Word: favelas
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...Favela...
Last week Carolina's diaries, compiled by Reporter Dantas into a 182-page book called Quarto de Despejo (Garbage Room), her epithet for the favela, broke over Brazil as its biggest literary bombshell. The first 10,000 copies were sold in a week-a record. Rolling off presses were 20,000 more, 'and a 50,000-copy* third edition is planned. Carolina appeared on TV. Earning $60 a day in royalties, she no longer hunts streets for paper...
Fetid Mysteries. To middle-class residents of Rio and São Paulo, the fetid favelas are cities apart, mysteriously alive but best not entered. In her book, Carolina tells them what life there is like. She recalls that for her daughter Vera Eunice's birthday, she dug a pair of shoes out of the garbage. "I washed them and gave them to her." Of the death of a two month-old boy in the favela, Carolina notes: "If he had lived he would have gone hungry." She says, "How horrible it is to see your children...
...Carolina, President Juscelino Ku-bitschek is a "wise man living in a golden cage." She warns, "Be careful, wise man. We of the favelas are the cats. And we are hungry." One time a favela woman knocked on a rich woman's door, Carolina recalls. "The senhora of the house told her to wait. Soon she returned with a wrapped package." The beggar woman carried the bundle back to her hovel and eagerly opened it. Inside were two dead rats...
...Black Whore!" Upon the success of her book Carolina moved out of the favela. Ordering a truck, she loaded up her children, table, two cots, mattresses, bookshelf and six cooking pots. Neighbors surrounded the truck. A man yelled, "You think you are high-class now, you black whore! You write about us and make lots of money, and then leave without sharing it." A drunken woman hurled a rock that gashed one of Carolina's two sons. Rocks struck Daughter Vera Eunice. As curses and the hail of stones grew, Carolina pounded on the hood, leaped aboard...