The Center for Environmental Education’s recycling program in the city of Porto Alegre employs two dozen favela residents.

Working for a Better Life
A recycling program revives hope in a Brazilian favela

By Teresa K. Weaver

In a favela known as Vila Pinto, on a dusty hillside in the city of Porto Alegre in southeastern Brazil, most people make their living collecting trash. That’s tremendous progress, insists self-styled activist Marli Medeiros, who helped create the Center for Environmental Education here a decade ago and watches over the community like a lion protecting her cubs.

Before the center existed, the predominant vocation in Vila Pinto was selling drugs.

“They knew what they were doing was wrong,” Medeiros says. “But they didn’t know any other way. Ten years ago, we started the recycling program and said, ‘This is the alternative. Drugs lead to death, and trash leads to life. You can choose death or you can choose life.’”

Now, two-dozen favela residents — most of them women — are employed to process 90 tons of trash a month. The recycling program even generated enough extra income to fund a day care program, which allows more women to seek outside work.

“When you see love and solidarity, you can go beyond any obstacle,” Medeiros says. “Hope is born again.”

In Vila Pinto, houses are made of scrap lumber, rusted metal, cinderblocks and cement. A putrid stream of water that you can smell before you see — ironically named Sweet Creek — winds throughout the lower level, where the houses are the most precarious.

One house on 5-foot stilts has shifted so dramatically on the unstable soil, a massive armoire has been carefully positioned in the front room to keep the roof from collapsing altogether.

Two sisters, 10-year-old Maria Alves and 6-year-old Taina Alves, play with a bounty of puppies and kittens just outside the front door, apparently oblivious to the ominous angle of the entire structure.

“Only the hand of God is holding up some of these houses now,” Medeiros says.

At a nearby shack, neighbors have rallied to support a family left in tatters after a mother’s death. One month earlier, the woman had sought treatment at a local hospital for a rat bite. Ostensibly treated and released, the woman returned home and died the next day, leaving behind five children and a husband.

The father is still in a daze, the neighbors say, overwhelmed by the prospect of raising the children alone. And so, 12-year-old daughter Sueli has dropped out of school and assumed all responsibilities of running the household and taking care of her siblings, the youngest of whom is 2.

“She has lost her childhood,” says neighbor Marilda Jurema de Deus. “She’s no longer a little girl.