaggerating), and will fall apart in a minute.
One thing that is refreshing about all this is that Brasil is somewhat accounting for its manufacturing externalities (I’m not talking about the environmental costs unfortunately). Most products you buy here are made in Brasil, and factor in labor, materials, transport, and storage costs, etc. into their pricing. The cost alone makes one have to think about consumption, and there is a beauty to the simplicity of living, where one considers whatever it is before they buy it, and we don’t shop for therapy.
Yesterday our cleaning lady came and washed our clothes by hand. For a half-decent clothes washer one can pay thousands of dollars. Using the laundromat is also prohibitive (I paid around $12 for a wash and dry in NY, but here I spend around $35). Our house-keeper is amazing. What I can do less efficiently in a day takes her about an hour. As I stood and watched her scrub and rinse the clothes (using almost no washing detergent), I thought, “I can do this!” So today I did. I got up early and spent the first two hours of my morning washing. During this time, I realized its much easier for me to write my dissertation than it is to wash clothes. My arthritis (contracted from my pregnancy) came back almost immediately, and I couldn’t figure out how to ring out the heavy denims. I didn’t feel defeated – just amazed at the abilities of my house cleaner, what a great job she does, and how I’d rather be paying a person like her (who is mindful of the resources she uses as she works — and really needs the money) than paying a machine that sucks energy to do a shitty job in comparison.
Another aspect of the “human labor” economy here is support given the aging population. Copacabana was one of the first developments in Rio, and there are a lot of old people living here. You see people here walking the streets in their 90s, and even older, agile and alert, with their care-givers that are sometimes almost as old as them, strolling arm-in-arm down the avenues. I see this tradition of aging-at-home with family and friends as a lot more humane than the nursing home culture we have created for aging in “developed” countries.
This culture, however, has arisen out of centuries of servitude. The country has a long, bloody, and tragic history of slavery that has evolved into a tradition of service. Every apartment has a maid’s quarters (and service entrance), indeed even a large percentage of the maids have maids. However, in large part, these workers have become part of their employer’s family over time, and often remain at their employer’s house for the majority of their lives (this can continue even after they retire from service). Of course, it’s not all that soft and fluffy around the edges. Often, these maids may have to travel three hours each way to work every day, and may only receive a monthly income of around $300 minimum wage for working a full-time position — I do want to go on record here as saying we pay our cleaner $15 Reis an hour).
Gen. Osorio elevator at night, with a view of the shorter, twenty meter tower in the background.
Yesterday we caught the subway from the Gen. Osorio station in Ipanema. This metro stop has a newly-opened sixty meter high elevator (equivalent to a 23-story building) that leads to the Cantagalo and Pavão/Pavãozinho favela communities. Use of the elevator is free. It is connected by covered walkways to a smaller tower, twenty meters high, that serves to get up into Cantagalo and Pavão/Pavãozinho (the elevator services a population of about 28,000 people – a city in itself). These favelas are lodged in the hillsides of Copacabana and Ipanema in the center of Zona Sul (the South Zone) in Rio. Residents of the slums in the South Zone apparently have a better human development index than the residents of Santa Cruz, the West Zone, which has the worst human development index in Rio, (None of the favelas seem to be free from control of drug traffickers. The West Zone is where the recent escalation in violence — car and bus bombs — originates from). Residents in Zona Sul slums still suffer from water shortages and floods, and live with an open sewer system.
The best piece of work / protest / grassroots activism / however-you-want-to-categorize-it that I’ve come across here was earlier in the year during the heavy floods in April.
Shanty construction and protest of living condions, Copacabana beach, April 7, 2010. Photo via O Globo.
Organized by the NGO Rio de Paz, about twenty children from the City of God favela, with gags in their mouths, protested the poor housing conditions in favelas by building a wooden shanty on Copacabana’s beach with material collected from several favelas that were affected by landslides caused by the rains, and that caused the death of hundreds. The protesters also asked for improvement of housing conditions to be prioritized in the planning for the upcoming 2016 Olympics. The action was attended by Brasilian celebrities, who later led the participants, with flowers and food, up to the Santa Teresa slum that was also severely affected by the rains.
Our family has now settled here for the next two and a half years. I hope to participate in learning more about what Mike Davis might call the “cities of slums” here, as well as the more affluent parts of the “marvelous city” I have the privilege to call home. I may just have to be content to periodically sip caipirinhas at one of the bars at the top of the Gen. Osorio elevator until the city reactivates after carnival in March. And speaking of caipirinhas, if you are partial to Brasilian music, I recommend our friends’ Mickey and Kika’s podcast: the Caipirinha Appreciation Society. http://cas.podomatic.com.
