Q: “What is a ‘community’?”

A: A group of living organisms that depend on each other—either physically, emotionally, or spiritually—to fulfill some need or desire.  There is an unseen bond that links them.  By sharing resources, as a group, they are made stronger.

Yesterday, to prepare for our volunteer work at Criança Esperança, the whole group sat down for some serious reflection.  One question that we each had to answer in our own words was this: “What is a ‘community’?”  While we had learned that a growing and less stigmatized name for the favelas was that of “comunidades” (which translates to “communities” in Portuguese), at the time, I still didn’t realize just how relevant the name was.

Before coming to Rio, I had some mistaken notions of what the favelas (or “shantytowns”) would be like, based on my own, limited exposure to poverty.  The prediction was a rough combination of a Native American reservation I’d visited, pictures of starving children in India, and the old “Hoovervilles” that I had read about in history class.  While the previous favela tours corrected my misperceptions in terms of physical differences, I still did not see them as comunidades.  I still thought of them as poor “neighborhoods”…and of places devoid of hope or happiness.  Today, however, all of that changed.

After a day of volunteering with the children at the Criança Esperança building, we had the opportunity to take a more “in-depth” tour of the surrounding, pacified favela.  After being given the option of walking up the twenty or thirty flights of stairs or taking a cable car up the steep hillside (I chose the cable car), for the first time, our group escaped the perimeter and tread through the heart of the favela.  The community was quite the opposite of the desolate “shantytown” I’d assumed it to be.  I have never seen a place so alive.  To even begin to understand what it felt like to walk through the favela, one must remember this:

In a world in which the air is as precious as the ground, one does not “enter”…rather, one is engulfed. 

In this favela, the residents live in a vibrant, three-dimensional world, utilizing the space around and even above them in a way that would put our most “space-efficient” cities to shame.  Houses tower overhead like pieces of a patchwork quilt, while a labyrinth of brightly grafittied corridors winds through, often barely wide enough for two people to pass each other.  Out and about, people are walking their children to and from Criança Esperança, pushing through on their motorcycles, stepping into the little “mom-and-pop” stores, or just socializing with neighbors and friends.  It is true, of course, that there are the mounds of garbage whose smell makes you gag, and that the sewage passes beside you in open grates.  But it is also true that young couples walk down the street hand-in-hand and that strains of music like Bruno Mars’ “It Will Rain” can be heard from nearby radios.  Also, and perhaps the most striking, is the number of brightly colored kites that flick at the sky, guided by children perched on the rooftops and balconies. 

The sense of comunidade that I felt from that single trek through the heart of the favela was overwhelming.  Not only is it a little town, but it is its own, little world…an ecosystem in which everything has a part and everything is interdependent.  It could easily subsist without the world around it.  There is an invisible bond that connects all the members, as I had predicted in my definition, but it is not a bond of poverty.  It is a bond of living and enduring in spite of poverty. 

Where I come from, we have access to almost everything we could ever need or want; yet, we do not laugh as easily or heartily, we do not take the time to fly kites on a Tuesday afternoon, sometimes we do not even know the names of our neighbors.  In my own neighborhood in suburban Omaha, I almost never see people simply enjoying life like I saw here.  But here, in this little, pacified comunidade—a place that is so often seen as something to be “pitied” as opposed to something of wonder—they have something much richer than I have seen in my time in suburban Omaha.  A true comunidade.