Favela Tour

Thursday December 2nd continued.

In the afternoon I took a tour of one of the favelas, called Rocinha. A favela is a slum, like the one that they had trouble with last week. Favela's are lawless and run by drug gangs. Actually not lawless, just not the law we are used to. This favela houses 200 000 people! It's a city within a city. The favelas are located on the hillsides of Rio. The 'houses' have electricity and running water, but the city can't collect much money because they have no idea who is using it. The whole neighbourhood is wrapped in the black spaghetti of pirated hydro and the alleys often have pipes of syphoned water.

The place has one road leading into it, with a check point. There were sixteen of us on the tour and they loaded us onto mototaxis for the ride up the hill. I'm a rider and I was quite nervous. I'm not passenger material, and they drove fast through narrow streets with lots of other bikes and pedestrians. The road switched back repeatedly as it climbed to the top. We were told when we could take photos and when we couldn't because there were gang members around. At one point a woman took a picture when told not to and a man ran up yelling at her, took her camera, perused the photos, deleted the offending one and gave it back! Apparently the gangs and locals like having gringos come to the favela and hopefully leave some of their money.

When we all arrived at the top, we began a walking tour back down. We walked the narrow maze like streets, through the garbage and filth. We stopped at a small art studio run by a couple of young self taught painters, a home bakery that also sold vegetables and plumbing supplies! I guess for the syphoning. We also visited a small daycare/kindergarten that the tour group helps to support.

Our guide told us that this favela will probably be the next to be attacked by the police and military as they try to clean up the favelas before the World Cup and the Olympics. But the police have a problem entering because there is one road, that is very narrow and they can't drive their vehicles or tanks up and the gangs are armed with machine guns, grenades and rocket launchers!

And since the attack last week, apparently a lot of the gang members escaped from there and are now hiding here. All the gangs of Rio are apparently now banding together, and not fighting each other, but preparing to fight against the state!

So, stayed tuned, I don't think we've heard the end of this.