Translator: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Claudia Sander
Every human being always has a love and hate relationship with time.
It's because we all have different experiences to each other.
We all live different lives from each other.
In this love and hate relationship,
each person understands time in a totally different way.
The fact that I was born in a favela,
removed to a hospital with my twin sister,
abandoned by my mother, neglected by my father,
looked after by a woman who had no family ties or kinship to me,
made me understand time in a totally different way.
That's why I always thought things happened to me at the wrong time.
And I'll explain why.
Before, there wasn't this idea that children don't work.
My grandmother, my mother's mother, who raised my mother and then raised me,
adopted and took me in like a second daughter.
I was abandoned in the hospital because I was born with a heart problem,
but my twin sister wasn't.
My father owned a drug den in another favela,
and he'd done many things to my mother.
My grandmother was afraid that he'd come and take me away,
and do the same things to me that he'd done to her.
And for four years,
she really thought that my heart problem would take me from her,
because the doctor said I had four years to live.
After my fourth year, she took me in
and began to teach me her routine:
washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning and tidying the house,
washing, ironing, and delivering clothes,
collecting recyclable material, getting food from the market,
because she knew that at the age of 78 to 79,
the chance of seeing me grow to adulthood was small.
And I had no mother, no father,
so how would I live?
It was at that time that I understood
why I couldn't play like all the other children;
why I couldn't go to school;
why she taught me to read using magazines and newspapers.
Because if I was far from her,
I could run the risk of my father taking me away.
So, as time went by,
I tried to understand why everyone could study and play,
while I had to work.
It was because, for them, it was time to play,
and for me, it was time to work.
A few years later,
I tried to change.
I felt I needed a break.
And when my 15th birthday came and I couldn't have a party,
I decided that I wouldn't live there any longer.
I needed a change, to give my grandmother some peace.
So I decided to go and live in the furthest part of the favela.
I got married and had my first child at 16.
At 17, I became pregnant again with twin girls.
In this attempt to give myself some time,
I think destiny decided to make things easier for me.
That's when I lost my memory.
When people lose their memory, they totally lose their notion of time.
They don't remember who they were, nor who they are,
and they can't imagine who they could be.
So...
I found myself in a maze, in a blind alley,
I couldn't imagine what I could do,
what I was doing there.
As time went by our relationship went downhill.
And just when I thought that everything possible had happened,
my husband separated from me.
After the separation, I started to do things that I'd never done before.
I started going out a lot, drinking a lot, going to funk parties.
To me, the funk parties were essential.
I'd go every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
to any funk party there was,
in the evening, at night, the early hours.
People who knew me would tell my story and say I wasn't like that,
so everyone thought I'd gone crazy forever.
Until one day I stopped, looked at my son,
looked at the people who knew me and were trying to help me,
and I said, "Why? Why does it have to be me?
Why does it have to be this way?
Everyone's normal, so why am I the only crazy one?"
And I realized that it was from wasting time and losing my memory
that I could recuperate my time.
My life had already been turned upside down.
I like to do an analogy of my life with hand embroidery,
because to know how well the embroidery is done,
you have to turn it to the wrong side.
If the strands are loose and tangled
you discover the quality of the embroiderer's work.
In my case, they were all entangled, all in shreds.
Destiny had done a very poor job
of embroidering all those things that I didn't understand.
But if you do a good job on the wrong side,
one day you'll discover the right side.
And this other side holds a much better future.
And in a clear moment, I could see
that it's on the wrong side that you discover the best opportunities.
It's there that you have to do a good job,
because if you do a good job on the wrong side, the day will come
when you'll find the embroidered side
is beautiful, amazing, and rewarding.
Don't be surprised when I say that I returned to the funk parties.
It was at one of the parties, looking at the girls who came in for the fun,
that I started to reflect on how they'd feel,
how they'd be if they could feel better about themselves;
if they could see each other as people, as human beings,
and not only as funk dancers.
I wanted to approach them, but I had to find a way to do this.
What way?
I decided to become a businesswoman and open a beauty salon.
It was the easiest way to reach those girls.
One day a 14-year-old girl arrived at the salon,
a very, very pretty girl,
she had the face of an angel,
except that she had a problem.
She hadn't come to me to do her hair, or to do her nails,
she wasn't just looking for me, she was looking for help.
And when I looked at her, battered and bruised,
I remembered there was a time when I'd been through worse.
I had an "ex"
who wasn't a drug trafficker, didn't live in a favela,
but who'd made my life hell.
He tried to kill me,
he poured gasoline and set fire to my room.
He had stabbed me.
He tried to run over my son by the school gate,
he tried to run over my grandmother and my son by the church door.
But one day he messed with my son,
who was the only thing I'd have left after my grandmother is dead.
So I managed to get him out of my way.
I decided that from that day onward none of those girls
would have to go through those things if they didn't want to.
My mother and I started to offer free accommodation.
We worked on changing them.
Several girls who went to funk parties only got involved
because they were needing a place to sleep when the party was over.
The vast majority of them came from outside,
they lived further away.
They came from the suburbs, they came from the coast,
they even came from other states.
That's why bad things always happened to them,
because they didn't know the "rules."
Girls from outside usually got involved with boys from the "movimento."
"Movimento" is the name given to the drug trafficking.
They didn't know the rules.
I can't, or shouldn't reveal anything about the "movimento",
because what I did was a life choice.
Even though everyone thinks that I'd made the wrong choice,
I knew from that moment that I would change my life
and the lives of those who wished to change as well.
Some of those girls returned.
And although they returned,
over time, and after many conversations with them,
they also learned the rules.
Until the day came when each one of them decided to go their own way,
when they realized this wasn't their place.
Those weren't the rules they wanted to follow.
Then, through time and medical treatment, my memory slowly came back,
and I even got married again.
Those people who had laughed at me and said,
"Hey, crazy girl! Are you still crazy?
Have you forgotten? Can you remember me?",
those people didn't believe that I'd end up marrying a business owner.
They said, "How is it that this crazy girl goes out of the favela,
finds a businessman and marries the guy?"
And, to compensate, the guy went bankrupt.
(Laughter)
They said it was because of me.
(Laughter)
It wasn't my fault.
It was his fault.
He let it happen.
And to my grandmother's dismay, who always thought...
She'd always repeat these two phrases:
"My dear, a woman doesn't need to study.
A woman needs to be able to read, write, and work...
and find a husband.
No, women need to be able to read, write and find a husband.
And the husband has to work to support his wife."
It was the excuse she gave me to not leave her.
So, to her dismay, my husband went bankrupt.
I was already tired of dealing with those things,
I was already an expert at taking care of my wrong side.
Then a project came up, the favela's gondola lift service.
And, as I had already lost my clients,
who had regained their senses and had returned to their homes,
I decided to study the tourism market.
I could barely read, write, or speak properly,
I hadn't the courage to look people in the face
and say, "Hi, how are you?"
I hadn't, but I needed to.
I needed to learn,
because, besides me, I had my son, who's still with me,
and who depended on me.
That's when I decided to search for businesses
that worked directly or indirectly with tourism inside the favela.
I started to get involved in various social projects,
with various institutions that work there.
And I found that the problems I had
were nowhere near the problems that these people had.
My problems were partially fixed,
but theirs weren't even near to being fixed.
That's when I saw, in tourism,
the possibility of solving part of these problems.
When the tourist arrives at the favela he usually thinks he'll find poverty,
that he'll find someone begging for money,
begging for food, but it's not like that.
What we've lacked for a long time is contact, cultural exchange,
of people seeing us as human beings,
as citizens,
and not only as favela people, as poor creatures.
And what the inhabitants want most
is for people to come and see the reality,
and not to buy the idea that a superficial makeover
will put an end to the suffering of those in need.
So, with my work,
I started to get involved and to sneak into meetings where I wasn't invited.
And there I discovered a lot, until, one day, a public official said,
"Hey, get real! You folks don't even exist in the public policy records!"
I said, "What do you mean I don't exist? What do you mean they don't exist?"
We've been here ever since the Polish man bought...
- who everyone thought was German.
They only called him German
because he was blond, blue-eyed, and came from the war.
(Laughter)
So how come we don't exist if we've been voting in all the elections?
We've been here since 1920.
Can't you see us, or don't you want to see us?
And in the same way he said that we didn't exist,
a lot of people really believe that favela people don't exist.
And it's not like that.
We didn't have any voice because we didn't have the knowledge,
because we didn't have the information.
It was because of what he said that I made a decision:
I'll spread the gossip to everyone.
(Laughter)
I created a Facebook profile, and I started to add everyone.
My Facebook doesn't have my photo,
it has a photo of the favela, everything about the favela is there.
I created the Facebook profile and formed partnerships with various institutions.
I entered the public system and found out about their procedures.
And, in the middle of these discoveries, I created a strategy,
- because not everyone has Internet and a computer -
I distributed information everywhere:
halls, churches, schools,
transport vans and motorcycle taxi stands, markets, beauty salons,
until it reached a point
when the resources came to an end, and then...
my phone turned into a call center.
Instead of sleeping embraced with my husband,
I slept embracing the phone.
Time went by, this was going along,
I was helping and getting involved.
Then one day,
I looked at my son and realized he was taller than me.
I asked him, "What are you standing on?"
He said, "I'm not standing on anything. I'm just taller than you."
But, to compensate,
what cheers me up the most and makes me realize
that what I do is worthwhile, for me, for him and for everyone,
is that, apart from him helping me,
he understands that this work I do,
helping the community association, helping the samba school,
helping local institutions, helping the homeless,
helping people who need a place in a hospital or school,
that work makes a difference.
And through this work I can create the means
for people to have opportunities that I didn't have,
know things that I didn't know, and this includes my son.
What I consider important
is that even though I didn't know who I was,
I recovered my lost time, and I could reinvent myself.
And through entrepreneurism, I discovered that my talent
was not in administering a business, it was in administering change.
And today, if those people don't have reliable information from the outside,
they at least have a reference where to find this information.
Today, I still look after the tourism business,
I administer the Facebook page daily with over 40,000 followers,
I take care of the technology; nobody lacks information,
those on their way to school or work know what's going on there.
I paint about 1,500 canvasses every month.
This is one of my paintings.
I still look after the samba school,
the funk parties, and various other things that take place inside the favela.
I help various people and institutions, and they also help me;
I learn a lot from them, I learn something from each person.
People often ask me how I look after so much
and so many people at the same time.
And for me the answer is very simple:
when you reinvent yourself, time takes on another dimension.
And the best way for you to discover yourself and your talents,
is to reflect on humanity,
wish for others what you wish for yourself,
and reinvent yourself.
Thank you.
(Applause)