Back to a Nowhere Home

Miriam used to live in the occupied Prestes Maia 911 in downtown Sao Paulo. Her youngest daughter, aged two, developed an allergy so severe to mold in the building it scaled her skin. The doctor told her she had to move out of wherever she was living. Miriam works as a social assitant for an NGO helping homeless people get off the street. This same NGO helped her buy a one room cinder block house on the periphery slum Jardim Pantanal. Was this a coincidence? I finally found a tie to the Prestes Maia occupation and to the expanding periphery settlements.

She bought the house for US$2,500. She has a paper entitling her to the house but the land on which it stands is owned by someone else, so it's ok until the owner claims the land. In other words someone built a cinder block house on illegal land and sold it. For Miriam to keep her job she has to get her children back into school. Downtown they all went to school. It's full of schools out in the Jardim Pantanal but there are three times as many children. After two months in the periphery she found school for her two eldest. She was thinking of taking the youngest with her downtown, drop her off at the kindergarden and then go to work. She starts work at 7 am. This means she would have to leave home at 430 am walk to the train for 30 min, take a 1 hour train, take the subway to the kindergarden and then go to work. Her social counselor prohibited her from leaving her home with her child at such early hours.

Miriam had been working for the NGO St. Lucia, where she had a contract offer for $US350 but upon entry they reduced it to less than $US250. Then they fired her and she received a new job offer before moving out to the periphery. She couldn't take it because of the prohibition by her social counselor. However Miriam is absolutely sure she can get a new job if she moves back to the downtown area. That will take months Her husband, who beats her frequently, stayed in the Prestes Maia because someone obviously had to put food on the table. So the family has a home now, has poor schooling for the children and the parents are seperated for better or worse.

Out here in the periphery her children have nothing to do but hang around the mean streets. Downtown they had a park one block away. Downtown there was infrastructure, restaurants, supermarkets, public transport, etc. Here there is nothing, her home doesn't even have a bathroom and she'e living in dangerous part of the slum. She now believes in the MSTC (Movimento Sem Teto do Centro), even if its corrupted. The MSTC is a socialist movement occupying abandoned buildings downtown, in an attempt to get people off the street or those who can't afford a rent. Miriam knows that no matter what she's not staying here. She's going back to the MSTC and to another occupied building. And she's going back to fight, because she's living proof as she says that when city hall evicts the over 250 families in the Prestes Maia and spreads them out in to the periphery the will have nothing, once again.