Hello & Happy New Year
As the New Year begins, I know the very first thing on your mind is: What are Carla & Marcos up to? Well, I am glad you asked:
Although at this point I am desperately craving home, I was truly looking forward to a few weeks in Rio De Janeiro. I´´ve been there before and enjoyed the beautiful beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana, the international flavor of the business districts, the good food and backdrop of gorgeous people and the party atmosphere. Yeah. Thats not the Rio I was in for this time around.
This time we were staying in the heart of a Favella (ghetto) nestled deeply into the side of a steep mountain. The road leading up to the area was barely wide enough to accomodate a car...and that only took you so far. Then there´s a 70 step climb (I counted....70 out of 130 to the top) up broken concrete steps covered with debris, animal feces and most days raw sewage from pipes that often break. The home we stayed in was thankfully (for Marcos´ family who lives there and well, for ME) a haven secured behind two locked gates, a modern interior and air conditioning in the bedrooms that worked almost 80% of the time. Let me note again how thankful I was for that house because I was not able to venture outdoors. Too dangerous. Even though I was stuck inside with Marcos´ TWAT of a sister-in-law (that needs another email) I was relatively safe.
The Favella is controlled by the drug cartel wo determine when & where you can walk. Some streets are completely off limits, sometimes to everyone and always to me...an American tourist who has no business seeing their business. There are grown men & women, grandmas & grandpas sitting all day in the middle of intersections whose job it is to watch for the police. But, as it turns out, the police are more of a problem than the drug cartel. Here´s why: if the drug cartels are having a conflict amongst themselves they try to settle it amongst themselves. Yes, they are openly armed but they try their hardest to keeo the average citizen out of harms way. There is severe backlash if you leave a dead body on someone´s property (on the street is okay...wish I was kidding) or use someone´s private property for a shoot out. This actually happened the day before I arrived: a drug cartel soldier was running from the police and their was open fire in MArcos´brother´s backyard. The soldier was reprimanded, forced to apologize and now banned from the immedate area.
The police, on the other hand, learning of drug cartel action, will issue rapid machine gun fire into the Favella. Innocent bystanders beware. In a bizarre way, the drug cartel is a well oiled machine operating with strict rules and punishments. The cops, in direct opposition, are completely corrupt, answering to no on, free to take advantage of the system any way they can. Good example: driving back from the beach, we were stopped by six local police.....enormous men with machine guns. They told Marcos´brother to get out of the car, made him wait in the road for about a half hour and then took all the money from his wallet. Disappointed he was only carrying R$100 (about US$50), they asked him if he had a credit card!! Imagine how advanced the corruption has to be to be able to shake someone down using credit card transactions!! I cannot, simply cannot get my head around that.
I know this is shocking. And if you are a halfway decent peron, you are thinking about the children & families who are trying to live their lifes like this. You can quickly muster up the image of an impoverished cherubic infant crawling thrugh trash between rays of bullets. Heartbreaking. But let´s not use site of the bigger picture which is ME and how extremely diffcult those weeks were for ME. And if you can´t feel bad for me you can at least empathize with my husband. Because you know if I was miserable he was downright suicidal.
Marcos´plan was to leave Rio after the New Year. In seven years that we´ve been together, I´ve never done this....the thing you are not supposed to do, the thing every therapist tells you never to do, hell...the thing every Cosmo magazine tells you never to do...I issued an ultimatum. Either we leave this disease infested shithole together or I go back to the states alone.
So, we´ve been out of Rio for about a week. Yes, there are a lot of lessons to be learned here. A lot of eye-opening moments about how other people live, what a marriage can withstand, what kind of person I am at my core. I´m not ready to digest any of that yet. For now, I just spend a lot of time walking around outdoors because I can and being grateful that I hit the lottery with the life I was born into.
Miss you all and will write again when I get the chance!!