guardian
Favela residents make World Cup work for
them with home stays for fans
Some supporters are shunning Brazil's expensive hotels and say they feel safer in the favela than
they do on Copacabana beach
Hadley Freeman in Rio de Janeiro
Monday 23 June 2014 22,00 BST
Of the many advantages Maria Clara’s house offers, accessibility is not among them.
First, you have to take a moto-taxi - aka, risk seemingly certain death on the back of
someone’s motorcycle - which will race through the winding and chaotic streets of
Rocinha, Brazil’s biggest favela. Then you walk up a perilous cobble path that at times
appears to be almost entirely vertical. About halfway up the path, you might spot a
house on your right that, from the outside, looks like nothing much. At this point, you
have to shout out to Maria Clara and, if she hears you, after several shouts, she’ll peer
over the roof and throw over the key to the door. At this point, you - and maybe your
luggage, maybe not - have arrived at your hotel.
Well, hotel is not quite the right word. “Not a bed and breakfast either - we are a republic
here,” says the grinning Maria Clara, a smart and wiry grandmother who plies visitors
with sweet coffee and biscuits, and she has many visitors these days. Since January, she
has opened up her deceptively spacious house to guests, who live there with her and her
family. She is completely booked up during the World Cup, mainly with American and
Mexican fans who sleep on bunk beds in her back rooms and eat supper with her and her
family on the roof terrace.
Rio de Janeiro is notably lacking in World Cup bunting and decorations, making a sad
contrast to 2010 when it was covered in yellow and green, and this is a notable and a
pointed expression of the city’s, shall we say, ambivalence about the World Cup. Maria
Clara’s roof terrace, by contrast, is decked with World Cup decorations because, while
she certainly has her qualms about the event, she has also found a way to make it work
for her:
“If Fifa could, they’d take the stadiums with them when they leave, along with all the
money. But when I saw big companies in Rio starting to make money from the World
Cup I thought: ‘Why can’t I do that, too?” she says. And she has certainly found a way to
make it work for her: her rates have more than doubled for the World Cup to R$90
(about £23) a night. “Many of my friends,” she says, not surprisingly, “are now taking in
guests in the favela ...”
“Favela” is generally translated as “slum”, but that isn’t quite right. It’s more like a
community. Each one has its own character and Rocinha’s is bright, bustling and almost
overwhelmingly friendly. In the past decade Rocinha, while still comparatively rough,has changed to an almost recognisable extent: a 2008 project has installed a library, an
emergency health clinic and a swimming pool for the residents.
The somewhat unfortunately named favela pacification programme also brought some
improvements, but Rocinha residents complain, too, of the downsides: yes, they like
that they now have street cleaners and some sort of rubbish disposal system, but they’re
Jess keen on the constant presence of police who they say don’t understand their ways.
Others speak more darkly of police abuses.
{still eat breakfast, lunch and dinner to gunshots outside. Do I feel safer? I'm too scared
to answer that question,” Maria Clara says. “It’s good the government have made
improvements, but how about dealing with all the people who have sewage running
through their backyard?”
Nonetheless, the cleanup and, in some cases, full-on gentrification, have made the
favelas in the south zone of Rio an increasingly popular place to stay, and never more so
than during the World Cup when hotels have jacked up their prices beyond belief.
Matthew Wilmington, 25 and from London, is staying in the Babilonia favela in Rio after
seeing a recommendation on Facebook: “I decided to come to the World Cup back in
December and wanted to combine it with time in Rio between England games. My mate
and Iare so much happier we're in a favela: our friends are all in some Ibis or something
and it’s rubbish and expensive, whereas the woman who runs our house makes us
dinner every night. We feel safer in the favela than we do on Copacabana beach.”
About 10 minutes from Maria Clara’s house, down a rubbish-strewn path and up a
staircase so narrow your shoulders touch the sides, three Chile fans - one wearing a
Beckham LA Galaxy shirt - are blearily recovering from the triumph over Spain the night
before. Their landlord moved out of the house so as to be able to fit in more guests and
they are certainly crammed in: three bunk beds are packed so tightly together in the
bedroom you could roll between them without hitting the floor. But the Chileans love it:
“It’s not like we’re poor, but the hotel prices were out of control,” says Francisco Fredes
from Santiago. “People had warned us beforehand not to wear a watch in the favela but I
do and it’s been totally fine. We’re very happy here.
“It’s not entirely easy,” says Elliot Rosenberg, the founder of Favela Experience. “Some
guests expect things to work the way they do in the developed world. It is definitely a
problem for them if they lose their internet connection,” he adds with a palpable eye
roll.
Rosenberg set up his company, which arranges home stays for tourists in Rocinha and
nearby Vidigal, as a way to help the favela residents. Many, particularly in the
increasingly chic Vidigal, are being priced out of their homes by developers, so
Rosenberg saw this as a way to increase their income.
Tourists have been visiting the favelas for a while, particularly on the popular tours,
where they stare down at the residents from jeeps as if they were looking at animals ina
zoo. The favela home stays, Rosenberg says, are precisely the opposite of that: “That
kind of tourism has no positive impact on the community and it is often run by outsiders
who can’t give a real sense of the favelas. We want to improve the esteem of the faveladwellers and break down stereotypes about favelas to outsiders.”
Even though the favela prices have doubled during the World Cup, those Rosenberg
looks after are completely booked out, with more than 150 guests staying in them in
total. Because the people who opt to stay in favelas are a fairly self-selecting group,
Rosenberg says there haven’t been any problems with them. “I'll be honest, I was
worried about the England fans beforehand, but they’ve been fine. The sort of people
who want to stay ina favela are generally culturally sensitive.”
It would be hard to find someone who sums up the sheer variety and fluctuating
fortunes of the favelas more than Maria Clara. As well as now being a hotel landlady, she
isa funk singer - under the name Mulher Maracuja - and a herbalist, under the name of
Mao Santa or “Sacred Hands”.
She was also, until relatively recently, homeless and lived on the streets of Rocinha for
eight months with her five children after being accused by authorities of flouting
planning laws. But thanks to friends and money earned through singing, she bought her
house and is proud of the alterations she has made for her “gringo guests”. She recently
rewired it and covered up all the exposed brick and woodwork with plaster.
“When I grew up in Rocinha, my house used to flood every time it rained,” she recalls.
“Now, I have guests booked to stay in my house up until December. I love it. I want to do
this for ever.”
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Topics
World Cup 2014
Brazil
World Cup
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