Summary
HEALING PEOPLE, PART II - Report
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Extract
Brazil on $300 a year.
RIO de JANEIRO -- My wife and I got used to Lourdes' annual departures. Our maid's happy chatter would transform into vague grumblings and complaints about dotes nos ossos--the pain in her bones. She'd start in on her cachaca-drinking husband, the alcoholic, and her many humiliations at the hands of the mouthy, pregnant teenage girls who roam Caju, the drug gang-dominated Rio de Janeiro slum, or favela, where she lives. Lourdes would say she missed her elderly mother in Paraiba, a poor state in Brazil's northeast. She'd say it was time to retire. Then we'd pay her and chip in a few extra hundred reals for the four-day bus ride to Paraiba and she'd leave.
A few months would pass before Lourdes returned and, after a year, the cycle would repeat itself--the pain in her bones, the humiliation of Caju, the visit to her mother. Then, six years ago, Lourdes didn't come back. We had all but given up hope of ever hearing from her again wh...See the full content of this document
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