The Yale Globalist - Voices on the Edge of the Page

Voices on the Edge of the Page
Narrow Boxes and Fragile Homes in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Saturday, 04 April 2009 | Emma Sokoloff-Rubin

“If I talk to you, will things get better or worse?” That’s what people ask me. Not why are you here, in a neighborhood where you would never live. Not what is this small army piling out of a white van painted with government insignia. Not why aren’t the streets paved yet, or will my daughter stop coughing, or when will the bolsa familia come. They don’t ask, even when their only income is the bolsa familia, a conditional cash transfer that the Brazilian government offers parents who make less than $408 per year and whose kids stay in school.

In the shantytowns of João Pessoa, a city of 675,000 in northeast Brazil, you don’t have to listen hard for violence. Echoes of gunshots mix with loud voices from inside houses and the games children play on the streets. Lives here are not shared through emails or phone calls. They spill into the streets like the sewage, like the colorful laundry clipped onto clotheslines strung through windows of makeshift houses.

I entered these neighborhoods as an intern for Operation Respect, a partnership between the city government and a local NGO. Founder Pedro Henrique de Cristo proposed the initiative in order to raise “awareness of the real current situation of João Pessoa’s low- income areas” and “generate pressure for improved government services.” In the name of democracy and “human development”—terms frequently repeated but never defined—the program sends interns armed with questionnaires to neighborhoods on the periphery of the city.

We hesitate at first. But after five or six neighborhoods, we know what to say:

“Hello? Who’s inside?” When I don’t work quickly enough or stumble over words in Portuguese, a colleague moves things along for me. “Bom Dia. Good morning. Open the door.” And, turning to me: “Things start late here. It’s like it’s still the middle of the night.” It’s 9:30, and the sun, which rises at four in the winter, is already blazing. Someone sticks a head out the window. “This is Emma, she’s American, can she come ask you questions? About health, education, nothing hard. It’ll take five minutes. No, it’s not necessary for her to go inside, she can talk to you right here. We’re here with the government.”

That opens doors. The first question on the questionnaire I complete in each doorway asks about monthly salary. The second asks about employment.

The questions are ordered poorly, but it doesn’t matter. I rarely need to ask the second question.

The government doesn’t spend much time in this part of the city. Riding down central streets from City Hall to the beach, where NGOs have plastered signs with cartoon depictions of the eight United Nation Millennium Development goals, you can convince yourself that bringing questionnaires to the poorest neighborhoods might do some good. When you get here, and people want to know if talking to you will make things better, you realize you don’t know—but that’s not an answer you’re willing to give.

Better or worse. There is no middle ground here, because things won’t stay the same. Without bank accounts or health insurance, and in many cases without doctors or grocery stores, it’s hard to recover from little setbacks—a child’s flu, spoiled food, a heavy rain. Routine challenges pose real threats in the lives of the residents of these isolated urban streets.

“I’m Emma. I’m working with the government to learn more about conditions in your community, things like healthcare and education. do you have a moment? It’ll take five minutes. No, I don’t need to go inside.” I catch myself. I accept a seat on a red plastic chair inside the house. I stray from the questionnaire and stay too long. I notice the pictures on the walls, the children’s bold glances, the details that have no place on my government form. But then I leave, and at the next house my greeting is almost the same. I say what I’ve been told to say, tweaked to reflect what I believe: that the policymakers in city hall need to know what goes on in these neighborhoods.

“The people at city hall want to know what’s happening here,” I sometimes say. “Is there anything else you want me to know?” I sometimes add, and I write down what they say without knowing for sure where the message will go.

If anyone’s been hardened to the promise of democracy, it’s people here. I’m not the first to cross these streets with questions. I suspect the shantytown residents know that the questionnaires will end up in a pile on a desk at city hall.

Maybe someone will look at them. Maybe a street will get paved or a community health center will be reopened. Maybe not. leaders of Operation Respect say they come here to create democracy, right on the street, checking off boxes so City Hall can make sure to represent everyone. But people answer my questions in an offhand tone as if nothing is at stake in what they say. “I can’t read but my daughter can… I’ve heard of AIdS...We all had dengue fever…no, no one died…What? How many meals do we eat each day?”

No one says back to me, how many meals do you eat, so that I can experience the humiliation the question must bring.

The people I speak to buy into this performance, and I do as well— this enactment of a hope we share that if I knock on the door and they talk to me, things will get better. Our conversations let officials at city hall think they know what happens in these neighborhoods to which the bus lines don’t extend, whose streets would be too narrow for the bus if it did arrive. There’s a sense of invisibility in these homes, a lack of voice and dignity that my knocking at the door can’t restore.

Yet people make time in their days to speak to me. And when I learn to look up from the questions on my page, I catch a glimpse of the part of “human development” that involves real people, real interaction, stories that carry answers and an honest, if wary, hope for change: “Will you tell the mayor that when it rains here the streets overflow? It’s hard here when it rains. The water piles up in houses, and the children are swimming in it, and it’s hard when you have kids.”

There aren’t any questions on the questionnaire about what people actually need or want. That part of the conversation happens off the page. I scribble that part on the margins of the page, so I remember, so I know. Then I make a clean copy—all numbers, all yeses and noes—to send to city hall.

“If I talk to you,” people begin, and I realize they’re not just asking what will happen after our conversation. They’re asking about the conversation itself, about who this “you” is—about who I am—knocking on their door. They want to know why I’m there, and what our conversations will mean, and where the content of our conversations will go.

I know where it needs to go. The policymakers in city hall need to know the faces that line the streets outside city limits, the negative effects of rain and drug violence, and the way soccer games and boom boxes fill the streets with a different kind of noise. There isn’t space in the cold, abstract boxes on my questionnaire for the tone of people’s voices when they describe daily realities and daily needs. I write what I can in the margins, but the stories and the people on the margins are easily ignored. Policymakers can’t learn about their own city from my words. They need to cross its varied streets themselves, without clipboards for protection or a list of question to ask and then move on.

Emma Sokoloff-Rubin is a sophomore History major in Timothy Dwight College.

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