Fake bottoms and surprised cats in Silicone Valley

I expected to see some memorable things in Colombia, but the fake bottoms have been utterly breath-taking. Until this week I had never seen a real live fake bottom, so every time one has bounced past me I have been alarmed, in a mouth open, eyes as wide as saucers kind of way. ‘Why is that lady’s bottom sticking out at right angles?’ ‘Is she smuggling cantaloupe melons inside her skinny jeans?’ ‘Can she even sit down?’ (Those have been my thoughts as I’ve watched them wiggle off into the distance).

I must have seen more than 20 fake bottoms this week. TWENTY! I didn’t even know fake bottoms were really a thing. I heard about them, around the kind of time Jennifer Lopez was so mega-huge-famous she was dating Ben Affleck, but I didn’t think people actually really went and got implants in their BOTTOMS! As a girl whose derriere has always edged on the side of cushioned and who, since the age of 10, has struggled to find trousers that allow ‘it’ in without the material at my waist and legs flapping like a windsock on a still day, I fail to see why anyone would ever want to increase the size of their booty. But hey, who am I to judge the body fantasies of Latino ladies?

It turns out cosmetic surgery of all forms is big business in Colombia, and the city I’m in, Medellin, is the centre of it all – with so many flocking here to perfect their bodies it’s sometimes referred to as Silicone Valley. According to the Colombian Society of Plastic Surgeons a whopping 450,000 operations were performed in Colombia last year, including breast, bum and facial implants, liposuction, nose re-shaping, face lifts and lip augmentation. Since discovering this I have been keeping a kind of mental tally of everyone I see who has had some form of surgery. It’s fun – kind of like a live version of Spot The Difference.

My score shot off the scale on Friday night during a tango show at a local bar. Towards the end of the evening the wonderfully glamorous Argentine singer began inviting people from the audience on to the stage to sing with her or to dance with one of the professional dancers. As the guests stepped up, one by one, I began to notice something strange: every single one of the women was of an indeterminable age. I’m confident the men were all between about 55 and 70, but the women had been so pinned and lifted and tucked that it was impossible to judge whether they were 35 or 75. To make matters even weirder, they all had the same ageless faces. Kind of like surprised cats.

They got me thinking: WHY?! (Not why had they gone for the same ageless cat look – I’m guessing that wasn’t intentional.) But WHY on earth had all these women in front of me paid for their flesh to be sliced and stretched and pulled and sucked? What were they trying to achieve? Eternal youth? Everlasting beauty? A boost in self-esteem? The lust of men? The envy of women? And more to the point, WHY HADN’T THE MEN DONE IT TOO?

It seems wherever you are in the world, cosmetic surgery is a woman’s thing. A survey by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons found that 91 per cent of cosmetic surgery patients in 2007 were female. In 2008 breast implants were the number one cosmetic surgery procedure in both the UK and the US. Gazing around the room at all those women, and thinking back to all those impossibly large fake bottoms, I was struck by how bizarre and how sad it is that so many women go under the knife. Not just because it carries unnecessary health risks, but because it means so many of us believe our bodies and faces aren’t right.

What I was finding it particularly hard to get my head around was the idea that we are chasing slightly different, equally unnatural, ideals of beauty. In England we want bigger breasts and smaller bums. In France you want tinier waists. In the US you want bigger breasts and fuller lips. In Colombia and Brazil you want bigger bums and wider eyes. In Italy you want flatter stomachs. Forgive me if I have got these slightly the wrong way round, it’s hard to keep up. But the point is, wherever we are it is scarily normal for women to hate the way we look and to want to change it. The only thing we all have in common is the desire to look young.

The first time my girlfriends and I discussed what surgery we’d have I was 13 (ironically I went for liposuction on my bottom); fifteen years later I have two friends with breast implants and a whole lot more who say they would have some form of surgery if only they could afford it. During those 15 years our image of ideal beauty has changed in the UK– from Naomi Campbell to Kate Moss and onto Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Yet the existence of a perfect look has endured – as has the feeling that we are in some way failing if we do not match it.  

There is no innate reason that women should be unhappier with our bodies than men are. In fact, aren’t we already supposed to be the fairer sex?! Perhaps therein lays the problem. As women our bodies are scrutinised in a way that men’s aren’t. They are judged – by ourselves, by each other, by the media, by men – and are deemed objects that could and should be made beautiful. Try to imagine your male friends sitting around discussing what surgery they wish they could afford. It’s incongruous isn’t it?

I have made light of Colombian women’s desire for big bottoms – and of the women at the tango show’s cat-like faces. But really I do not mean to criticise anyone who has had cosmetic surgery. I understand that many women feel it transforms their lives – boosting their confidence and self-esteem in a way that could not have been possible any other way. Rather I want to draw attention to the damaging way in which our culture forces women’s self-esteem to be so closely linked to our physical appearance – and to the absurdity of us trying to sculpt our faces and bodies into whichever is the current ideal of beauty.

I'm still here!

Sorry for the huge gap in posts, I am now writing for The Conversation, Amanda De Cadenet's new interview series in the US! You can read my latest blog HERE. This one's a bit different - it's about Being A Good Partner...  

Pieces of Marilyn Rose

The house I am living in belongs to a mystery woman. She is definitely a woman and not a man because the person renting the house to me refers to her as a ‘she’ and not a ‘he’. But I don’t know where she is, why she went away, or even how long she’s been gone. She must have been in a rush, because she left all her things behind. All the pieces of her are still here.

I have been wondering what her name is. Yes, I know I could ask, but I prefer to look at the clues. I’ve settled on Marilyn Rose – it suits her. Let me tell you about her house and you’ll see why.

Each room carries the talcum powder touch of a grandma whose perfume is vanilla pods and lemony Fairy Liquid. Seven lacy cream cushions lie plump on the sofa, delicately embroidered with yellow and blue and purple pansies. Trinkets and treasures sit on milky white doilies on every surface, nook and cranny: a pink china bootie, a bucking bronze unicorn, a fat green porcelain duck, a laughing dancing flamenco doll, two kissing elephants, a chicken-shaped bowl overflowing with buttons and peach-coloured cotton thread.

The kitchen cupboards are stacked with baking tins of all shapes and sizes, with mugs painted with teddy bears, with whisks, with blenders, with leaf-shaped serving dishes. This mystery woman must love to cook, she owns a hundred books to teach her how – MAGNIFICENT Muffins, The World’s Greatest Recipes, SIMPLY DELICIOUS. The best is Grandma’s Kitchen, a handmade folder she has created with her friends – each of them sharing a recipe for their famous blueberry cream pie, or peanut butter cookies, or a hundred other sweet, comforting, creamy treats.

The shelves in the mystery woman’s living room are lined with ancient books that have taught her how to care for people in the best way she can. The Mother’s Encyclopaedia stands next to serious books on nursing – The DRUG The NURSE The PATIENT, The Complete Guide to Paediatric Nursing, MEDICAL-SURGICAL NURSING, and so on. I can tell she is very serious about these roles of mother and nurse because she has written careful pencil notes in the margins of their yellowing pages. I can also tell she is serious about being a brilliant and understanding friend. The clue for this is a china plate with a poem called ‘Special Friend’ painted on its ivory surface. It begins “Whenever I need support, you’re there to help” – the writing whirly as though the person who made it got carried away, looping the y’s and the p’s because she was overflowing with the special pink love between two best friends.

There are two sad things about the mystery woman’s house. The first is that all her clocks have stopped. She owns so many clocks – miniature grandfather clocks, clocks with horses rearing over ornate round faces, butterfly-shaped clocks, daisy clocks – but they are all standing still, at a quarter to four, or half past seven, or two minutes before six o’clock. Don’t ask me to explain why this is sad, it just feels that way – you’d feel it too if you were here.

The second sad thing is that there are only three photographs in the whole of the mystery woman’s house – and instead of decorating the walls or being displayed in pretty frames on milky white doilies they have been shoved to the back of a wardrobe. Each photograph is big, the size of an A4 piece of paper, and each records a very important moment in the mystery woman’s life. The first shows her with her husband on their wedding day. They are serious and shy and stiff like young soldiers and his shiny white and black shoes are cheekily peeping out from beneath his very smart suit. In the second she is perhaps 45 years-old and is wearing a starched nurse’s outfit complete with her hair pinned back behind a little nurse’s cap. It is the day of her graduation and she is posing with 16 other nurses, who all look much younger than her. They are each holding a crimson carnation and she is beaming so widely she is showing her teeth. The third photograph shows an older her, standing next to her husband and behind a seated young man who has her round nose and a baby on his knee. She is smiling softly this time with her mouth closed and her peanut butter eyes shiny and bright.

Why have these cherished memories been stuffed at the back of the wardrobe? It doesn’t seem right.

There is a funny thing about the mystery woman’s house – something that tells me that for all her caring and treasuring and baking and nursing there is a little bit of naughtiness underneath her kind crumpling skin. On her fridge, amongst her dolphin and rose-shaped magnets is a bright pink rectangular sticker saying: “HOUSEWORK IS A REAL BITCH” like that, in shouty capitals.

So that’s it: the mystery woman’s house. I don’t suppose I shall ever meet this woman who became plump with cookies and embroiders pansies on cushions and bakes magnificent muffins, but I like guessing her name. I wonder if you can see yet why Marilyn Rose suits her so beautifully? Perhaps you’d call her something else.

Sexual assault on Big Brother Brazil?

Twenty-three year-old student Monique Amin was asleep when Daniel Echaniz – a male model she had met just that night – crawled into bed next to her. "We kissed, I remember one kiss,” she says, the following day. But she doesn’t know what happened next. “We touched each other and really this is all I remember."

Asked if she’d had sex with Daniel, Monique replies: "No. Only if he was a real scumbag and did it while I was sleeping."

Under normal circumstances it is likely Monique would never know what had happened to her that night. She had been drinking heavily, causing her to pass out into a deep sleep and wake up with only very hazy memories. But it just so happens that the whole incident was being broadcast to millions live on Big Brother Brazil. And seen via night-vision footage, with the two under the covers, it looks as if Daniel touches or perhaps even has sex with Monique as she lays motionless, asleep.

 “Esta rolando o clime entre Daniel e Monique debaixo do edredom,” explained the live subtitles on Big Brother Brazil’s website. “Ele se mexe, parace acariciar a sister, mas a loira nao se move.”

“The temperature is rising between Daniel and Monique under the covers. He moves, it seems he is caressing the girl, but the blond is still.”

It is bizarre and sordid, even by Big Brother’s standards. But while the show’s producers, Endemol, made nothing of it – neglecting even to include the incident in the highlights show the following day – it has since triggered such outrage amongst social media and women’s rights activists that the police have opened an investigation to decide whether Monique was sexually assaulted.  

Now while we must (at least pretend to) withhold judgment on Daniel until evidence proves if he did in fact assault a drunk, unconscious ‘blond’ (who I’m going to call MONIQUE, because she is a PERSON and not a THING), what is extraordinary here is that the show’s producers quite literally stood by and watched, nay, FILMED and BROADCAST something that looked as if it could be a sexual assault, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

That a man would take advantage of a drunk woman is disgusting and unforgiveable – but let’s face it, it happens a thousand times every night of the week. Somewhere in the world it will be happening right now. That a television crew would film a woman possibly being assaulted is sick and twisted. But that producers could broadcast it live on national television is beyond comprehension – and speaks volumes not just about the lengths reality television shows will go for ratings, but also about Brazil’s attitude to sexual violence.

The day after the police opened their investigation, I meet Ana Paula Portella, head of SOS Corpo: The Feminist Institute of Democracy, a nongovernmental organisation in the northeastern state of Pernambuco . She tells me she is not surprised by Daniel’s (alleged) actions, or indeed by the fact they were televised across the country. “Here we are used to non-consensual sex,” she explains. “One of the biggest problems we see is that women find it hard to identify the line – that is, if or when they can say no to sex once they have started to be intimate with a man. The view is that if she has led him on at all it will inevitably lead to sex – whether she wants it or not.”

Indeed as the social networks erupted, seeing the creation of two opposing Twitter feeds (one in support of Daniel, the other condemning him) it was alarming to read pages of comments like “Monique had it coming” or “it was her own fault”, or “if she wants respect, she needs to learn how to drink”.

Now I am under no illusions that these comments would not have been made in the UK too. In fact, sure enough, underneath the Mail Online’s article about the incident, one reader sneers: “It would not matter to her what happened as long as she got the publicity”. But while it would be fairly safe to dismiss this as one bored, disapproving old arsehole with nothing better to do than rant about the tragic youth of today, according to Ana Paula the hordes making these comments in Brazil truly, seriously believe it is a man’s prerogative to have sex with a woman just because she flirted with him, or let him buy her a drink, or walked passed him in a short skirt.

It is something I experienced myself, albeit on a minor scale, at carnival in Salvador five years ago. Known to be one of the wildest – some would say most dangerous – carnivals in Brazil, my friends and I were warned about professional thieves who we had heard sweep through the crowds, robbing en masse. But while we made it to the end without being mugged or even pickpocketed, what we did experience was intense, overpowering and frankly terrifying male sexuality.

There we were, four girls far from home, tipsy and delighted to be at the one of biggest parties in the world – and what easy prey we were for men who thought we were there for their enjoyment! We were manhandled, snogged and groped, pulled this way and that by guys who would smash their lips against our own. At the time we took it as part of crazy, passionate, Brazilian carnival fun. But it was horrible and wrong.

I mention this to Ana Paula and she nods, knowingly. “We need to change the culture here,” she exclaims. “It is happening, slowly.” She refers to the carnival in Olinda, a town in Pernambuco, where in 2007 the Mayor, Luciana Santo, instructed police to arrest anyone seen forcing a woman to kiss them. Luciana had experienced it herself and called it rape. “Before then [Carnival in Olinda] was awful,” explains Ana Paula. “Boys would move through the crowds in two lines, creating a corridor inside which they would surround girls, touching and kissing them, before moving on to the next.”  

For all its twisted voyeurism, reality television holds a mirror to society – as much by producers’ choice of contestants and the situations they put them in, as by the actions of the contestants themselves. What happened to Monqiue on Big Brother Brazil is disgusting, but at least it has started a desperately needed debate in a country where machismo culture has long put women at the mercy of men – sexually, physically and socially. It isn’t just Daniel who needs to be exposed here – it is a culture in which producers working for Brazil’s biggest television network don’t think twice about broadcasting a woman (possibly) being sexually assaulted.  

Brazil’s women in prison

Seven pairs of eyes stare unblinkingly through a gate of heavy iron bars. Four belong to women sitting slumped against the concrete walls of the prison cell, their legs on top of one another’s so that it is hard to tell whose is whose. The others belong to three younger women who are leaning forward on to the gate. One is brushing her hair. Another, who cannot be more than 18 or 19, is stretching her arms out through the bars, shouting “photograph me” at the top of a very loud voice.

Behind these seven women there are more – I count 18 in total – sitting in the darkness on bunk beds amongst photographs, posters and clothes hanging on criss-crossing lines, or squatting against each other on the stone floor. Daylight is petering in through a small dusty window, high up above the top bunks – just enough to reveal bored, empty faces and damp, sweaty skin around cropped tops and shorts.

I had been prepared to see the inmates at Bom Pastor Women’s Prison in Recife living in close, cramped conditions. Just minutes before, the prison’s Supervisor of Work Augusto Sales had told me the biggest problem is overcrowding. “The unit was built for 204 inmates,” he said. “At the moment there are 689.” But I had not expected this. Eighteen rabbits wouldn’t survive in a cage this size.

I have come to Bom Pastor to see how Brazil treats its women in prison. We have heard horror stories about male prisons in Brazil – about violence, murders and rioting. But I want to know about its women behind bars. Are they safe? Are their needs met – in terms of health, hygiene and rehabilitation? Are there the proper facilities to care for those who are pregnant? Seeing these women – who sleep two to a bed and on the floor – I am already worried.

Augusto hurries me along – out of the long corridor lined with cells stuffed full of women. He tells me the overcrowding in Bom Pastor is due to an increase in the number of women trafficking drugs over the last 10 years. Located on the northeast tip of Brazil, Recife is a gateway through which cocaine is smuggled out of South America and into the US and Europe. But while in the past it was typically men who carried it off for consumption in the developed world, Augusto explains it is now often women who take on the role of ‘mule’. Currently 60 percent of the women in Bom Pastor have been convicted of drug trafficking. They come from all over the world – Brazil, Hungary, the US, Nigeria – and range in age from 18 to 70.  Bom Pastor was not built to house so many.

Luisa* was 21 when she was arrested on her way to Europe with 15kg of pure cocaine. She was sentenced to six years and six months in prison, which she is serving in Recife, thousands of miles away from her home town near Igauzu Falls in the south of Brazil. “I thought it was an easy way to earn money,” she explains. “But now I know no amount of money is worth the sentence I am serving.  I am far from my family…” She stops, crumpling into soft sobs, before raising her eyes to say: “I have lost years of my life. It is not worth the pain.”

Despite her tears, Luisa, who is now 24, assures me life in prison isn’t so bad – mostly because she is one of the 230 lucky inmates who have a job. Augusto takes great pride in showing me factory rooms full of women sewing bed linen and pyjamas, packaging party products and sorting through nuts and bolts for the sale of plastic doors. They work for eight hours a day and earn 408 Reais a month, which is 75 percent of Brazil’s minimum wage. Some send the money home to help support their families, others buy toiletries, cigarettes or magazines. Most importantly for them, for every three days of work they complete, their sentence is reduced by one day.

Luisa’s role is to help in Augusto’s office. For her work is a way of escaping the confines of her cell and the boredom and frustration in her head. “If I could work every day of the week, including Sunday I would,” she says. “When I am here I forget I am a prisoner. I work, occupy my mind, learn. But afterwards, in the afternoon, I return to my cell and reality.”

It is clear Luisa really is one of the lucky ones. Picked for their skills such as literacy or sewing, inmates who work are busy for eight hours every day – they can move around, feel some sense of achievement and edge closer to their freedom. They can afford to buy hygiene and cleaning products, and they live with other women who work, meaning their cells are cooler and less stagnant when they return to them in the afternoon. Their existence is a world away from the 459 women in the cells Augusto is rushing me past – women who are older, less fit or illiterate, at the bottom of life’s pile both inside and outside the prison.

Vicki* also works in Augusto’s office. She arrived in Bom Pastor 17 months ago, and is still awaiting trial for compliancy to murder. She tells me she met a policeman in a bar and went to a motel with him for sex. When they arrived the receptionist refused them entry, so the policeman shot her. She died instantly. An eyewitness says Vicki encouraged him to kill her. Vicki says she had already run out of the motel when the shot was fired – that she had no idea what he was going to do.

Particularly worrying about the severity of overcrowding in Bom Pastor is that it is impossible to separate the different categories of inmate, as the UN’s Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners dictates. This means untried prisoners like Vicki sleep in the same cell as convicted prisoners. And murderers sleep in the same cells as those who have been imprisoned for petty theft. “It is against the law,” admits Augusto. “But it is unavoidable.”

But these details go unnoticed by Vicki, who at 32 has left two children in the care of her brother. She tells me she has refused to allow them to come to the prison because she is ashamed for them to see her here. She says her life has been ruined – if she is found guilty she is likely to remain in Bom Pastor for 15 or 20 years.

But despite all this, like Luisa, Vicki says she is treated well at the prison. “I am safe,” she assures me. “There aren’t many problems here.”  In fact Vicki goes on to tell me it was a relief to arrive at Bom Pastor after the cruel and degrading treatment she experienced at the hands of police. She explains that when she was first arrested, she was stripped and left naked in a police cell overnight. “I had my period,” she whispers, recoiling at a memory she has been trying to blot out. “But they wouldn’t give me anything. So I became dirty with blood. In the morning when they brought me to Bom Pastor they gave me my clothes back but didn’t let me wash. So I arrived here so dirty.”

Across the other side of Bom Pastor’s rectangular courtyard is the prison’s maternity unit, which currently houses 17 very pregnant women and five who have recently given birth. “Some arrived pregnant,” explains Augusto as we walk along mint green corridors painted with cartoon babies and puppies. “Others conceived during the ‘hour of privacy’ they are given when their husbands visit.”

“We have an exclusive cell for the pregnant ones, with different food,” he continues, gesturing towards a barred gate leading off the corridor. “When they have given birth they go to another cell for women who have just given birth.” I meet a specialist nurse who monitors the women during and after pregnancy, and hear there is also a prison doctor. The cells are large and clean, and appear to be very well-equipped to care for new mothers and their babies.

Babies born in Bom Pastor are allowed to remain with their mothers until they are six months old. They must then be handed to their fathers, aunts or grandparents to look after, or else taken to an orphanage where they remain until their mothers have served their sentences. Those who are not collected are put up for adoption.

Tanielly* is 25 and serving a 23 year sentence.  She was an accomplice in the armed robbery of a house, in which the elderly owner suffered a heart attack and died. She had been the man’s cleaner and had alerted the burglars to his fortune and then unlocked the door for them to enter. Two weeks ago she gave birth to a son, Marcio*. Born eight weeks early, he is tiny, fragile and pink, with fingers and toes clenched into tight fists.

Perched upright on the edge of a bed with Marcio cradled tightly in her arms, Tanielly tells me she met Marcio’s father when he was carrying out some building work in the prison. They married, and within months she had fallen pregnant. She says he visits regularly and hopes he will take care of Marcio when he reaches six months.

It’s hard not to feel very sad for Marcio – and for the other babies in Bom Pastor whose mothers have very long sentences ahead. As I say goodbye to Tanielly, feeling at least encouraged by the facilities in the unit, Augusto tells me “the majority of long term prisoners get pregnant in here.” It leaves me questioning the sense of conjugal visits. I understand it is thought they increase the chances of success for an inmate's eventual return to life outside prison, but I wonder about the life chances for babies conceived in this way.

Before I arrived at Bom Pastor, I hadn’t known what to expect. I knew if management were willing to have a foreign journalist look around, it must be one of the better examples of Brazil’s prison service – and indeed Augusto proudly confirms to me that it is. This is backed up by testament from Luisa and Vicki who both tell me life here isn’t so bad – they say the staff treats them well, the food is ok and they feel safe.

But while I don’t doubt what they say, I feel very aware I have not been allowed to talk to one of the 459 women who don’t have a job here, or have not ended up in the impressive maternity ward. And it is the sight of these women jammed into hot tiny cells that will remain with me when I drive out of the prison and see the scale of development work happening all around Recife – the construction of new roads, metro stations and malls, as well as a new football stadium for the World Cup.

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a person should not lose their human rights when they are imprisoned. But I would argue that those women I saw, trapped in those full-to-bursting cells are being denied their dignity, and are leaving in utterly inhuman conditions. I wonder about the hypocrisy of a system which stands to uphold the law, but in so doing breaks international doctrines of human rights.

Augusto tells me the Pernambuco state government are “in discussions” about building a new women’s prison in Recife to accommodate the huge overfill at Bom Pastor, but as yet there are no plans underway. There must be some soon. Because while my experience at Bom Pastor shows Brazil’s prison system isn’t all violence, murder and riots, there is still a very long way to go to make it acceptable. As Brazil takes its place alongside the richest and most powerful countries in the world, it can certainly now afford to take better care of its women in prison.

* Names have been changed.

Wednesday Club

Amongst the coconut trees on Salvador’s Boa Viagem beach are 20 very excited children. Perhaps the most excited is Fefo*, a giggly 8 year-old boy with an extraordinary amount of black snot caked around his nostrils. For the past 20 minutes Fefo has been sitting behind me on an intercity bus, intermittently tickling the back of my head and then pretending it was the invisible person next to him, and telling me over and over again that he’s about going to go swimming in the sea.

Boa Viagem is certainly not one of Brazil’s finest beaches. As well as coconut trees and children, there are two tattered tents, a wheelbarrow, a dumped sofa, a lot of empty coke and beer cans, a sewage pipe, and a bony, untethered pony on its yellow sand. But these things go unnoticed by Fefo and his friends who are now throwing hula hoops and footballs to one another, racing in and out of the sea and glugging down hot sweet drinking chocolate. They have been waiting for this day for a whole month – because today is their turn to come to Wednesday Club, a session run for street children by Instituto Benficiente Concição Macedo.

Estimates on the numbers of Brazilian street children vary from 200,000 to 8 million. Some spend their days working on the streets, selling chewing gum, shining shoes or washing car windscreens, before returning home to their families at night with their earnings. Others have no home or family – because they are orphaned, have been abandoned, or have run away. These children sleep rough and survive any way they can: perhaps by collecting recyclable rubbish which they exchange for money, or perhaps by begging or pickpocketing. The most desperate find themselves sucked into prostitution or drug running.

Set up by Donna Conceicao, a matronly, no-nonsense woman in her 50s, IBCM has been working with some of Salvador’s poorest children and families for 18 years. Around 80 children are members of its Wednesday Club, but due to a shortage of funds only 20 can attend each week. The idea is to give them a safe place to play and a hearty lunch of rice and beans, and at the same time keep tabs on their health and wellbeing so it can intervene if a child is in particular danger.

Today nine children – including Fefo – are from the same family. Their grandmother, 45 year-old Maria*, is here too. She tells me she has 17 grandchildren in total, none of whom have permanent housing. She currently lives in a room paid for by ICBM donors, which she shares with her daughter Ana*, Ana’s boyfriend and six of her grandchildren. While she says it’s a hundred times better than sleeping on the streets, it is far from ideal – the nine of them share just one bed.

While it is ICBM’s first priority to get children and their families off the streets and into safe accommodation, situations in which extended family members or various families live in the same room bring about a new set of problems. The most concerning of these is children’s early exposure to sex. Lurdinha, an ICBM volunteer, tells me it is not uncommon for them to start being sexually active at 9 or 10 – and for girls to fall pregnant soon after they reach puberty.

Fefo’s mother, Dani, has one such story. She gave birth to her first child at 16. Now 28, she has five children and is heavily pregnant again. Lurdinha explains Dani has a learning disability, and that despite ICBM’s efforts to explain contraception and safe sex to her, the message does not seem to get through.

While Fefo is up there with the loudest and most boisterous children, 10 year-old Leo* is by far the most quiet and withdrawn. Dressed only in a pair of grey pants, he plays alone, carefully and seriously rolling a hula hoop up and down the sand throughout the morning. When I speak to him he steps back, his expression something between confusion and a frown. Eventually we are playing a game of hoola hoop catch – in silence, but with a soft smile gradually edging across his freckled face, starting at his eyes and at last reaching his mouth.  

Conceicao later tells me Leo lives in one of the tents on the beach. She invited him to join the club when she saw his mother stub out her cigarette on his arm.

ICBM has never received government funding, it relies entirely on donations from friends and sponsors. In theory the mothers here today could qualify for the Bolsa Familia, a government grant which gives families small sums of money so long as the children stay in education and get medical check-ups. However, of all the five mothers here today, only one of them receives this. Presumably because the children do not attend the obligatory 85 percent of school hours, or go for regular health checks.  

While Wednesday Club is undeniably doing a fantastic job of giving these children time for fun, it’s hard not to feel a sense of desperateness as the day comes to an end. ‘Cycle of poverty’ is a term used so frequently by development charities that it can feel like a cliché. But for these children extreme, unbreakable poverty really is reality. So far Brazil’s booming economy (now sixth largest in the world, having overtaken the UK) shows no signs of changing the fortunes of Fefo, Dani, Maria and Leo, who, if it weren’t for Conceicao, would be all but forgotten. Let’s hope in the future it finds a way to do so.

* Names have been changed.

A January afternoon in Pelourinho

A cruise ship has spilt its human cargo on to the candy coloured streets of Pelourinho, Salvador. Scurrying this way and that, wealthy Brazilians, Argentines, Germans and Scandinavians point cameras and dive in and out of kiosks to splurge on souvenir t-shirts and paintings of the amplified curves of Afro-Brazilian women.

Pausing in the Terreiro de Jesus they watch as two capoeiristas kick, sway and leap to the steady rhythm of a tambourine, their bodies shining and flicking sweat into the hot air. Now a tourist joins in, confused and clumsy, but beaming the carefree smile of a man who knows he has earned his holiday.

Outside an icecream shop on the Cruzeiro de São Francisco a boy of eight or nine with no shirt to hide his small frame sidles up to customers with his hand outstretched. He wants an icecream too. Waved away by tourists too engrossed in their sweet creamy treats to look up or catch his searching eyes, he gives up, leans against the wall and surveys the street before ducking into the shop and emerging a few minutes later with a satisfied smile and a cone topped with a pink cloud of strawberry icecream. Something about that smile says he wrangles that icecream more often than not.  

And then he appears. Silently, quickly. His head down, his eyes fixed to the ground. He is walking towards the bin, dragging a frayed plastic sack behind him – a boy of 10 or 11, 12 maybe, it is hard to tell. A boy too tired, too hopeless, too outcast to beg for an icecream.

He slides his hand inside the dirty yellow container and pulls out plastic water bottles, dropping them onto the cobbles, before squashing them deftly under his blackened bare feet and kicking them into his sack. Within seconds he turns and heads to the Terreiro de Jesus, his eyes still down, scanning the street for more of the discarded bottles he will trade at a recycling point for money. For a moment he raises his head, just long enough to see two pale stripes running down his cheeks. Wide and wet under his eyes, narrower as they reach his chin, these streams of silent tears cut through the grub that is clinging so tightly to his face. He is young, his hair is matted. He looks so very alone.

Stop press! Brazil is getting fat!

Picture the scene. It’s 1987, you’re 12 years-old and you’re sitting on a pink stool wearing a woollen cardigan. You are staring into the eyes of another quivering kid about your age while a man in a Hawaiian shirt (his name’s Timmy) is wielding a comedy-sized yellow and pink hammer above your heads. The man shouts the word “Brazil!” so close to your right ear you think he might have perforated your eardrum and swings his hammer in your direction. What do you do?

If you have any sense you’ll scream the word “football” or “beach”. Or quite probably, if you’re a boy whose hormones have already started raging, you might shriek “bum!” or “arse!” or “bottom!” depending on how rude you dare to be on live TV. If you’re a girl you might well shout “bikini!” or “beautiful!” at the top of your lungs.

You will by now have worked out you’re on hit 80s TV show Mallet’s Mallet, where the name of the game is word association. The chances are you will have shouted one of the above words into the face of your opponent – because they are the words that we in England, and most likely the rest of the world, associate with Brazil (and because if you don’t shout something that hammer will be brought down upon your young head).

But the chances are, if you were playing the game in the future – say 2022 – Brazil might not conjure up the same images you had of suntanned beauties parading the beaches in tiny bikinis or toned men in football shorts. Because according to recent research done by yours truly (which has included observing lots of Brazilian bodies in swimwear on the beach) and other (perhaps more reliable, real) studies, Brazil is getting FAT.

Last year a study carried out among 54,000 people for Brazil’s Ministry of Health revealed some 13 percent of Brazilian adults are now obese — 12.4 percent of men and 13.6 percent of women – while, almost half (47.3 percent) of adult males and 39.5 percent of females are considered overweight. While these figures are still low compared with the US (where more than a third of all adults are considered obese) and England (where almost a quarter are obese), analysts at Brazil’s Department of Health Analysis have calculated if the current rate of increase continues then Brazil’s rate of obesity will match the US by 2022.

I can believe this. I was last in Brazil in early 2007, and while it might be hard to believe I could notice a difference in such a short time – I can! It’s so different now! I will always remember the first time I hit a Brazilian beach. I had sweatily trudged my way to the top of a sand dune, and, upon reaching the summit, looked over into what appeared to be another world, inhabited by another species (a beautiful golden brown and extraordinarily toned species). There I stood, mouth open in a mixture of shock or possibly shame, wondering if I should turn back, because I knew this was not a place I belonged. Firstly I was at the very least 10 shades whiter than even the palest of this sun-kissed species. Second, I was twice as wide and wobbly as all of them put together. And third, it appeared my bikini had morphed into granny pants and sports bra next to the miniscule three triangles the females of this species were wearing.

This time however, less than five years later, having prepared myself for this alien feeling again, it has been totally different. Mini bikinis there have been – but many have been on great big dimply bodies. In fact, I’m not sure why – perhaps it’s because the heat means people reveal more of their bodies here, or perhaps it’s because I wasn’t expecting it – but I am far more aware of the number of overweight people here than I have ever been in England. And it feels genuinely worrying – because it has been such a quick change.

It may seem strange to be writing about obesity while so much attention at the moment is on rising food prices – particularly when I am in a country where until now hunger has been seen as a more serious problem than weight gain: a country which only recently achieved a UN target for reducing child malnutrition. But it is clear Dilma Rousseff’s government needs to start thinking about how to tackle obesity in Brazil – before, like the US and UK, it faces an ill and expensive future.  

Meet Pablo

“Buenos dias!” calls Pablo, hobbling down the aisle of the bus on his makeshift walking stick. “¿A dónde vas?” He is pleased to see me – I can tell because of the enormous grin he is grinning, which is revealing his spindly teeth, and because his eyes are sparkling their own smile as he swings his slender body into the seat in front of me.

I am pleased to see him too. Pablo is an Argentine man, perhaps 75 years-old, who exudes something so intriguing, so magnetic, that when we first met (at a bakery, two days ago) I found myself debating the merits and downfalls of life in Argentina and Brazil, standing right there, in front of the shop. Quite suddenly the offensively pothole-ridden hour-long bump of a bus journey ahead seems a whole lot more exciting.

Save for his torn canvas shoes, faded shorts and Dennis Taylor-esque thick-rimmed spectacles, Pablo looks as if he might have just walked off the set of a Greek tragedy, where’s he been playing the role of the oracle, with BAFTA-worthy believability. He walks with a kind of staff, which he made himself by breaking the twigs off a fallen branch of a tree and smoothing the top for his palm. His eyebrows are thick and white, and reach out of his face as if like a cat he is feeling his way with whiskers. His hair is long and grey, with an assortment of curls that jump about his face. His skin is folded by the years and peppered with freckles. Only his eyes are young: glistening puddles of grey-blue, the colour of the sky before a spring storm.  

I tell him I’m moving on – away from Itaunas, the sleepy town he has recently made his home – and starting the journey north, to Bahia. He says I will fall in love with its small towns “Trancoso, Arrial d’Ajuda, Itacare” and for the second time in three days begins expounding the slow pace of life on Brazil’s vast coastline, away from the city, where there is “tranquilidad”. With that he laughs, an unselfconscious open-mouthed laugh that starts deep within his torso, and I realise that he laughs a lot, quite unexpectedly, as if he’s sharing a joke with the world that no one else can hear.

Then he turns to the window and in a moment his expression changes. Outside, under the afternoon sun, men with plastic packs on their backs point guns at rows of young trees. As they press their triggers, jets of spray fire onto the seedlings. “That’s the second biggest thing wrong with this country,” he frowns. “Pesticides. And with that, its attitude to the environment. Did you know an area the size of Europe has been cut down in the Amazon – to make way for cattle. For beef. As if Brazil doesn’t already have enough beef!”

I did know this, but I want to know more – from him. “The biggest thing that’s wrong with Brazil is the gap between rich and poor,” he continues, as if reading my mind. “It is too much. You don’t notice it so much here, but in the cities – in Sao Paulo, in Rio de Janeiro, it is too much. It’s very different to your country, and to Argentina.”

Soon we are talking about Africa, which he says “humankind hasn’t looked after the way it should”. I mention I went to Sierra Leone earlier in May, which begins a bizarre and entertaining rant about lions (Sierra Leone means Lion Mountains) and why on earth the British Royal Family’s Coat of Arms, and subsequently England’s football team, bears three lions. “THERE HAVE NEVER EVEN BEEN LIONS IN ENGLAND!” he guffaws. “The closest lions came to England is Turkey! There are ravens in the Tower of London… Ravens should be England’s symbol!”

This time I am in on the joke, and between my own bursts of laughter admit I don’t know how lions ever had anything to do with England. He tells me it was of course King Richard the Lionheart who chose lions to represent England, because he “saw them in battle and thought they were cool, basically… When you are back in England Sarah do one thing for me. Tell Queen Elizabeth Pablo wants to know why she keeps the lions!” I’m not sure if I’m laughing because of what he’s saying, or because the sight of his be-goggled eyes bobbing up and down from behind the bus seat is so funny – I can’t see his nose or mouth, just curls bouncing, and those giggling eyes!

As our bus pulls into Conceição da Barra (where he will go to the bank, because Itaunas does not have one) Pablo props himself back onto his feet, and apologises for talking too much. “It is a great problem of mine,” he says, this time in English. And with that he shakes my hand, wishes me luck and hobbles off. And as he goes, there it is again, that laugh.

Fala Português? Mais o menos… Não

Life would be a lot easier in Brazil if I could speak Portuguese. Funny that, I hear you say.

It’s not that I haven’t tried – I did have some lessons before I left London. But there’s only so much you can learn in a few hours, particularly when in between them you are working as many hours as possible to prepare for six months of irregular income, packing your entire house into boxes, attempting to come up with a cheap capsule wardrobe that is light, anti-crease and chic, and planning and attending several events for your 28^th birthday (yes, it’s a hard life.)

Anyway, I’m discovering there’s a certain charm to muddling your way around a country with only a handful of abysmally pronounced words to get you by. It’s full of the unexpected. Have I just ordered a chicken sandwich or am I about to have to be given a plate of tiny fried poultry hearts for dinner? Am I on a bus headed back to my hotel or am I driving off into a faraway and undesirable part of town that just happens to have a name a bit similar to the area I’m staying in (similar in that it starts with the letter C)? Yes, not speaking the language brings a whole other level of adventure.

To give myself credit, I’m not that useless. When I’m in full Pigeon Portuguese flow – talking about the weather for example, or asking where the beach is – I generally get the gist of what the other person is saying and can make myself understood (Gosto do sol. Onde é a praia?). Any Portuguese words I don’t know I say in Spanish through my nose, elongating random syllables and kind of singing in a high voice at the end of the sentence, because in my head that’s how Brazilians speak. I learnt this trick from my Dad who until the age of 12 I thought was a fluent Spanish speaker. In fact on all those summer holidays he wasn’t speaking to the waiters in Spanish: he was speaking English in a very weird accent, inserting an ‘a’ or ‘o‘ at the end of every second word. It worked surprisingly well.

I haven’t come across many English speakers here in Brazil, but there have been times when people have been so desperate to end my stuttering spluttering suffering that they have given it a go. My favourite of these was an unusually hairy but kind girl in a Travelodge equivalent in Vitoria, who asked me, in an encouragingly clear accent ‘Do you speak English?’ When I sighed a ‘yes’ of relief and began to explain what I wanted it transpired ‘Do you speak English?’ and ‘yes’ were pretty much the limit of her English phrases. So I went back to my stuttering.

But the good news is yesterday I think I hit a turning point. We arrived at a family run pousada (a kind of Brazilian bed and breakfast) in a little town famous for its sand dunes called Itaunas, and were immediately invited to the family’s Sunday afternoon barbeque. Very kind of them – but also somewhat awkward due to the lack of common language and the fact we were bus-lagged after getting up at 5am for the seven hour journey there. Anyway, I reckon I excelled myself. A lot of beer definitely helped – as did a lot of patience on everyone’s part (but especially theirs). We sat there all afternoon and into the evening, chatting about how expensive Brazil is now, which vegetables Brazil and England have in common, Arsenal, The World Cup, their dog’s castration, the Dad’s hysterectomy, the fact the 80 year-old grandparents argue over who they give the most of their tomatoes to. Yep, all the big topics. 

Obviously my responses were pretty basic. Things like “In England no mangoes, but tomatoes and apples.” And “I had a dog. Her name is Poppy, but she is a girl so castrated she is not.” But I was definitely understood and it was definitely a lot of fun. 

I hate to think how odd I must sound speaking Portuguese (imagine the whole Spanish-through-my-nose-elongating-random-syllables-and-kind-of-singing-in-a-high-voice-at-the-end-of-the-sentence thing – it’s not cool). And I know I’m still basically just speaking weird Spanish and hoping for the best, but I’m definitely, definitely doing it better now than I was two weeks ago. And that’s Portuguese for progress.