TIE | TIE + Espaço da Criança

Coelhos: Portuguese for “rabbit”; name of the favela where most of Espaça da Crainça’s children live.

While the Coelhos might look temporary due to the wooden structures built on marsh-land, the community has been there for over 30 years. The first thing I asked was where the name “Coelhos” came from. There were three theories: first, that the favela lay hidden from sight like a rabbit; secondly, that once you enter the favela it’s like a rabbit’s warren — small passages between make-shift homes, that all look alike; or thirdly, that they have a lot of babies. All are somewhat accurate.

When the discussion first arose about visiting the favela to see where Espaça da Criança’s children lived I was reluctant. Not that I wasn’t interested, but because I didn’t want to be a favela-tourist (yes, they exist) and say “oh gosh isn’t it awful that these families live on top their own waste”. Yes it’s tragic, but it’s only part of it. Here are the facts as I saw them:

1. I was welcomed into every home, told to take photos and to come back soon. The mums I met were house proud. One apologized for the gaping hole in the side of her bedroom/ kitchen (one of two rooms that constituted her house), where the wood had given-way. Termites are a big problem in a wooden-city.

2. You can’t tell where one house ends and another begins. The houses, or rather homes are completely inter-connected. People don’t live as individual units, but rather as part of the community. It’s unsurprising then that many of the families who are moved by the government (there’s a program underway to build new homes for many of these families, further out of the city: freeing up the land for development, and giving them their own bricks and mortar) end up moving together to new favelas and renting out the government’s apartments.

3. Years of abuse are manifest on every corner. It’s impossible to ignore, or to avoid the drug abuse that feeds the community.

4. The cycle repeats itself: I met a girl in the favela, 6 months pregnant, she’d just just turned 14. She showed me her bedroom that she shared with her 7 brothers and sisters. She had attended Espaça da Criança up until last year, when she’d aged-out. Her brothers and sisters still attended, as did her mother (on the professional development course), until her arrest a month prior.

Her mother was abused, became a prostitute, and turned to drug trafficking to support the family. The money was too good to turn down, even though Espaça da Criança had helped her find a job working as a hairdresser. Now, she’s looking at 4 years minimum in prison, and is also 6 months pregnant.

5. Everything leads back to the drug dealer: All residents of the favela pay rent to the dealer in the form of money and, or food. All decisions about who lives in the community are determined by the dealer. The favela is their theifdom and it’s no surprise that the children want to be them and to do their bidding. To the children the dealer isn’t just the person who sells drugs, they are all they can aspire to be, having never seen or known anything different.

6. And then you go one street from the favela and you’re back in the other Recife with office blocks, self-service restaurants and salaried commuters sat in traffic. Worlds away, and just a street apart.