first volunteer experience approximately 15 minutes of real work, just like my job back home

Last Wednesday at 1:30 I went with two other students, the German guy and a Swiss woman, to help out at the aforementioned Instituto Central de Cidadania. Of course they had a lively chat in German the whole way so I mostly stared out the bus and elevator windows on the way there. Which is fine with me. On the bus there was a tall, beautiful black woman who was looking at me, who wore dark glasses, was tall and wearing jeans and a yellow t-shirt, and had a bad leg which could have been a prosthetic, so she walked funny when she got off the bus. The busses here are so cramped in the back (because that's where you have to pay and there's a guy sitting that at what amounts to a desk and cash register) that she had to essentially walk over me to get by. This is bad, but I assume that any woman here who has even a fleeting interest in me is a prostitute, since it's legal here and they are everywhere, and so I was dying to know what the deal was with her but who knows. She kind of looked like trouble, regardless of what she did for a living. And which is why I found her attractive.

We got off in Pelhourinho and had to walk a few blocks before taking this thing that's like an elevator but not, that gets you from Cidade Alta from Cidade Baixa and vice-versa. It's on a rail, so think of a San Francisco-like rail car that runs on tracks at a 60 degree angle.

We met Ivanildo, the volunteer coordinator, at his office in the central part of the city, which is a bit run down and sketchy-looking but I think it's relatively safe in the day. He seemed a little bit stressed out, and was a little less talkative than usual (I've met him twice so who knows how he usually is). We got in his car and drove for about 20 minutes to the poor neighborhood (called a favela in Portuguese) of Castelo Branco, which is right by the main road that takes you in and out of Salvador. By "main road" I mean a two-lane, cramped street with a bunch of street lights to slow everybody down. Ivanildo told us later that the government didn't want tourists coming in and out of the city this way, because you'd end up driving by the favelas, and did its best to make sure tourists entered and left via plane only.

The distribution point for the food packages we were going to help deliver is a Catholic church that's on a hill that overlooks the favela. Most of the houses in the favela are brick, with holes for windows but no actual window installations. They sort of just look like stacks of bricks placed in a valley of dirt, which was originally a forest or jungle that was cleared away. Ivanildo said that violence (at least towards us) wasn't much of a danger here because there wasn't much visible drug trafficking going on and there weren't a lot of guns around. The people are just dirt poor. I got the feeling that they were too poor even for guns or drugs. It was mostly women and children, but a few men were waiting in the church as well, sitting in a wide circle to stay out of the sun, which was pretty oppressive. We got there around 2:15, and the truck which was coming with the food and supplies was supposed to have shown up at 2:00. We're on Brazilian / Bahian time here, though, so it wasn't much cause for worry at that point.

Three hours later, however, the truck still hadn't arrived and I think Ivanildo was on the verge of taking us back. While we'd waited, first in the church and then outside where kids were playing, he and a woman named Alexandra, another coordinator with the organization, had been frantically calling the delivery people on their cell phones to try to get the food there as soon as possible.

For the most part, the women and children didn't seem particularly unhappy, although I'm sure they were bored, and anxious to get the food. Part of the anxiety may have been that some of them weren't sure they'd be qualifying to get the food, since there's strict criteria on who gets food and who doesn't: you have to be unemployed and with children. The men tended to be quiet and middle-aged. This was one of those times I'd really wished I spoke better Portuguese, because I think they probably had stories to tell. They looked like honest, hard-working, normal guys, (as much as you can tell that by looking at someone, which is little to nothing) but I didn't have any way to talk to them, really, to find out what they were like.

The food came finally and the men did most of the work helping the presumably "high as shit" truck drivers to get it off the truck and into a corner of the kitchen. There were something like 50 20-30 pound bags of what looked mostly like beans, which is a staple around here. Everyone crowded around the corner and got into a semi-organized line, and Ivanildo told us he wanted to take pictures of us giving the packages to these folks with these big labels he taped onto them that had the name of the organization. Before giving them out he made some speech which I caught very little of, but the gist was that this was made possible by donations from all kinds of people, and that it brought people from all countries together to help each other. And everyone clapped, to my horror, presumably for us, the (white) people who just happened to be picking the bags a meter off the floor and handing them to the next person in line.

So we handed them out and each person had to stop and pause and have their picture taken getting the food from whomever it was who handed it to them - the Swiss woman, the German guy, or me. This was a bit awkward for a lot of them, understandably, and for others they probably could have cared less. If it was me I wouldn't have been thrilled about it. One woman said "God bless you" to me as I handed it to her. I wanted to feel good about it but I left with a pretty empty feeling because I felt like I was taking credit for a lot of stuff I just didn't do.

I talked with both of the other students when we got back and we agreed that Ivanildo did get something out of it from us, which was the PR value of the pictures. I'm guessing he plans to post things like this on his web site, including a caption along the lines of "Look, there are white people (pictures are proof!) who give a crap about what happens to poor folks in the favelas, even if they didn't technically do any work."

One hilarious postscript to the whole thing was that on the way back, the Swiss woman sat up front and started flipping through Ivanildo's CD book. She tried a few and then landed on this one that was a computer-burned blank, and he was like "Oh yeah, that one's great." She pops it in and what comes on but "Don't Want No Short Dick Man" by the notoriously obscene techno group 20 Fingers. Now that was worth waiting 3 hours for.