I spent the night in a favela. In case you were wondering, it was a first for me. In this neighbourhood withstood the describable abode of a newly acquired friend, with whom I met that evening to embark on an adventurous hike starting at an ungodly hour the following morning.
Upon arriving at the nearest bus station, I am fetched, and sitting on the back of a Honda scooter we put-put over to the house of a family member, where I am offered a humble dinner of rice and beans to eat, and a kitsch cd of reggae music to listen to. It is rare for Brazilians to indulge in food without a fizzy refreshment accompanying their meal, so I anticipate the offer. “Quer água, ou água,” my friend jokes – do you want water, or water? – and places a glass of drinking water on the table in front of me.
It is not long before the time has come to make our way home. On any day prior, had anyone asked, I would confidently have assured him or her that the characteristics of someone well-travelled and infinitely adaptable reside starkly within me. This bull-strong mentality was about to get flagged.
I clutch the backseat handlebars throughout the ride home, resisting the bumps and bends of a dirt road caked with filth and narrowed between two walls that constantly change but in truth all look the same. As the windows we struggle past open small portholes into another way of life far different from mine, of people unbeknownst to any municipality-upgrading scheme that ever may have existed, the realisation that “choice” is in actuality an unaffordable luxury for some hits me between the pupils of my widening eyes. My mind cannot help but keep repeating, I never want to live like this, I never want to live like this. But people live like this. Without.
The smell of open sewerage drives into the singular space as we open the doors to enter, and the attempt at ignoring it distracts my desperate urge to find a coping mechanism. It is after midnight, and the droning sounds of this populated human jungle are only clarifying – urban nature at its rawest.
As I lie on my back in the heat and noise and pungent dark, my stomach sinks into a vacuum above my spine. Hunger, silent, conspires with my inability to sleep despite knowing that there would be nothing in the fridge if I had the audacity to look, nothing spared in the oven if I cared to peak, and even if by stroke of luck there were something to savour in either of these places, my pride would anyway not have had the confidence to help myself to it.
