Here comes the 2nd letter, finally...

Here comes the 2nd letter, finally... Not from Sao Paulo this time, but from Lörrach in southern Germany.

I have been back from Brazil for over a month now, my 3-month tourist visa had expired and I’m trying to get a 1-year visa right now. If everything goes fine, I would like to go back again in January.

In the meantime, I’m not sitting around bored... J but I enjoy the time with my parents and my sisters a lot. It is so nice to see them more often and with more time. In November our project will be touring in Switzerland in order to present the work that we do, and since I’m here anyway I will be joining them!

A lot of people have asked for the second chapter about the occupied house... here it is:

Around 30 of us had gathered in front of the burnt down school sometime between 4 and 5 in the morning with candles, banners and the mandatory guitar J Most of the over 70 families that lived there were already up and some of them were downstairs in the front yard. It was quite cold and we were waiting to see when the police would arrive in order to start with the eviction. One family hat already loaded a pickup and drove away before they would get kicked out.

Damaris was there to film with her camera and our Brazilian leaders Ney and Fernanda kept staying in contact with the leader of the occupied building in order to find out what would happen next. The gate in front of the school building had not been locked yet, and they explained to us that they would lock it as soon as the police arrived in order to make a statement and let people know that they would not leave voluntarily. Usually the police then breaks open the locks and they don’t exactly treat people with care when they kick them out.

We realised this when one ambulance after the other started to pull into the street and park there and in the area. And I’m not talking about a few small ambulance cars, some of them were huge buses like I’ve only seen them in operations with huge accidents. That made us you wonder what on earth these people were up to...

A little while later, just as many moving trucks pulled in and were parking wherever they could find space.

After that, nothing happened for the longest time. It became light outside and we were still holding our candles and were singing like crazy J . More and more people from the school hat gathered in the yard downstairs behind the iron fence and at one point they gave us a big hand and applauded in order to thank us, that really moved me. We also knew some of their kids that we had taken to the camp the week before. Then they locked the iron gate.

One thing we didn’t find out until later was that one of the judges that apparently have to be present for such an eviction kept driving his car through that street, trying to make sense of this “strange” group of strangers with their candles and their singing... It looked like they had never seen any such thing before and were quite insecure.

More and more “important” people from the city, the police and from wherever, and journalists had gathered in front of the school and someone said they were negotiating whether the eviction could be postponed or not. Unfortunately this was not possible in the end, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference though whether it would happen that day or another.

When it became clear that the house would be evacuated now, the situation started to get serious. I don’t know if I have ever seen so many police and so-called military police on one spot. The military police were wearing shields, helmets, bats and knee-high boots. The street looked rather bizarre, people that lived there, other people that just walked past, the moving service guys and our group were all standing there, feeling tense and waiting to see what would happen next.

Then, around noon, the police broke the lock on the iron gate open. A lot of the families in the school yard cried, holding each other. We even saw how one guy from the moving company and a policeman cried. Many of our group cried as well, there had been such a tenseness and we had waited in the cold forever, hoping that the eviction could be avoided after all.

The rest of the eviction went rather peaceful. People carried their belongings out of the house in order to load it on the trucks. Apparently everything got stored in warehouses and the people were able to get their things back from there within a certain period of time. The school got sealed off with planks and a guard is watching over the building day and night (at least until I left this was still the case).

Some of the families that we knew built very scanty shacks. Pastor Ney and his wife Fernanda visited them there a short while after they had moved there. Of course they were lacking even the most basic things, above all some decent food. So Ney and Fernanda decided to bring them food packages and I was able to go along to deliver them. The former leader of the occupied school was there too, and I thought he was kind of a tough guy. But when we brought the food, he had tears in his eyes and he thanked us that we were there for them.

I believe the fact that a group of young people simply stood up for people that don’t usually get heard has moved all parties involved very deeply and has had a great impact. A lot of people told us, that to them it was a complete miracle how peaceful the whole eviction had taken place, and maybe that miracle was greater than the one we had secretly prayed and hoped for.

I think that if I was ever really proud of having made a difference and something that really made sense, it was then.

I am very fond of the great team I am privileged to work with in Sao Paulo and I’m already very much looking forward to go back. There is so much to do, so many ideas and our leaders have great plans I think. And yet a lot of things are still at the beginning. At least that will keep it interesting!

There is so much more to tell, actually I had planned on writing one page only, this time... It didn’t work, huh. (Or ey, for the Canadian readers J ) But I’ll save the rest for another letter.

Thank you guys by the way for all your responses on the last letter, I was really pleased to get so much feedback!

Hope to see you soon,
Silvie