Maria do Carmo Barbosa lives in Atlantica.

A Different World
Families of a favela find new hope just a short walk away

By Teresa K. Weaver

The city of Guaruja boasts some of southern Brazil’s most stunning coastline and some of its most abject poverty. Sprawling shanty towns known as favelas fill nearly every inch of undesirable real estate — beside an active rail line, where people scamper to clear the way for trains every 30 minutes; on slick, muddy hillsides that are too steep to grade; beside dank, listless streams that are choked with trash, tree limbs and an occasional animal carcass.

In March, four families from one favela moved into the first phase of Habitat for Humanity Brazil’s first multi-unit community, which ultimately will become home to 32 families. Most of the 32 new homeowner families come from a favela called Atlantica. It is a short walk away, but it is a different world.

Edna Souza will be leaving behind a three-room shack of chipped concrete and reclaimed tile that she shares with her husband, who works at a nearby chemical plant, and their three children: Kathleen, 14; Andressa, 11; and Wesley, 7.

The house is long and narrow, with a well-worn dirt path running out front and the foul-smelling Acarau River in back. The house is immaculately kept but difficult to navigate, as bunk beds fill the living room. Andressa and Wesley regale visitors with stories of an alligator that lives in the river less than a dozen feet behind their back door. The parents have pieced together a low concrete-block wall to keep their children “from falling right in.”

A few steps away, Erica Rego Edeltrudes shares two dark rooms with her mother and an 18-year-old sister who has a debilitating kidney disease. The family has defied several attempts by city officials to move families away from the nasty river. “They didn’t have any suggestions about where we could go,” Erica says.

In all of the shacks in Atlantica, everything feels and smells damp. The ground is clearly visible through 2-inch gaps in the wood plank flooring, which bounces precariously with every step. A single bedsheet serves as the door to a rudimentary bathroom.

Every shack is unique, though, as people put their individual stamp on unimaginable conditions. Vanuza Narciso shares two rooms with her husband, who has a job in nearby Santos, and their three children: 12-year-old daughter, Andrielle; and sons Kennedy (“like the American president,” she says), 7, and Cleberson, 5. Vanuza has gone to extraordinary lengths to dress this place up, covering almost every rotted-wood wall with fabric or lace. “This is the best I can do,” she says.

One nearby shack leans ominously toward the Acarau River. From across the water, it’s obvious that the only thing keeping the house from falling in altogether is a very old and sturdy banana tree.

The white bananas are the only thing Ivanir Ivan Batista Ramos will miss when she leaves Atlantica and moves into her new Habitat home, she says. Having finished her daily work as a house cleaner, the 58-year-old Ramos is on the Habitat building site a few blocks away, putting in some sweat equity by mixing jugs of white glue for brickwork in the brutal midday sun.

“I’m not afraid of work,” she says. “And I’m doing it with love. Without hard work and without Habitat, this victory would not happen.”

Ivanir is one of the fortunate ones. She and her family will be moving into a new home by the end of July. Still, she cannot forget all those left behind.

“You look at everybody’s faces and see only sadness there,” she says. “Without Habitat, there would be no hope at all.”