Santa Teresa

It was agreed that we would have the last Portuguese lesson in Santa Teresa where Karina lives.

It is still so difficult to tell where is safe and where isn't that all travel is still a bit fraught. Still I got off the Metro at Estacioa Carioca and managed to find the start of the Bonde, which is behind the Petrobas buildin.g.
There are many posters of Rio that show 3 scenes; The statue of Christo Redentor on the Corvocaldo, the cable car going up to Pao de Asucar, and the old yellow tram going over a viaduct. This yellow tram is the Bonde. It costs 60 centavos to travel as far as you like. Despite this the driver and the conductor are happy for people to cling to the outside of the tram for free.

The tram crossed the viaduct and then it joins the roadd squeezes by parked cars, waits patiently while cars and vans in front of it manouvre to squeeze by and joggles slowly up the hill. All the time getting better views of the centre of Rio.


Teresa met me at the Largo de Maraes stop and we walked through the streets and visited the Parca des
Ruinas., which has particularly good views, before going back to Teresa's house to have a coffee. She rents one floor of a 4 story house. An visitor from England rents the downstairs. He was in a Pharmacist when it was robbed. He tried to creep out but the robber saw him and went to shoot. Running from the shop in a panic he was knocked over by a car and run over. (The fire brigade had to lift the car off him!
This confirms what I had already heard about St. Teresa which is that it is lovely but rather close to 2 bad favellas.

Another story about the place is that a woman said that she worked there every day for a year and didn't think it was that bad. She then admitted that once at work there was some shooting in the nearby favella and a stray bullet came through the window and went through the newspaper that her boss was reading. And once when they were driving out of the area in the boss' armoured car when a gangster with machine gun stepped in the road in front of them and forced them out of the car and then drove off in it.

Yet Karina has lived there for 5 years and says that it is fine and she has never had any trouble.

And there area was delightful with a bit of a hippy, arty feel to it and a real character and full of lovely individual styled houses. The next visit to Rio I-will be looking to rent a room in this area. After the intense affluence of Leblon it just seemed like a real place to live.

Karina's house was on a cul-de-sac street with a security guard with a barrier at the beginning. As well as this security she said that most of the shooting was between the 2 favellas and they were at right angles to this. At night she said you could hear the gun fire and see the bullets tracing between them but they didn't get any accidental bullets in her direction. (I guess that houses in the line of fire must be much cheaper).

Karina teaches Portuguese to 2 English volunteers who work at a charity that temporarily adopts children from the Favellas. It was set up by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, (who has married a Brazilian woman.)
He intends to have 3 or 4 places. The one we visited is for 2 to 6 year olds.They intend to have another one that has 6 to 11 year olds, one for older children than this and then a farm in the country where the older onces can go. So .... “a whole lotta love”!

Before I left I jumped on another tram carrying on up the hill and was rather unnerved to discover that after about a mile it stopped at the entrance to the main favella. As the tram manouvered to turn round I noticed that opposite the entrance to the Favella was a police post with 3 policeman in their flak jackets and carrying machine guns.

As a contrast the quaint houses of Santa Theresa here is a shot of the appartment block in Leblon. Apparently when this was built in the 1950's it was the very first high rise block in the area and at this time Leblon would have been very like Santa Teresa.