Side Effects - A Day in the Community
“I’d love to hear your impressions,” Theresa said to me as we boarded the bus outside of Rocinha, “about what you think of the communities here vs. where you lived in Kenya.” Here was Rio de Janiero, Brazil and in Kenya was Kibera, a million-person shantytown in Nairobi, where I had just spent the previous three months living and working. Theresa and I were catching a bus to the outskirts of Rio for a visit with local community leaders and to spend a “Day in the Community”, a regular event that brings together children and neighbors from six of Rio’s favelas, Brazil’s illegal communities. Theresa and I found a seat as the bus lurched forward and I sat there wondering about her request. What preconceptions had living in an African slum given me about a South American one?
The bus picked up speed and Rocinha faded into the distance. I leaned back into the seat and rubbed the palms of my hands over my face; my head was in a whirl, not just from the warm Brazilian hospitality and strong caipirinhas of my night out before but also from the eclectic route we were taking through Rio. We had started our trip in the beautiful and trendy neighborhood of Jardim Botânico, with lush green mountains and inland lagoon, switched buses in front of Rocinha, the Americas’ largest squatter city with its two hundred thousand residents and overflowing hillside houses, and were on our way to Asa Branca, a twenty year old favela I knew nothing about, yet somehow had inadvertently impacted months before. Theresa looked at me for a moment and gave my shoulder a squeeze, sensing if not understanding my confusion. I let my hands fall back to my lap and I smiled back at her, relaxing a little before turning my gaze back to the passing communities.
Theresa Williamson is the founder and executive director of Catalytic Communities (CatComm), a Washington D.C. and Rio based organization that creates spaces to empower community leaders. These spaces, both physical and virtual, are designed to share solutions and foster new relationships, in the process growing a local/global network that catalyzes community development and engagement. I never could have predicted that a chance encounter with Theresa nine months before in San Francisco would draw me into this world-changing network. However, CatComm’s mission of creating connections is mirrored in Theresa’s personality and so it was no real surprise that here I was, stepping off the bus onto a dusty street corner in a Brazilian favela with Asa Branca’s community leader, Carlos “Bezerra” Costa, reaching out his arms to greet me like an old friend. The strangest part of it all was that despite this being my first visit to Asa Branca, I knew that I had already been there. I had Theresa and CatComm to thank for that.
Bezerra quickly started us on a walking tour of the neighborhood and I began making comparisons between Asa Branca and Kibera. My first impression was that most Kiberans would be thrilled to live in a place like Asa Branca. Sure, like Kibera there were some scrap metal shacks for homes and a river with overflowing garbage behind the community, however mixed in amongst it all were charming, locally built houses, one and two story structures of cement or wood with red clay tiled roofs and green gardens in front. Even the shacks had potted plants hanging on their outer walls, the level of care bearing no relation to the quality of the building material. And, trash-laden river aside, the community was clean and the streets were smooth, there were no open sewage trenches and we’d even see the occasional parked car and speed bumps. This is what Kibera could be like if allowed to develop, I thought.
As we walked down dusty white streets past houses, stores and bars, I noticed that Bezerra would introduce Theresa to the people on the street as “a member of my family”, each introduction provoking Theresa to flash a warm smile. Theresa explained to me that the engagement with Bezerra and Asa Branca is one of CatComm’s longest running relationships; Theresa has personally been documenting the community’s development for years and Bezerra is a regular visitor to the Casa do Gestor Catalisador, CatComm’s community hub in Rio. Asa Branca is a great example of how a community can solve its own problems: while the city government ignored it, Asa Branca organized to install its own community sewage system and to raise its streets against flooding. That project and others are documented in detail in CatComm’s Community Solutions Database, available in three languages at http://www.CatComm.org/ The database is one of CatComm’s most important tools and is the main draw to the organization, but the power of Catalytic Communities is not just captured in the solutions found on its website, nor just in the Casa where community leaders meet. Actually, what CatComm does is only a fraction of what it creates, evident in the fact that I was now sitting down to have lunch with Bezerra and his family.
Allow me to explain.
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