Daughters of the world

There is one thing I’ll never forget. One person,actually. I usually forget people’s faces,but this boy...
I was in Rio de Janeiro with my family and amazing Italian guide: she was kind, patient and she knew the city as if she had been living there for centuries.Therefore,she offered us the opportunity to visit by car a real “favela”:Rocinha. Not taking pictures, not staring at people,not opening the windows,and pretend everything was normal.These were the rules.

From the moment we entered,everything was like a dream,a very strange one. Have you ever been to Disneyland Paris? There’s an attraction called “it’s a small world”. It is a boat ride that takes you around a miniature version of the globe, with puppets singing in every language. Entering Rocinha reminded me of that feeling I have on that small boat when I was a child, with a main difference. There were no dolls, no colourful scenography, and no other boats with children holding their mums'hand. The deafening noise of the hooters replaced the singing puppets;there were no happy matrioskas on the shores, only real,barefoot people staring from the side of the road.

Suddenly, after a sharp turn, we found ourselves stuck in a traffic jam. It was in that precise moment, when we stopped,that I looked carefully outside,and I saw him. The boy would have been 8 years old. He stood in front of a tatty grocery store, just right by the door,wearing a red huge undershirt.He stared at us.Actually,his eyes were looking in our direction, but they were not staring at us:they looked empty and full of fear at the same time;they looked like the eyes of someone who has experienced so much that he could not imagine something worst but,at the same time,he wouldn’t close them for the fear of dreaming of it.

I travelled, a lot. And I knew, by that time, that poverty is part of reality. But seeing it and smelling it from the inside was completely different from feeling sorry for a child mistreated in a movie. That boy was real, and he may have been the same age I was when I sat on my dad’s leg on that boat in the small world.
I remember I was so shocked that I felt guilty to have gone there and watched those people like in a zoo.Exiting Rocinha, you see the ocean in front of you,faced by hundreds of luxurious terraced houses enjoying the light show of the sunset. I looked out the window and I could still see, right behind them,the crumbling buildings of the favela. There, the sun had set a long time ago, I thought.