Favela

Our playground is finished!!!!!!!! It is amazing!!!! Huge items for the children to play with -they`ll love it!!!

What I wanted to tell you about is our visit to the Favela we built the playground for. I think we only went because I didn`t stop enquiering about it. Monika, a very nice maybe 10-year-old girl whose mother had been cooking for us during the last two weeks took us.

I am convinced this visit was unique. No one would ever go there on his own. No tourist guide or guide book would ever take you there.

It`s funny. When I think about how to describe it I can only think of the descrptions everyone would have in his head anyway: huts like pidgion-wholes one next to the other, on top of one another, behind one another, huts inside huts. The houses would be made of everything. Trying clothes on lines (sry, I`m missing vocabulary...) wherever you look. Rubbish all over the place. Many dogs, many children and many men that one should imagine to be working in the streets. Cables that provide the people with illegal electricity and stranded kites caught in the cables.

However, it was different than these well-known descriptions. Somehow it was incredible. I cannot describe this as I only have the words I`ve already put down. It was however different. Being in there. From the outside you have no idea what is hidden behind the normal-looking wall. You enter through a tiny path now broader than the door of a house and you find yourself in another world. One you do not know from any movie, one you would never have been faced with before. No books would have ever described this atmosphere or whatever it is one can not describe...

The moment we entered we were all silent, our heads bent like criminals (only eventually lifting them, not sure whether to greet people or to better pretent not to be there). The sun was shining warmly. Eventually we came to a place where there where many (adult) peple and very loud happy music playing.

We were even able to enter two houses. (one was the one of the cook and one was the one of her doughter`s friend). For these I had, however, never had any descrption in my head. Maybe because it is too far from anything you can imagine. When you think about Favela there is a lot to think about before wondering what the houses might look like from the inside. You would already have moved on to the overal questions of equality and social justice and injustice, the role of the state, human rights and so on...

Well, what does the inside look like? I can not tell you. Our girl`s family was better off than the other one. Although the family had long ago lost their father (only 30% of the families have a father). Two floors, two TV`s, two beds for 4 people each, I think; I was reminded of the house we got to see in Zambia. Many (kitch)pictures of Lady Mary on the walls. An about 16-year-old brother was there, watching his younger brothers and sisters. In a way the place was cosy. But to perceive it that way is horribly wrong. Maybe -even though you wouldn`t be reminded of that while there/ I`m only thinking of this now- you would get most closely to what it is like when you think of the tree-huts we used to build and to play in when we were small. I am sure, every single piece of furniture has a long story to tell. There is no way of imagining where these might possibly come from. The windows would be rectangular holes in the walls made of carton and thin wooden walls. What you see is more huts, some banana-plants maybe, some skyscrapers in the distance.

It`s weird. You heard me using the word "cosy", "the sun was shining", "music". On this day one might have imagined the people to form a huge community living closely with each other, forming a family were everyone is his neighbours` friend... Maybe one should try and imagine the whole place when it is raining (and you find the rubbish being washed down the streets together with all the mudd) or when it is so f****** cold as it gets for example during every night. Maybe one should go on and enquire more closely about what one would have started wondering about when looking for anything like a bathroom inside the houses. There was a terrible looking canal running through the Favela with mountains of plastic bottles and waste on it.

What do you think? If you feel as helpless about these questions now as you have ever felt than you feel the same way as I do. If we have no answeres does this mean that we should not be concerned with the question?