On the rains

I had a plan to post on Tuesday morning about my trip to Paraty (a historic lil' town on the Costa Verde south of Rio) -- actually a quite eventful trip, complete with a late-night ER visit and a falling-asleep-in-the-sun half-of-the-face tan. NATURE, HOWEVER, HAD OTHER PLANS.

As I taught an evening lesson on Monday night, it started to rain. Wait, not rain, downpour. Quickly the streets flooded and cross-city transportation became a pipe dream. I made my way home over the course of 3 hours, abandoning a bus stopped for an hour in favor of the metro (not anticipating the winding line and 35-minute wait for tickets with others having the same line of thinking), then standing in the pouring rain to wait for a kombi van up the hill to my home against a strong river of water flowing down the hill. The pouring rain did not stop, and I woke up Tuesday morning to a pounding on the walls and windows. We lost all power, and sometime midway through Tuesday afternoon, all water. My three lessons Tuesday were canceled, and I settled in with the other houseguests to a long evening.

We gained power back late Wednesday morning, internet Wednesday night, and regular bus service Thursday; aside from a small leak in one of the upstairs rooms, our pousada is no worse for wear.

One can't quite say the same about the city. The floods made international news as the worst in over 50 years; the death count from favela landslides is currently at 224. This slideshow is pretty intense, and photos like this resemble what I experienced firsthand Monday night. Basically huge mudslides hit residents of favelas in both Rio and neighboring Niteroi (see previous post), not simply affecting but completely fucking with these communities.

The landslide in Prazeres, the favela right outside my house.

Brazilians are certainly sympathetic, but at the same time resignedly cynical. Igor, our pousada's live-in maintenance man, said something to the effect of "it's what happens when they build their homes stacked on the hills. The residents know that." In fact, even as Rio's mayor insists that he's going to remove the over 10,000 favela residents he considers to be in danger (worried that he "won't be able to sleep all summer" knowing the mudslides could happen again), the favela residents refuse, either insisting that Prazeres is their home or bluntly questioning the government "yeah, but where will we go?" The situation gets more complex when one considers that in actuality most favels are governed not by the city but internally by drug dealers and idiosyncratic moral codes -- even if the police were following an order to remove favela residents, they may find it tricky.

Destruction just down the road.

Anyway, things in Rio are fairly tense now. This is the closest to a natural disaster I've really ever been (and to be honest, I'm a little miffed about the minimal coverage it received, especially seeing how severly it impacted the lives of people here) and this week, combined with the earthquakes in Chile/Mexico/Indonesia, make me slightly less dubious about my Thursday-noon English student's 2012 theories...