by Tim Butcher
Teresa invited me into the minuscule hut she shares with her mum and two children. It’s a lopsided mud-brick construction which leans tipsily into the street. The holes in the walls are stuffed with plastic bags to keep out the rain and wind. A sardine would feel cramped in there. And yet, clean washing fluttered from lines which criss-crossed the tiny room. Her two little girls, eighteen months and three, sported perfectly plaited hair and freshly laundered frocks.
I asked the teenager if she would like to go back to school. ‘Oh, I would love to,’ she replied, despondently, ‘but there is nobody to look after my kids.’ Her first unwanted pregnancy forced her to leave school.
The door wheezed open and Teresa’s mother shuffled in unexpectedly from work. World-weary and weather-beaten, she looked eighty, but is only forty. Teresa shyly revealed that her mother was also pregnant at twelve. I asked Teresa’s mum if it was difficult to accept that her three daughters became mothers at such a tender age, just as she did.
‘It is difficult to accept, yes. I was very sad when I found out my daughters were pregnant. But the reason … well, their father was not a good example.’ Sadness strained her face as she lowered her bulk on to the bed next to me, the springs mourning beneath us. ‘He drank and smoked a lot of dope in the house. Both girls were rebellious and angry that I stayed living with this man. It’s been very difficult for them.’ She was fretting at her fingers, bending and stretching them as if warming up for a piano concerto. ‘You see, my own mother, had three children by the time she was sixteen. They were starving. At ten years old, I was the eldest so I became a prostitute to bring home milk for the baby and food for my siblings. I didn’t want to steal. I would rather work as a prostitute,’ she said defiantly, the veins in her neck standing out like cables.
‘I took drugs to numb the experience. My boyfriend, he was thirteen years old, he took drugs too. He became an addict. At fifteen my boyfriend was living off me as a pimp. He use to hit me.’ Her face burned with indignation. ‘I have been a victim of domestic violence all my life.’ Tears ran down her lined, exhausted face. ‘I am most ashamed of the time I had to have three men at once,’ she admitted, her face as crumpled as the unmade beds she is trying to forget.
I felt dreadful that my questions had made her weep. I tried to change conversational tack, explaining, self-deprecatingly that with my diplomacy skills I really should take up a career in hostage negotiations … But Teresa’s mother waved away my apologies and insisted on concluding her confession. ‘This year I’ve accepted Jesus and found the strength to leave prostitution and my pimp,’ she revealed, her voice see-sawing with emotion. She is telling me all this, she said, ‘because Jesus tells us to embrace the truth’. (Teresa’s mother has abandoned Catholicism for the Pentecostal religion – an increasing trend in Brazil.)
She started to cry again, blaming herself for her daughters’ blighted lives. ‘It was so bad at home, the drinking, the violence, it was no wonder my girls went wild.’ Thick tears plopped onto her chapped hands.
Teresa, mortified with embarrassment at her mother’s unexpected revelations, plugged a squawking baby with a bottle and looked at her feet. I probed the mother a little more, enquiring why she hadn’t talked to her daughters about contraception. Ironically, although working as a prostitute, her Catholic upbringing had left her too self-conscious to broach such sinful subjects. Her only advice to her three daughters had been, ‘don’t go out with boys’. She admitted that it is now something she bitterly regrets. ‘We just feel ashamed to talk about these issues.’
In a rather bleak postscript, she concluded that in the Plan-run school where she now works as a cleaner, she can see the twelve- and-thirteen-year-old girls going with men for money. She had worked as a child prostitute to support her own mother who had also worked as a child prostitute and both had endured pregnancies aged eleven. And now her three daughters have followed biological suit by having babies in their early teens. It’s a vicious cycle – a menstrual cycle. The question is, how to break it? Teresa’s mother receives no alimony or social security. She must work scrubbing floors all day to support her three daughters and clutch of grandchildren, even though her hands are gnarled with arthritis. She sleeps in a hammock strung across the dismal room; her daughters and their babies nestled into the small cots below.
In Brazil, paedophile tourism is rife. (In São Luís alone, 1,000 children are known to have been sexually exploited in the last year.) The young girls I met told me of specific bars and service stations where such tourists go, knowing that children will be available for proposition. One of Plan’s counsellors revealed that even though the government says they’re trying to break these paedophile rings, the girls are getting younger. ‘They use to be twelve to seventeen. It’s now eight- to nine-year-olds being offered, with younger children pimped by their parents, in their own homes. Two weeks ago,’ she added, bleakly, ‘a father and grandfather were convicted of having sex with the youngest child in the family – she is four – and of selling her to men. The little girls have to be stitched up as their vaginas have been torn and split. Sometimes they are also penetrated with objects. I see these cases every day and I never get used to it.’
In every dilapidated shack, I found young women who had become little more than a life support to their ovaries – reduced, by lack of contraception and lack of access to abortion, into breeding cows. Forced to drop out of school and unable to work, it’s as though society has handed them an eviction notice. They have become runners-up in the human race. Cintia and her sister share a hovel with their four babies and their mother, who, although also crippled with arthritis, must work as a domestic to support them – yet is paid only at the whim of her mistress. As there is high unemployment, no unions and no basic wage, Cintia’s mother has no choice but to put up with this capriciousness and take the fiscal scraps she is thrown.
At fourteen, Cintia had a baby, prematurely. ‘I wanted to be a police woman,’ she told me, with longing. Her sister, now eighteen and the mother of three children, with another on the way, wanted to be a teacher. But instead they look after their babies and try to help their mother around the house. ‘Mum was angry with us at first, but loves us and the kids.’
But how can these mothers mother, when they so desperately need to be mothered themselves?
Although their shack is neat and tidy, there is no money for a septic tank. The toilet is a pit covered by two wobbly planks through which the toddlers could easily fall. The sisters dug a hole in the backyard, but had no money to buy a tank. Ignorant about hygiene, they now throw their garbage into the pit – nappies, food scraps and waste – where it all festers in the sun. As it’s been raining, the squalid pit has filled with water, turning it into a surreal fishpond in which the soiled nappies bob about. All the babies have rashes, sores and skin complaints, which I can’t quite put my finger on – and would much rather not, come to think of it. But there’s little doubt that it’s to do with the festering bucolic pool in their microscopic yard.
My next visit was to Diana’s tumbledown hut. She is thirty with three teenage children. Here the family defecates in a bucket. The mother then wraps the family’s faeces in a plastic bag and carries them to the garbage truck once a week. This is the tropics, I hasten to add. She does this week in, week out, year after year after – well, you get the pathetic picture. A case of Oh, those old familiar faeces.
Diana’s thirteen-year-old daughter sat mutely in the corner, sucking her thumb. Her legs were covered in bites and discolorations. She is four months pregnant. ‘As a mother, I do what I can,’ Diana shrugged, ‘but in these areas, girls start their sexual lives at twelve.’
Diana’s daughter told me in a faltering voice that girls have sex so as not to lose a boyfriend. With a self-esteem that is limbo low, they dread being cast off into social Siberia. This macho society encourages young boys to sow whole acres of wild oats, but girls can’t go on the pill without parental permission. Most don’t have the fifty cent
s for a packet of three condoms. Many girls die from illegal abortions. They try to abort using herbal pessaries and potions from the forest. The latest misguided fad is for the pregnant girl to eat four ulcer pills and insert four vaginally to provoke miscarriage. ‘You can’t have babies any more after this,’ Diana told me, matter-of-factly.
Worse than the urban slums are the favelas on the edge of the rainforest. The aptly named Poverty Street, Rua de Pobreza, is a cluster of rickety mud houses, with no sanitation and nothing but sheets of plastic tacked to the roof for protection against the five months of rainy season. Half collapsed and open to the elements, the huts look as though Pavarotti has sat on them. There are 4,000 families squatting in this one area, quite literally, as there are no latrines. It must be impossible to get to sleep here – mainly because some insect is always blinking its 9,000,624,439,002 eyes at you in the dark.
Despite this, the young mothers showed me their lean-to’s with the pride of 1950s housewives – the tiny stone fireplace for cooking rice, the well where they fetch water, the palm fronds tied together to make a private place to wash, the earthen floors swept clean.
I had come to meet thirteen-year-old Maria, a beautiful and bright student. Her mother asked me to stay for lunch, offering piranha. Gritting my teeth, I decided that I’d better eat it before it ate me, giving a new definition to ‘fast food’. What an innovative way to lose weight – eat piranha and diet from the inside!
In a water-to-wine, loaves-and-fishes act which would put Martha Stewart to shame, Maria’s mother magicked up a lunch of rice, black-eyed beans, beetroot, tomato, potato and fried fish. The kids stood around wide-eyed, amazed at this sumptuous feast. Starved stray cats insinuated themselves into the hut, weaving a mewling minuet round our legs. Some days the family has nothing to eat, Maria’s mum revealed. The adults sleep on a single, lumpy mattress on frayed, torn sheets, the babies in filthy cribs with the other kids strung above them in a hammock. Maria’s mother told me that they moved here to try to improve their lives. (How bad could it have been in the city? I wondered, aghast.)
Despite the desperate poverty, there is a quiet dignity to these women. After lunch, I retreated on to Maria’s small bed, with her mum and sister, away from the village men. The males hovered nearby, suspiciously. They all had the sort of faces you usually associate with Crime and Accident reconstruction units and I didn’t want to rile them.
Maria is doing well at school. She takes pride in her appearance. Two filthy dolls are decoratively draped upon the bed and a plastic handbag is proudly displayed, on a nail on the wall, along with dog-eared books. Her bed-sheet depicted a beaming Jesus, but the mattress beneath was just a pile of bricks with a thin blanket. If Maria can over-ride her ovaries, this girl could make her mark. If not, she will join the millions of other young women in the Missing Persons Bureau. And who is missing? The girl with potential – the girl she was B.C. (Before Childbirth).
Out of earshot of the men, I asked Maria’s mother what aspirations she has for her daughter. ‘To stop her from having a baby,’ she told me, emphatically. Maria’s mum then whispered that, after a Plan workshop, she started secretly taking the pill. Her sister is operating a similar subterfuge. They dare not tell their husbands. Both women yearn to have their fallopian tubes tied. I asked why their husbands wouldn’t go for the snip, being a much simpler operation. Maria’s mum shrugged. ‘It’s impossible to convince my husband to wear a condom, let alone have a vasectomy,’ she sighed.
So, what is Plan doing to help these brave women of Brazil? A better question would be, what are they not doing? Education, sanitation, nutrition, child protection, literacy workshops, health centres offering free contraception, after-school theatre workshops and football coaching to get kids off the streets – Plan immerse themselves in communities, building long term support and empowering people to fulfil their potential and improve their lives. When it was discovered that Maria and her friends were not attending school as it was too far away, Plan built a school nearby. It is here that the children often get their only meal of the day. (The school has two shifts, one from 7am to 1 pm, another from 1 pm to 5 pm.) In 2007, only 79.2% of children in the north-east of Brazil completed primary school. Brazil has the largest population of under six-year-olds in the Americas.
Plan trains teachers and community volunteers to help young children learn to read. They work with the Brazilian government on eradicating child labour, and providing emergency shelter and food when mud slides destroy communities during the wet season. For the past two years, Plan has been encouraging communities to develop allotments to grow food. In this part of Brazil, young children are fed a staple diet of mingau, a watery porridge made from farine, a starchy flour with low nutritional value. Now families are growing beans, vegetables and herbs like parsley, a spoonful of which every day has enough vitamin A to sustain a child.
There is so much violence in the favelas that children are not safe on the streets. And yet at home, domestic violence against the women and children is astronomically high. With much police corruption (people had told me that if you see a policeman in Brazil – run) Plan’s counsellors, elected by other locals, can be an alternative source of intervention, offering shelter and help.
Without the support of Plan, standing up to the macho Brazilian men, a corrupt police force and the patriarchal Catholic Church would be like facing up to Darth Vader with a butter knife.
As pregnancy consigns many Brazilian women to poverty, it seems clear that Catholicism kills. The dying process begins the moment we come into the world, but it sure speeds up if you are poor in Brazil. Two hundred and twenty-five children under the age of five die every day in Brazil. Thirty-one per cent of family houses in urban areas don’t have access to basic sanitation which results in 2,500 deaths a year of children under five as a consequence of the contamination of the water by fecal matter. The number of young murder victims grew five-fold in the last twenty years. Nearly fifty youths are murdered every day. 17,312 youths aged between fifteen and twenty-four years were murdered in 2006.
The Pope promotes abstinence. Well, yes, of course, the one hundred percent safe oral contraceptive is the word ‘no’. But with child prostitution and rape rife, this is not an option. Termination is illegal, so when women go to the hospital bleeding from a self-administered abortion, the doctors must report them to the police. One hundred women are currently awaiting trial on self-abortion charges. Recently, a nine-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather. She became pregnant with twins. The Bishop for Pernambuco swore to excommunicate the family and the doctors if they aborted the foetus. And yet it’s clear the sanctity of life stops the moment the baby is born – after that the Catholic Church chickens out of its obligations to those eggs. It fails to protect the children its policies have brought into the world, particularly all the little girls who have been pimped by their poverty-stricken parents or left to starve by an indifferent state.
Brazil is a patriarchal society. The girls must get up at six and help their mothers prepare breakfast. The sons get an extra lie-in. When the kids come home from school, the boys play soccer. The girls must help with domestic chores. Seventy-eight per cent of the population believe that domestic violence will go unpunished. During my time in Brazil, everyone was on swine flu alert. But Brazilian women have dated so many swine, even married one or two, and confessed to others in church, that they must surely be immune?
But even so, the spirit of the young Brazilian women I met shone through. Their joy and optimism in the face of adversity made my heart expand like an accordion. Every child I met had the sort of neon smile that made you wish you were wearing Polaroids. When I went swimming with some of the girls from the favela, they giggled uncontrollably at my conservative one-piece swimming costume and my unwaxed pudenda. Even though there is no money for waxing, the girls do trim. (Brazilians are obsessed with deforestation. The rainforest doesn’t stand a chance!) I retorted that I liked my pubic hair – that it was like h
aving a little pet in my pants at which they roared with laughter, teasing me mercilessly. I may not wax, but I will wax lyrical about the resilient, beautiful young women of Brazil.
Ballad of a Cambodian Man
XIAOLU GUO
Xiaolu Guo was born in 1973 in south China. She studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. The English translation of Village of Stone (Chatto, 2004) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Chatto, 2007) was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. UFO In Her Eyes (Chatto, 2009) is her latest novel. Xiaolu’s film-making career continues to flourish: Her feature She, A Chinese received a Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival (2009), and How is Your Fish Today? (2006) was selected for the Sundance Festival and awarded the prize for best fiction feature at the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival.
THE OLD POLICEMAN stepped into the muddy rainwater streaming through the market. A smell of rotted durian fruit hung thickly in the air. He walked fast, with a sad joy, constantly colliding with busy shoppers, driven on by his eagerness to get home. He had to fix his rotten motorbike as soon as possible, and then drive to a village fifteen miles away before sunset.
Dara, or ‘the old policeman’, as the locals called him, was not really old. He had only just hit fifty, but was still the oldest in his police office. In Siem Reap, or in any of the big towns in Cambodia, apart from those who became bosses, all the older policemen were either retired or had no need to work anymore, thanks to the pocket money they got from bribes. But Dara was still there, and had been for half his life, carrying a gun in northern Cambodia. He was neither rich nor particularly poor, and he was reasonably kind to people, if they weren’t discouraged by his silence and often grumpy, motionless face. Dara was, after all, a man with a secret, and an inscrutable dignity. He barely talked about his past; some people said that he had been a soldier when he was young. But his short, solid body showed none of the usual signs, unlike others who had lost their limbs to mines during the war.