The two worlds of Yvonne Bezerra de Mello
The distance between Yvonne Bezerra’s home and the community where she works is much longer than the 20-minute-drive it takes her to get there. Yvonne’s apartment building, nested on an arc of Rio’s most famous bay, is a traditional and upscale address with a sea-view, a doorman in uniform and a lobby that offers a few magazine titles, like Yachts and Investment, that can sound more realistic than aspirational as they lie just across the street from a private marina. Indeed, the polyglot mother and grandmother, Sorbonne-educated pedagogue could be easily mistaken as a perfect specimen of women-who-lunch — if her lunch didn’t take place almost everyday at Uerê, the school she founded twenty years ago, a lunch that she shares with dozens of poor kids, generally black, in one of the most dangerous, least accessible favelas in Rio where even the police is afraid to make incursions.
Yvonne bridges that chasm every early morning as she drives herself, alone, to an area the average carioca won’t visit in a lifetime — a favela, or as it is more politely or condescendingly referred to now, a community. To most middle class people in Rio, a favela is the closest and furthest reality there is. The same is true from the opposite direction. Inhabitants of Rio’s favelas, however physically close to rich neighbourhoods, feel so distant from the most basic public services that they refer to places like Ipanema or Copacabana not as “the beach”, but as “the asphalt”, the word for a paved road symbolising the basic civility and modern commodities from which they have been deprived.
A short visit to a Rio favela reveals the absence of what we often take for granted: paved roads, fire hydrants, manholes, piped water, proper sewerage, schools, sports and entertainment areas, delivery of cooking gas, electricity, mail. Some of those services do exist, but are rarely provided by the state or utility companies — the vacuum is instead filled by criminal gangs or groups of rogue policemen, known in Rio as the “milicianos” or militiamen. They charge monthly fees for “protection” and mandate that things like cooking gas be always purchased from the same supplier. In other words, to live in a favela means to live in fear of both criminals and milicianos. It also means to be afraid of even honest, well-intentioned policeman.
On the day I came to visit Uerê at Complexo da Maré, I saw Yvonne trying to convince a six-year-old girl to accept a spray ointment for her mouth sores. The girl wouldn’t respond to any of her questions, nor would she open her mouth, as if inside it there was a sob she was trying to keep forever trapped. For long seconds, it was just Yvonne and the girl, staring silently at each other, holding each other’s hands. The girl had lost her speech a couple of days before when she witnessed her aunt being killed by a “stray bullet” — a causa mortis that has become as carioca as the Cristo, which describes someone shot dead not by design but due to bad marksmanship or faulty identification, a death made all the more obscene for being the fruit of contingency, rather than intention.
One could argue that the worst thing that happens in a favela is not an untimely death, but a life lived in fear. A giant note on the roof of Uerê illustrates how life has been devalued in those lands, and how easy it is to lose it. It informs those flying above the building that it is a “school, don’t shoot”, a message most likely aimed at the police, the only side that owns helicopters and shoots from them. It is difficult to fathom how children can thrive in such environment, but they do, and Uerê and other non-governmental initiatives have been critical for that.
Yvonne Bezerra de Mello became known in 1993 when some of the homeless kids she used to teach — in the streets, under the bridge — became victims in the notorious Candelaria Massacre, the murder of eight children, some as young as 11, perpetrated by a group that included members of the police forces. Years later Yvonne would hit the headlines again when one of the survivors of that massacre, then already grown-up, kept several bus passengers hostage for hours, all broadcast live on TV, a nerve-wrecking event that ended with the death of the criminal and one of his hostages, both killed by the police. The story of Bus 174 was told in at least one feature movie and a documentary.
Today Yvonne tries to provide children with some of the necessary conditions for a happy life, ones that go beyond safety and sewerage: knowledge, nutrition, and that most intangible and invaluable instrument to contentment, the ability to dream. That’s why Uerê not only supplies three healthy (and delicious) meals a day for all the nearly 400 children enrolled at any one time, in all ages from six to 18, but it also gives them some of the other stuff necessary to keep them confident, proud and prepared, like the ability to enunciate one’s thoughts with eloquence, to play an instrument, to know the world’s capitals, to speak a foreign language. It has done so for 7 thousand kids so far. I met a 15-year-old boy that arrived at Uerê years ago almost incapable of saying a word in public. Now he plays the celo, and carries the pride of a kid who knows he has talent — who was given the chance to prove he has a talent. That is another gift refused to most people born in a favela — the belief in social mobility, that one may leave this life in a better condition than that with which one entered it. To see that boy with pride and self-assurance was another miracle performed by the Yvonnes of this world, who believe everyone is valuable and has some beauty to give back to this life, as well as get that beauty back from it.
Uerê has been maintained with the help of a few companies, private donors and the contagious conviction of Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, who invented the pedagogic method Uerê-Mello, chosen by UNICEF as one of the six most efficient in war zones. The most awarded Brazilian female — she tells me that herself — Yvonne still struggles to keep Uerê afloat, and the school budget is covered only until the end of August. This is all the more disturbing because Uerê is a project — like most good projects in education — that can eventually save the taxpayer a lot of money in health costs, education, crime. More than that, schools like Uerê — true havens of normalcy, calm and learning in the middle of one of Rio’s most violent areas — are sometimes the only chance those kids will ever have of an enriching and fully formative childhood.
I asked children at Uerê between the ages of 12 and 15 what was good and bad about living in Mare. It was difficult to say under which classification (good or bad) some of the stuff was listed. They seemed to agree that one bad thing was fear of “the traffic” (the drug traffic), and how difficult it was for the kids to go through areas of the Mare complex that spanned the turfs of different crime gangs. The good thing, they also seemed to agree, was the “absence of crime.” Sounds puzzling to first-time listeners, but not when one remembers that many drug dealers argue they are not thieves and are not stealing from anyone, but are instead committing a victimless crime and filling a demand. “But someone broke in the grocery shop the other day and stole the stuff,” someone says, showing that the absence of thievery is not absolute. “But the thief was caught and killed a week later,” someone else said, straightening the record.
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