"No, this is Brasil," she told me. "Right now, we’re probably over Goias or Minas Gerais."

"It looks like there’s nobody down there," I said.

She said: "That’s how it’s always looked to you."

I asked her if she was talking about me or my country. She just looked away and stared out the window at, what for me, was emptiness. I do love her passion, which sometimes inhabits silence. And I more than tolerate her views, I positively rejoice in them no matter how inconvenient they are to me. Her political incorrectness is simply charming; paradise itself would be a bore if there wasn’t someone to pluck feathers out of the angels’ wings. As long as they can still fly, what’s the difference?

Finally, after an hour that seemed to be a container for infinity, we saw the tiny candles of towns appearing in the night, leading us, like footprints, towards significant concentrations of human habitation. And then, the great bowl of lights that was Rio de Janeiro appeared beneath the red wing lights of our airplane, crying out to the universe that there was life here, after all. It seemed to me that we were about to crash into a field when suddenly a runway appeared below and we were back on the earth, glad to end our momentary, awkward imitation of the birds. Dirse and I hugged, and she said: "Welcome to my country."

Since then, we have spent two days in the hotel waiting to be transferred to the secure compound, although the hotel itself is quite safe, patrolled by soldiers with automatic rifles who smile little, and would frisk their own mother, which is most reassuring to us. Though Dirse warned me against it, I went out onto the street for a little breath of fresh air and saw the dark faces we have come to help: pure black faces, straight from Africa, boisterous, curious, and sometimes hostile; Indian faces with that impassive beauty cracked open like a vault by the extroversion which surrounds them; white faces that could be European, like foam on the surface of an ocean of color; and everywhere, a most incredible mixture of the races: mulattos, mulattas, mestizos, mestizas, zambos, zambas, hybrids of both extraordinary beauty and ugliness, Galateas and Calibans, genetic masterpieces and genetic disasters, surly chimeras and brilliant pioneers of the cosmic race. It is like a rainbow blowing up in your face. For the last two nights, I have not been able to shut them out of my mind, even with my eyes closed and covered with an opaque cloth in my bedroom; they have swarmed into my consciousness like the army ants which eat huge paths through the jungle, devouring flowers the size of plates. "Where are you from?" they asked me.

I’ve been told to say I am from Ireland, but I told them: "From the U.S."

Some of them stretched out their hands to me and said, "Well, good luck. If you manage to put up with us, we’ll find a way to put up with you."

Those who didn’t like me merely shrugged and said, "It can’t be helped."

When I told Dirse about my walk, she slapped me saying I had risked my life. She made me promise never to go out on my own again.

According to Colonel Barry, there is nothing to this legend, but it has nonetheless, become a force to be reckoned with because people believe in it, and it gives them hope. The ERB, the rebel army which was in tatters only six months ago, is said to be regrouping, and its urban cells revitalizing, on the basis of this legend, which is inspiring beaten men to try again. More than this, Colonel Barry fears the impact of this new myth on the gigantic masses of the discontented and the volatile," the shapeless, latent force of the poor", whose apathy, if ignited, could be as devastating as an avalanche; and if, injected with leadership, as lethal as a car bomb.

Colonel Barry disagreed with Rabey’s dismissal, insisting that from the military point of view, psychology cannot be completely pushed aside by material factors. "Myths can be as dangerous as trenches and foxholes, they can give shelter to the enemy. Real people can shoot you from inside a myth. We are experiencing a period of heightened agitation on the basis of this runaway urban legend. In this context, the importance of the Hand-to-the-World program as an image-changer for our nation, and a rage-squelcher here in Brazil cannot be overemphasized. We need to counteract the escalation of revolutionary energy with a perceptual reconstruction of the meaning of our presence, and the motives of the ASB."

By the time the meeting was over I felt more like a sociologist than a doctor; more like a part of the military-police apparatus than a disciple of Aesculapius.

When I told Dirse about the meeting she just told me, "Your Mr. Rabies knows next to nothing. That Che Guevara was a hell of a fighter. The very thought of him coming here to fight would be enough to make me throw in my lot with the guerrillas. With those eyes like a French kiss…"

I told her, "You shouldn’t make jokes like that, not at a time like this." Sometimes it isn’t easy to live with such a livewire. Sometimes, the hot pepper is just a little too hot.

Captain Mendez escorted us out of the secure zone in a lorry preceded by a jeep with a machine gun mounted on it and followed by an armored car with a machine gun that merits the name of "cannon", and tubes that looked like organ pipes in a church for launching rockets. When I asked him for a pistol for myself, to put in my belt, since our armed escort only succeeded in making the situation seem more alarming than it already was – to us it seemed like we were divers being given an empty can of shark repellent, which simultaneously lets you know that there are sharks in the water and that you have no defense against them - Captain Mendez protested, "Don’t you trust us to protect you?"

I answered, "Well, just in case a soccer match comes on." Three weeks before, in Sao Paulo, there was a major prison break while guards were gathered around TVs watching Brazil play Argentina, so Captain Mendez knew what I was talking about. He had no choice but to laugh.

"Here," he said, giving me his own pistol. ".38 caliber, clip holds eight bullets, here’s two spares. Here’s the safety. Don’t shoot one of your patients, god damn it. Do you know how to fire this thing?"

"Of course," I told him, "I come from the land of the cowboys."

"John Wayne’s been dead a long time," he said.

"Don’t worry. I’m good with gadgets, machines, all this kind of stuff. I’m a typical Yankee. Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Robert Fulton, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Bill Gates and now there’s me. Here’s the trigger. ("Careful!" he told me.) I can turn on a light switch and I can flush a toilet. How hard can it be?"

The captain patted me on the back and on we went. Past the trench and barbed wire and sandbags of the compound, down the walled through-road with its sniper’s towers and observation balloons, and out of the inner wall, with its trenches, strategic pillboxes, and minefields. As we moved out towards Bairro Capanga, we had to stop and wait for a moment, a funeral was passing by, a huge crowd of mourners carrying a tiny wooden box on their shoulders.

"What’s going on there?" I asked the captain. One of his soldiers came back from talking with the mourners and told us, "Funeral. Yesterday, a kid ran onto the minefield to try to help a stray dog who she had begun to feed, so that even though it was wild it sort of became her pet. Anyway, the dog tripped a mine and got blown up but it was wailing so pitifully she ran out after it to try to carry it back and she ended up stepping on a mine too. It blew her leg off and made a huge hole in her stomach, they say her guts were dangling out like pig intestines which you hang up to dry. They say there’s no doctor around here for miles, and they couldn’t get past the checkpoint to get to the hospital."

"From the description," I told them, "it sounds like the wound was fatal. Barring a top-notch field hospital and helicopter evacuation services, no one could have saved her."

"Imagine," the captain said: "Feeding a pet dog, even though they don’t have enough to eat themselves. But they breed like roaches, and for them, condoms are a sin. Negroes are too hot-blooded to think when they get the urge, they just jump into bed and pop!, out comes another one! One more mouth to feed. We really made a mistake not to go ahead with the forced sterilization program, but they measure their worth by the size of their dicks and the number of starving brats they put into the world, so who’s going to rope them like cows just so you can pull out the plumbing?"

I found the captain’s comments disturbing, but since our lives depend on him and his men, it would be well not to be repelled. Aversion is one of the easiest emotions to detect.

After a while, the parade of tragedy passed, headed off to some pitiful spot of dust to bury a girl who loved a dog. The world will go on without her. Flowers will bloom without her; the moon will still come into the sky even though she’s not here to look at it. It makes you wonder, when you look at the stars at night, who’s not looking at them, and why?

It was nearing dusk when we finally drove up a dirt road into a hellhole that looked more like an encampment than a neighborhood. There was a little wooden sign on a tree that had forgotten to die which said "Bairro Capanga." It looked like a hurricane had struck, or like some great ship in the sky had exploded and rained its debris all over the earth in the form of the dwellings in which these people lived: shacks made of cardboard, wood, and tin; tarps turned into roofs and strung across trenches and ravines; little caverns dug into the sides of hills, with furniture made of boxes, and crosses hanging on the walls; external cooking - ovens of stones with tiny fires glowing inside them, leaking smoke into the air, or makeshift stoves fueled by tanks of propane gas; outdoor toilets which were wooden boxes with holes in them built over pits; outdoor showers, made out of water cans with holes punched into the bottom, surrounded by clotheslines covered with rags; a well for drinking water down the road; pools of stagnant water and open sewage to the side, and the huge garbage dump which they called "Pearls to Swine" looming behind them in the distance, like an enchanted tower, like the home of a mad alchemist who could transmute one world’s puke into another world’s gold; a ziggurat of waste where men and vultures fought like gladiators for life, where desperation gave pathetic pieces of junk the value of diamonds. All around us, as we entered the slum, lay emaciated dogs, saving their energy for an emergency, it seemed. An angry woman yelled at us for nearly running over her chickens, though, in fact, they never even came close to the road, as a stray goat, dragging a tether attached to nothing, stood puzzled by a spiny plant on a hillside, which had drawn its sword.

As we drove up along the dirt road, absolutely intimidated by the people we had come to save, they gathered around to watch us pass. My colleague, Dr. Vega, who had features not far removed from the roots of these people, made a brave show of it, and waved to the sullen, skeptical witnesses who watched us arrive, forcing something approximating a smile onto his face. But there was no response; absolutely no response, it was as if we had driven into a land of statues. To me, the eyes of our new patients reminded me of the telescopic lenses of snipers’ rifles. There was nothing in their hearts; in the midst of the tropics we had entered a world of ice.

For a moment, our convoy struggled to get a grip on the dirt road that seemed to want to disappear back into the mountain; it was like a mistake on a piece of paper that wanted to be erased. A feeling of dread overcame us, the thought of stalling out here, of our vehicles failing us, of displaying our helplessness before such freezing eyes was enough to induce panic. For a moment, we felt like prisoners being led to the gallows. One doctor even urinated in his pants. But then, thank God, the engines triumphed, the wheels dug like picks into the trail that would not help, and finally, we bounded over the crest of a hill, and coasted down the other side to the great stone house we had been assigned to occupy. To us, it looked as reassuring as a castle with a drawbridge.

Yesterday, we convoked a neighborhood meeting at a place called "The Fountain", where the neighborhood well is located and where the people often spend hours hanging out and exchanging news. "It is their own version of the Roman Forum," Mendez explained to us. "Or Behind The Scenes [which is a popular magazine that specializes in gossip]. Poor people love to talk about who’s sleeping with who; the women compare the size of their lovers’ penises, and the men ask around to see who’s giving it out." When we showed up, Dr. Bari explained to the people why we were here and what we proposed to do for them, but he seemed like one of those mentally ill people who you sometimes see on the trains, talking to himself, or to some imaginary angel or demon. The people just went about their business, taking water out of the well, watching us from a distance with their arms crossed, then turning away from us and resuming their conversations in quieter tones, until finally they lost all respect for us, and began laughing with each other again and drowning out our offers of help with all the latest news from the bairro. They couldn’t read the leaflets that we handed out to them.

One man said, "You’ve come too late to save Don Cristovao. But if you want to, you can dig him up, and try to bring him back to life."

While a woman told me, "My arm’s already covered with mosquito bites, do you think I want the bite of your needle on top of it? But if you really want to help me, carry this jug of water back to my house." I did it, while some of the other women laughed and said, "That’s a nice puppy dog." It seems that sometimes the willingness to help is interpreted as stupidity, or softness, which is even worse. One of Mendez’s soldiers accompanied me just to make sure nothing happened. "I do this every day," the woman told me, when I gave her back the water when we reached her house, which was a dilapidated shack - and that is all she said.

After this first encounter with the residents of the neighborhood, Dr. Bari said, "We need to give them some time to get used to us."

Our staff was divided as to whether we ought to force people who might have contagious diseases, like TB and SDV to come to treatment, or attempt an AIDS quarantine like the United Center had imposed in Central Africa, but Dr. Bari overruled our concerns by reiterating the primacy of the political aspect of our presence. "We do not have the solid footing to implement a policy of coercion at this time," he insisted.

Captain Mendez, after mulling things over for a while, agreed. He says that even though his well-armed platoon can easily handle any disturbances arising from the bairro dwellers themselves, he could not handle a guerrilla detachment infiltrated into the bairro and striking from under the cover of its disgruntled populace; and that the key to our security, from his point of view, is in not alienating the residents to the point where they might become active collaborators of the ERB. "They are stubborn as donkeys," he said. "Better that they kill themselves with TB than that we drive them into the arms of the guerrillas by trying to cure them." Nonetheless, Mendez arrested a young local this week, which did not in any way endear us to the bairro, or further his strategy. The man, by the name of Capoeira, was spotted near the stone house, slashing the air with a knife. According to Mendez, he was going through the motions of grabbing someone in an armlock from behind and slashing his pockets to take his wallet. Mendez believed the young man was a thief, who probably infiltrates downtown Rio, and that he was practicing his moves; our captain did not hesitate to detain him. According to irate locals, the boy was simply a harmless louco who played with his knife in order to feel more powerful, in the same way that kids pretend they are superman. One man said, "If he was practicing slashing someone’s throat, or stabbing them in the heart, you could arrest him, but he was only holding them by the wrist and slashing their pocket; what a tame fantasy! If he is a thief, he is a humanitarian. You should give him a medal for not wanting to kill. Your jails are too terrible for a boy so innocent, it would be like dropping a bomb on an ant. Just send him home to his mother."

"What do you mean ‘your jails’?" demanded Mendez. "They are ‘our jails’, yours and mine both, we belong to the same society and are ruled by the same government, and we both have a stake in punishing crime."

The man said: "Is there a law that says you can’t stab the air?" He walked away and some women who were standing nearby sang strands from a song: "Sow injustice, sow injustice, reap a hurricane. Crops of blood come from your greed. My tears will become a gun." Mendez had tears in his eyes, he felt helpless at that moment, and turning to Dr. Bari, said: "We’re surrounded. We’ve walked into a pit of vipers. Say your prayers, because who knows how this will all end."

One day she just turned around and asked me: "Why do you keep on helping me? You know, I have a man and he is in prison. You’re not the kind of man I like. I like men whose skin is even darker than my own."

"I’m just helping you, because you said it is hard to carry the water to your house. I’ve come to help. If nobody wants the services of a doctor, I’ll help in other ways." I told her that her house was wide-open with all kinds of cracks and holes. She needed air, she said. I offered her mosquito netting. She said it would make her feel like a fish being pulled out of the sea. I told her that her kids were beautiful, and that health was the world’s greatest treasure. I offered her a jar of quinine tablets, and a liquid vitamin formula in a vial with an eyedropper which boosts the immune system, which I explained to her means the body’s ability to defend itself. "Does it work against bullets? Against teargas? Poor Don Cristovao," she said. "Funny thing, white men dig the hole and throw you in, then give you a ladder to climb halfway out." I left the medicines behind on top of a chest of drawers without drawers on which she had left the plastic statue of a black virgin, seven candles, and a Bible, which she could not read, but put into her children’s hands whenever they were sick.

Besides Dr. Chafing’s presentation on Malthus, before our departure for Bairro Capanga, I remember a philosophy course I had back in college on the ancient Greeks. Heraclitus of Ephesus once said, in some ancient fragments found just in time for my graduation: "The chariot of the world is pulled by the horses of Strife… Struggle builds the world, peace asphyxiates it… Times whose roots do not reach deeply into the soil of strife give no blossoms to the world… A ship is made of wood; tranquility is made of war which is at rest." Maybe justice is only our means of trying to run away from history, and deny the inevitable.

I wonder why ideas that fit a few months ago now seem so uncomfortable, like clothes that have shrunk in the wash.

The medical staff is upset that we have not had a break yet, not the time off back in the secure zone which we were promised. We thought we would be allowed to spend weekends there. I used to think about Dirse, but missing her only makes me feel naked here. It’s better to have nothing to go back to. When you are in a dangerous place and you want to cry you know you have to change your focus.

Then, before the day had ended, an old man by the name of Joaquim came by. He is blind in one eye, which lacks an eyeball, and simply stares out into space like a white stone in his head, while his other eye he keeps half-closed as though he is afraid that some piece of dust will blow into it, rendering him completely blind. To top it off, he limps from arthritis in the knees, it seems. "Have you come for a medical exam?" I asked him, hopefully.

"Che is coming soon," he told me. "I can feel it. I know these things. Your days here are numbered."

"What’s this bull crap?" demanded Captain Mendez. "Che Guevara is as dead as a doornail."

"They made us another one," the old man said. "And he’s coming to kick you all out. Go on, shoot me, doesn’t the truth deserve a bullet?"

Some woman and her husband came up to lead Dom Joaquim away. "Don’t hurt him," they said, "he’s crazy." But then, as they were departing, the woman said, "He’s as crazy as Teiresias."

"Who’s that?" Mendez asked me. I guess I have the reputation of being the intellectual here, because once they found me reading a book in the dark.

I told him that Teiresias was a blind prophet mentioned in the Odyssey.

"Must be someone else," Mendez told me; "how would they know something like that? They can’t even write their own names."

Dr. Bari decided to let me go ahead with my plan, since we were making no progress and I had the best record, so far, of getting along with the populace in view of my daily water-carrying for Mina. "Here, take this cell phone," he told me. "Press 1 for an emergency, and Mendez will come out to help. You already have a pistol. But please, try not to use it. Do you have a flashlight?"

I was amused by his concern, as if I were his son.

The others accepted my decision to move into the tent only because they thought it was a stratagem. If they had known that I am doing it as much for myself as for the success of our project, because I cannot bear the stress of feeling hated, and knowing that there is a good reason for me to be hated, then they probably would have said no. But perceiving me as a valiant manipulator, they are impressed.

At first, the skepticism of the bairro dwellers wasn’t dented by my move out of the stone house. I guess if my home was a pile of dirt, and you just flew down from a cloud saying you wanted to help, I’d make you crawl across a field of broken glass before I’d trust you, too. Word is, in this bairro where nicknames gush into being like spring water from imaginations driven to states of hyperactivity by the poor fruits of reality, that the people began to refer to me as "The Farter." I was reputed to have left the stone house not because I was sensitive to the source of their rage, or because I wished to take a step closer to them, but because the others could not stand me and had driven me out. And the most demeaning reason they could come up with was that it was because I had a problem passing gas. Thus, my expression of solidarity, which might have necessitated a diminishment of their resentment towards me, which is dear to them and difficult to part with, was transformed into a comedy of grotesqueness, and I become even worthier of their contempt than before. "Wonder how long till they’ll let the stinker back in?" they joked with each other.

When Mina asked me one day, as I helped her with the water jug, why I was living in the tent, and I told her, a little curl of amusement appeared on her lips, a smile that had the cruelty in it of not wanting to reveal itself, and she said, "Now all you have to do is become black. Why don’t you try going back into the oven for a little bit longer? You’re undercooked." And she added, parroting the lyric of a popular song which parodies the promises of politicians: "Vote for me and I’ll give you a car of silver and a road of gold, and you can drive a hundred miles per hour to everything you never had."

The next day, Mina said nothing to me and I said nothing to her as I carried the water for her from the well. I had the feeling that the whole bairro was watching me, looking for a sign of weakness. I was grim, but walked well, making sure that I did not appear humiliated. Swimming in shark-filled waters, not a single drop of blood can seep out of your wounds.

"Sure," I told him. "No one’s coming to me to be treated. It looks like I’m going to have to make my own patients. Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of bandages and disinfectant, and a forceps and scalpel, which they didn’t manage to steal last night, so I can remove the bullets from you - if they don’t pass all the way through, that is."

"Are you joking?" he asked me, disconcerting for his ability to believe that such a monstrosity was an option.

"That shit you’ve been shooting off tonight is too much," I told him, again. "I haven’t done anything to you. I can’t help it that I was born white. Is that a sin? I still believe in the things that seem absurd when they are betrayed: that race, religion, and nationality don’t matter, that we’re all human beings, and that when someone bleeds, it’s my duty to bind their wound. That crap you’ve been throwing tonight is as powerful as hand grenades, it could maim someone. Yes, I’ll shoot in self-defense if that shit’s thrown at me again. How far do you want to push things? I’ve come here to help, god damn it, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to wear a god damned crown of thorns. What, you think I’m going to shoot you in cold blood right now? Is that what you’re accustomed to?"

"Pretty much," the kid answered.

"Just go home," I said. "You know, by the way, that firecrackers like that are illegal, and you could do prison time for that?"

"They’ll never take me alive," he said, imitating some gangster or guerrilla or movie star, but completely meaning it in his juvenile way. "I won’t swim peacefully into the alligator’s jaws." That was from a song.

"No need to go down in a hail of bullets," I told him, "just put that crap away. Whatever you may think of me, I don’t deserve it."

"If it’s really the guerrillas, and they’ve got a gun to your head, tell me one more time, Everything’s OK, it’s just kids shooting off firecrackers," he told me.

"No, really," I said. "It’s OK. You can all go back to sleep."

Then, turning back to the kid, I told him again to go back home. Smiling faintly, like somebody who feels better after puking, he backed away, then when he got to a ridge about eighty yards away, he turned around again and shouted, "Look at this one, doesn’t it look like an angel lighting a joint?" And he fired off a rocket which raced fizzling and hissing over my head, then erupted into a beautiful pattern of pink explosions that somehow made the vast night seem like it cared, like a house in the winter that has a fireplace. You can see stars filling the sky above Bairro Capanga if you dare to look up from the paths where you could be killed for a dollar.

After that momentous night, I graduated from being "The Farter" to "O Pistoleiro", the "Gunman." It was a step up in the world of Bairro Capanga, and a step closer to being "the Doctor." When I helped Mina with her water that morning, a group of young men, who seemed like they could be older brothers of the teenagers who had accosted me the night before, appeared on the side of the path and began to follow us. As they got closer, I put down the water jug.

"What happened, water weighs the same as always," Mina told me.

"My arm’s feeling sore," I told her. I was now free to draw my gun if needed.

The young men came up to us. "What’s wrong, Samson?" one of them asked. "You aren’t going to impress a lady like that, you’ve got to carry the water even if your arm breaks." They all laughed.

"You look strong," I told him. "Why don’t you carry the water for her?"

"My lady will get mad at me," he said.

His friend said, "Poor people got to learn to do things for themselves, too much handouts make them lazy." They knew all the rhetoric used against them.

The other guy said: "If she kisses me I will. How about it, Mina? Two kids hasn’t worn you out, yet. You look just as fine as before Roberto started dealing to keep you."

"Just move on, all of you," Mina told them, "and stop your probing. Put your dorsal fins back down."

"Help her with the water," one of the young men suggested, again.

"My arm hurts," I told him.

"Damn, this water’s heavy!" Mina protested, exasperated, not by me, but by the young men who had descended on us. "Go on," she told them, "move along, so he can get back to helping me. See, there’s something between shoot-on-sight and be a dumb-ass. Now go on, not every white man’s radar is broke!"

Shaking their heads, with strange souls halfway between panthers and clowns, they ambled on as though they were only out for an innocent stroll. They reminded me of cats who, failing to reach the top of a piece of furniture whose heights they have leapt for, walk away as though utterly disinterested. But their games could just as easily turn into hunts. All of us knew what had just transpired.

As I left her at her shack, Mina told me: "Don’t pay them no mind about what they said about Roberto. I never asked that man to do what he did. It wasn’t to keep me, it’s cause I wasn’t enough. He went and started to build his new world without me. And besides the crack, he killed a man who didn’t deserve it. He’s got life," she added. It was all pretty discreet and understated, but I wondered: did she actually care what I thought about her, to know that she was the kind of woman who wouldn’t use a man? And was there a reason that, although she had a man, as she told me when she first met me, she now wanted me to know that that was only in the most technical sense, and that, in actuality, he was no longer in the picture? And why did she tell me that he had killed a man who didn’t deserve it? To diminish his rights, in some way? To lessen his claim over her? To make the act of going with her, for the man who chose to do so, seem less an act of stealing her from a good man than an act of rescuing her from a bad one?

All night long, I could not sleep because of the few words she had spoken, my heart was pounding with excitement, guilt, and confusion. I love Dirse, I am sure that I do. She has been such a valuable counterpoint to everything I have learned, she has humanized the world I live in without driving me from it, made it possible to live on the bridge between Heaven and Hell without bearing the guilt of wings the rest of the world cannot have, or burning in the fire along with the damned. She has been challenging at every moment - mind-expanding, supportive, fun, and sexy, but most of all, she is vulnerable underneath her bravado - and the thought of hurting her by going with another woman is horrifying, like shooting into a crowd with a machine gun. But somehow, here, in Bairro Capanga, Dirse’s colors have faded. Her idealism seems bland, like food without spice, her passion too theoretical. She is utterly rambunctious, like a spirited pony, when placed beside businessmen, but here, she seems so tame, like a grandmother with her hair in a bun. But then, how was I only a month ago?

Mina, meanwhile, captivates me with her regal reserve and occasional smile that is like every flower in the world blooming at once. Something about her dark arms seems so vigorous, so fierce, so overpowering, like it could break you, and maybe that is what I want now, to be broken so that something that is stuck inside of me can come out. Or am I only being the typical man, looking for greener grass, craving an adventure? Is Dirse’s tan skin not dark enough to drown my whiteness in? I don’t want to break hearts, I don’t want to make mistakes.

Next morning, Mina didn’t give my world a chance to become more complicated. She acted utterly aloof, as though fleeing from her comments of the day before, and didn’t even say thank you. She, like everybody here, is wonderful at pretending. Wonderful at pretending that nothing happened: that no one robbed you, that no one wanted to mug you, that no one is sick, that there’s not drugs here or guns, that hints of something more than carrying a jug of water forever never took place. A meteor could land here and next day, as long as you were here to observe their reaction, people would just walk around the crater as if it had been here since the beginning of time. They will never let you know that they can be affected, because that would be giving away more of their power, and they have already lost too much. Mina’s not going to be a white man’s taste of dark meat any time soon…

Next morning, as the skies cleared, and the rain faded away into merely a light patter on the canvas roof, I stepped out of my tent wrapped in a blanket, looking quite disheveled and mad, I imagine, as anyone who had lost a night’s sleep fighting against the windmills of the rain might appear. "He’s still here!" I heard someone saying.

"He went back to the stone house while it was raining."

"Just to get a spade. I saw him digging a drainage ditch."

"He spent the night in the stone house."

"No he didn’t, I saw him putting up his tent. It fell down. Look at him, does he look like he spent the night in the stone house? He looks like a drowned rat."

Pretending I hadn’t heard anything of their little conversation, I asked the people who were standing nearby how their shelters had held up in the storm. They just shook their heads as if to say everything was OK, which for them communicating with me, was actually quite loquacious.

Without really thinking it all the way through, my stubbornness has reaped tremendous rewards. The fact that I didn’t bolt from my tent during the storm to run back to the stone house seems to have convinced the people here that I am not fronting with them, but that I do have some sort of principles, after all. Now I have the feeling that they regard me as something utterly strange and exotic, like a unicorn, and they don’t quite know what to do with me.

Mina said, "Some storm last night. No need to carry the jug for me today, I put it out last night. Look how full it got, in spite of the narrow neck." I helped a few families improve the drainage around their shelters. They told me that under ordinary circumstances, their places hold up fine, but this was like being in "a tsunami", which is a kind of disaster they’ve only heard about, so that it’s easy for them to imagine that this was the same. One old man has been going around all morning with a fish saying that it fell from the sky. The others say he is crazy and tell him to stop carrying it around and to just cook it.

It is hard to believe, but this is a quantum leap.

This morning, I had the breakthrough I have been dreaming of since I came here. Mina showed up with a friend, Gabi, who has a very sick little boy who is obviously suffering from a severe gastrointestinal disorder, most likely a parasite. He is crapping the life out of him, is listless and utterly drained, and his skin is disconcertingly hot to the touch. A quick temperature reading showed that he was up to 105 F. I undertook treatment at once, which included emergency measures to decrease the boy’s temperature, an IV for fluids, injections of nutrients and antibiotics, and taking samples of the boy’s blood, urine, and feces for testing in our lab. The boy’s name is "Little Joao", and his mother kept on crying throughout the treatment, asking me, "Have I brought him in too late?"

A doctor’s skill lies not only in his medicine but in his presence. I told the mother, "You should have brought him sooner, but it is better that you brought him late than never. I will do everything possible to save him. I remain hopeful."

"Do you have a son?" she asked me.

"No," I admitted.

"Then you can’t imagine what it would be like to lose him," she told me.

"No one in this world, who’s lived more than a few years, hasn’t lost someone they love," I told her. "There’s no place in the world that’s free of pain. Some people build walls around their pain, to shut away everyone else’s. Some people build bridges from their pain to other people’s pain. I am a doctor, and that is the path I’ve chosen."

"If I wanted money, I would be back in the US," I told her.

"That’s right," Mina said, "he could be reeling in the dough doing liposuction for those dinosaurs that eat everything we don’t have. If he’s here, he must want to do something."

"Probably failed the medical school. They sent him here cause nobody with money wanted him anywhere near them. Not with a scalpel in his hand. Not over their heart."

"Some people want to help people," Mina protested. "Once you stop believing that that’s possible, what’s left? For every hundred outsiders who are con artists, there has to be one who’s for real. There can’t be nothing but rotten eggs in the world, or the word ‘rotten’ wouldn’t exist. We’d just say ‘eggs.’"

"Huh?" Gabi asked.

"Give him a chance," Mina insisted.

By the end of it, six or seven women were hanging out in my ramshackle clinic along with Gabi, holding candles and joining her in prayer and song. They looked like a band of angels who had forgotten to erase their dark faces in recognition of where the power lies. For even Heaven obeys the strong.

I said, "Finally you let me be."

At that moment, I felt like the luckiest man to ever live.

When, jarred and moved by the disparity between the intentions and competence of the letter I had received, I asked Mina if she thought the bairro might be interested in connecting to a literacy program, in addition to the medical program which it had already been offered, she said, "Why not? We got a lot of things to write to the President about. Now he throws our letters out, because he can’t understand them. After we learn to write better, he’ll throw our letters out because he does." Sensing that I wasn’t sure what her final take on the subject was, she smiled and said, "That’s an improvement." We’ve put in a call to the Department of Education’s Literacy Campaign, which, is, in fact, the program Dirse is working with while I’m in Bairro Capanga.

True to expectations, now that the neighborhood has finally opened its door to us, it turns out that there are all kinds of maladies tearing up the place. Several individuals have tested positive for TB, and we are medicating them and working on establishing a hygiene protocol that this community can live with, since none of the sufferers wants to be removed to a sanatorium, and forced extraction from the community seems counterproductive from the political point of view. We are confronting widespread symptoms of intestinal boreworm infection, which is highly treatable with appropriate medications, and we are simply awaiting lab results. Several varieties and stages of respiratory affliction and bleeding through the urinary tract may be related to opportunistic infections facilitated by AIDS. More testing is being conducted. Poor nourishment is also a major factor in debilitating the immune system, and contributing to these types of pathologies. And then, there are the SDV cases. Where AIDS is involved in the background, treatment will be arduous. Where it is not present, a regimen of medications, some taken orally, and others applied as salves to the affected areas, may drive the symptoms beneath the surface, leaving a condition similar to herpes which passes through dormant and active periods, but which will not degrade and lead to massive, irreversible disfigurement. In my tent, I treated 3 cases which were not severe, and one man who is still known as "Face", because of his handsome visage, but who underneath his shirt is a morass of hideous sores and puss. Working on him was messy business. Though I detest using a mask and gloves for psychological reasons, cases of doctors in Africa who have wished to express solidarity with Ebola sufferers by refusing the protective barriers which separate them from their patients, have only succeeded in proving that there is a great difference between solidarity and sentimentality. From saliva, blood, and/or particulates of mucus sprayed their way, they caught the very disease they were attempting to eradicate, and were lost, along with their critical expertise, in the midst of a sea of hands crying for help. Afterwards, I talked with Dr. Bari about improving our ability to safely do away with biological wastes.

By far the most distressing case of SDV which I have had to deal with so far involves a woman named Maru, who used to be a great beauty they say, but whose face has now been utterly ravaged by the disease. Her man, in fact, who had been away working as a laborer in Maranhao, and who they thought might never return, did return one day, only to drive her out of the house as soon as he saw what had become of her. Now she lives alone in a little cave which the self-proclaimed priest of the town, Brother Lazaro, made for her before he died. Brother Lazaro had actually worked for the church once, but the official priest of Bairro Capanga, before he fled from the neighborhood due to the unruly nature of the people, had succeeded in initiating the procedures which resulted in Brother Lazaro’s excommunication. Brother Lazaro, it seems, had some strange aberrations of belief: for example, he preached that Maria Magdalene was Jesus’ wife, and that Jesus by her had a son, of whom he, Brother Lazaro, was a descendant; he also believed that Judas killed Jesus, not for gold, but because Jesus chose peace on earth before justice on the earth, and that now the spirits of Jesus and Judas have merged into one to form the complete savior. Brother Lazaro called them two halves of the same soul, the day and night that need each other. The bottom line is that he was a liberation theologian, and that went out of vogue years ago.

After Brother Lazaro’s kindness, Maru was essentially left on her own, brought food by her mother and shunned by everyone else. One night, when she tried to go back home, her man got up out of bed where he was lying with another woman and chased her away with a machete. The woman he was with threw stones at her. Mina told me: "It would break our hearts except she looks so bad it dries our tears up. It’s like seeing a ghost, you just get the most awful chills and want to run away."

"Once you lose the will to remind yourself that someone else is a human being, it isn’t hard to drive them away and make them live in a cave," I said.

Mina knew what I meant. "Are you saying she’s the Bairro Capanga of Bairro Capanga? So if we go to her, the world is going to come to us? Well, go on, then, see her. But don’t get yourself sick. Wear your mask."

For them, Maru is like a fire-breathing dragon, if she exhales you will be poisoned by the mist of her disease, if her teardrop falls on you, it will burn through you like acid, if she coughs, you will become her twin, if she touches you, it will be like making love to a cadaver at the bottom of a grave. Since their knowledge is imprecise, they protect themselves with the severest of boundaries. Not knowing whether they face a house cat or a lion, they dig a moat deep enough and wide enough to keep a lion away. I, being a doctor, with precise knowledge, can come closer.

It was, nonetheless, with awful trepidation that I let Maru’s mother guide me to her outcast daughter’s cave, while Mina and a member of the Quilombolas stood a good fifty yards back. It took a great deal of coaxing from her mother to finally get her to step out of the cave into the light where I could see her face. What a disaster! Her face was a barely recognizable mess of bloody sores, with her right cheekbone exposed by the flesh that had fallen off; it was nearly formless, without definition, like the face of someone found at the site of a terrible auto wreck after flying through the windshield, except that there were two plaintive, angry eyes looking out from beneath it all, signs of life crying for help, but not expecting it. I could tell she was waiting for me to withdraw in horror. Even her mother was averting her eyes. I admit, at that moment I forced myself to a new level of bravery. But I knew within that awful wreckage was a soul: a soul that could not have forgotten the taste of life. I was very focused and businesslike, it was the only way I could control my emotions, but for her, even though I was well-shielded by my mask and gloves, and acted as a doctor and not a saint, it was as if I were Jesus kissing her on the forehead, curing her of abandonment. I looked at her not with disgust or pity, but with compassion and professional attentiveness. I ask myself, since it was such a struggle, how? I believe it is like adjusting a showerhead, a showerhead of emotions inside your soul. If the spray is too wide, your first instinct of revulsion will come out and your ideal of love will express itself as sugary pity, offensive to the patient, since it is really only the manifestation of revulsion overpowering love and hijacking it; if the stream of emotions is too narrow, on the other hand, you will come off as cold, purely a technician, and the patient will feel despised like a frog that is being dissected. But if you find the right width of emotions within your soul, you will have compassion without pity, professionalism without coldness, respect for the disease without terror, love for the patient without affect. The adjustment happens in a moment, and is not fundamentally intellectual; it is very nearly physical, in fact, something like what the lens of the eye does as it searches for just the right level of tension to bring an object into focus.

The mere fact that I was able to deal with Maru in this way - to cleanse her wounds, to use the lancet, to disinfect the sores, to do some scraping, to apply medicinal salves, to place bandages, to give injections of antibiotics, to dispense pills and spare bandages, and to take blood samples for AIDS testing, without displaying either horror or the selfish ambition to use her as my ticket to Heaven - was overwhelmingly healing for her. The treatments will continue. Depending on the results of the AIDS testing, she will either be sent to our civic action affiliate hospital in Rio proper for more elaborate treatment, or else worked on here by Dr. Soares, who will do a patch-up procedure on the right side of her face, until the situation is stabilized to the point where it will make sense for her to undergo a more substantial program of reconstructive surgery. This might be arranged through the International Program for the Support of Battered Women’s surgical team, since the civic action budget considers plastic surgery, except in the case of landmine-related incidents, to be beyond its scope.

The day after my first visit with Maru, my overpowering stream of patients dried up. "I’m glad to see no one’s sick today," I told Mina. "But we must begin to screen all the kids here, beginning with your own. We’ll need physical exams, along with blood, urine, and stool samples, to test for various diseases and parasites and also to get a picture of where we stand with regard to nutritional issues."

Knowing this, I called a meeting, which a good number of people showed up for, and I explained to them how SDV is transmitted and how it is not transmitted. I explained to them what procedures I had used to protect myself, to dispose of or clean my clothing, and to disinfect and wash myself in the wake of treating Maru. "Granted: nobody wants to be bitten by a cobra," I said. "But what would you say if, to avoid the possibility of being bitten by a cobra, you spent your whole life flying in an airplane above the ground? Wouldn’t you call that exaggerated? Well, that is, essentially, what you are doing now. Maru is not the homem-marinho," I told them, referring to a mythical creature which some poor Brazilians still believe in, a sea monster that murders people on the beach, devouring their fingers and genitals before disappearing back into the ocean. "She is one of you," I said. You must protect yourselves from the contagious disease which she carries, but you do not have to sever her from your world. You can be safe from her, without throwing her away. I will tell you how."

The people listened with interest to my explanation. Then one man, skeptical, as most of the residents, of any form of official information, said, "Doctor, we are now beginning to understand that you are a sincere man. But where do you get your information from? Are you sure it is not from some government agency? We feel they do not want the people to know the truth, and that, in fact, when they tell us we cannot get a disease in such and such a way, it is because they want us to be careless and get the disease in exactly that way, so they can finally be rid of us. They are using biological warfare against us, and their strongest weapon is misinformation."

Without dismissing his fears, I told him that various independent studies had produced this information, which I had read in medical journals during my studies, and that I believed them. The fact that I disagreed with the studies in one detail, regarding the assumed longevity of the SDV agent outside of the body, which I believed might, in fact, survive even longer than supposed, pleased my audience immensely, and boosted my credibility.

I was then asked for my opinion on the reliability of Erva Acari for preventing AIDS. This is a supposed miracle drug which the media in the Center views as a product created by the poor and embraced by the poor, in a land where mysticism and backwardness reign. What people in the Center don’t know is that Yerba Acari - with some beneficial anti-inflammatory properties, but utterly unsuited to tackling HIV or cancer - is big business in the Amazon, and that it is controlled by multinationals operating out of the Center. They are deliberately marketing it in areas of extreme desperation, areas which are medically deprived, such as this one, where the people spend extravagant percentages of their income to acquire it as a shield against terrible diseases which it cannot resist. It is now common, in many areas, for people to mix Yerba Acari into a drink before making love, doing so in the belief that it will protect them from AIDS even if their partner is infected.

Without wishing to devastate those who might already have used the drink, given the fact that disillusionment from the placebo effect can sometime produce catastrophic crashes in the immune system (Jackson 2002; Rodriguez 2018), I nonetheless provided the sternest warning possible against the use of Yerba Acari as an AIDS preventative. In fact, its tendency to thin the blood, leading to an increase in instances of the commonplace and small-scale hemorrhaging which ordinarily accompanies sexual acts, increases the possibility of the spread of AIDS. I stated, for the benefit of all concerned, that an AIDS awareness workshop ought to be conducted as soon as possible, and I promised that I would do everything possible to make sure that we were able to obtain, from our program, up-to-date and effective drugs for containing the HIV virus.

In the same spirit as before, someone said: "Don’t accept any of that crap they already banned in America. All that stuff they won’t throw out because they don’t want to lose money, so they send it to us. Don’t give me a pen knife to fight the tiger when the rest of the world is using guns."

I assured him again that I would do my best to make sure that we got a competent AIDS prevention and treatment plan up and running here.

At the end of this week, I had a case of a different kind, an old man whose mouth was filled with rotting teeth. There was nothing I could do but pull them, then give him an injection of antibiotics and send him away with a bottle of antiseptic mouthwash. As I pulled his teeth, he exclaimed, "Jesus Christ, you should be working for the CIA! I would tell you everything I know."

"Sorry," I said. "I’m a doctor, not a dentist."

He said: "I thought they were the same."

The mounting problems presented by the Che legend led World Justice, this week, to interrogate Dr. Johansson, the alleged creator of the Che clone, in Sweden, and to impound his laboratories and archives. Under maximum binding vows – that is, with perjury punishable by death, not only applicable to the perjurer but also to his family and friends – he admitted to the fact that he did, indeed, create a Che clone 29 years ago, which was raised for a brief time in Sweden. He lost track of the child after three years, when it was given to handlers whose plan was to raise it in an unspecified foreign country, before sending the young man on to a revolutionary training program that would be both military and political in nature. However, according to Dr. Johansson, something had obviously gone wrong, because a contact from the "life preparation group" came back to him a few years later, asking him to make another Che clone. According to Dr. Johansson, the contact would not say, specifically, what the problem was, but Dr. Johansson had the feeling from how he behaved that the operation had somehow been compromised by international intelligence agencies, or rent asunder by an internal dispute, and that the Che clone had been "dumped" like stolen goods until things cooled down, probably into some orphanage; and that when the handlers had come back to recover him, he was gone, already given away, and they could not pick up his trail. Dr. Johansson was unable to grant the contact’s request to make another clone, because, in the meantime, his genetic sample of Che had become degraded through improper storage.

I told Captain Mendez, as the civic action team held an emergency meeting in the stone house, that it is useless to proclaim victory in the Periphery when the source of the war remains. It is as useless as bailing the water out of a ship while doing nothing about the hole in its side. One generation of guerrillas is destroyed, but another grows in its place. Repressive terror quiets the world until injustice overcomes the fear, and foolishness is resurrected. And once again there are men who, with bare chests, will face bullets because the blood of those who died in vain is dry, and the blood of those they love is still fresh. "I am surprised by how amazed you are at the ERB’s recovery," I said, "which parallels everything we know about the nature of disease. When you treat the symptoms and not the cause, your victories are doomed to be ephemeral."

"This is why we are here," admitted Captain Mendez.

"Are we repairing the dike, or merely putting our finger in the dike?" I asked him.

"Sometimes," he said, "the world is saved by a gesture."

"Your point, doctor?"

"We need to be real, Captain. Bairro Capanga needs to be more to us than a speed bump we are attempting to construct across the highway of revolution. These people need to be more to us than mere neutron rods, inserted into a nuclear reactor core to prevent a meltdown. We are living among mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, lovers, neighbors - our human brothers and sisters."

I think I sometimes have the tendency to give sermons and that I provoke resentment on account of it, especially when I demand, from people, things they lack the inner power to give. People have always said I have the tendency to get carried away by my passion. If I think it is right to live on the moon, I will try to do it, even though it is impossible, even if it means I will be left completely alone, dwelling in a crater. They have compared me to Don Quixote, charging windmills with his lance. Or am I being self-flattering? In the end, I am merely stubborn, not idealistic. It is Dirse who has pushed me in this direction, then lagged behind. No, I have moments of unreasonable romanticism, but thus far have always returned to common sense. My heart throws itself against limits, like a wild horse on a rope that wants to be free, but my mind understands limits; it is, in fact, the rope. All I know is that I felt acutely uncomfortable there, among my fellow doctors and Captain Mendez’s soldiers, as though I were asking them all to jump off a building and fly, and leaving them no choice but to do that or to have devil’s horns. No wonder I yearned to go back out into the bairro as quickly as possible , to escape their silent, offended faces. And I am sure they were waiting with equal fervor for my departure.

As far as I can tell, the highlight of the meeting was when Captain Mendez expressed relief that two civilian contractors who were found at the edge of the bairro with bullets in their heads had merely been killed by bandits, and not the guerrillas. "Thank God!" he exclaimed. How precise our humanity has managed to become; how exact our cues for grieving!

Meanwhile, in medical news, I conducted an AIDS awareness workshop which was so well attended that it made me feel like Peron or Gaitan giving some fiery populist speech in the plaza, although all I was doing was imparting technical medical information; I actually needed a microphone and amplifier to finish. At the end, free condoms, immune-enhancers, post-exposure response meds, and informational pamphlets based principally on diagrams were distributed. The day before, a truck had rumbled up from the secure zone filled with supplies, a Pawnee A-37 attack helicopter cruising the skies above it. One teenager laughed, and said: "Don’t anybody try to take our condoms, or we’ll blow you up!" The thought of protecting a shipment like that with violent force amused the neighborhood beyond words.

Although the bairro has no formal chamber of commerce or civic action junta, an unofficial council comprised of some of the more active citizens, members of the Quilombolas, and some who are considered "elders" is taking shape to help integrate our projects into the community. Together, we will continue the program to eradicate mosquitoes – test results are also beginning to return showing the prevalence of malaria, which is another immune-system-depressor; in addition, we will attempt to cover over and isolate the effects of open sewage systems which present a major health hazard, especially to some residents. The long-delayed program of childhood vaccinations is going to start soon, and a massive video screen for long-distance literacy training is going to be installed, since the Department of Education believes this location is far too dangerous to insert its personnel into.

Speaking of literacy, yesterday I discovered a most amazing, and moving thing. First of all, to put it all in perspective, Mina has two beautiful kids, a boy of eight and a girl of six. The boy’s name is Helder. He was named after the famous liberation theologian of bygone days, Helder Camara, the Bishop of Recife, who once said: "When I fed the poor they called me a saint. When I asked them why there were poor, they called me a Communist." He had sought to use the gospels as a basis for the nonviolent transformation of Brazilian society and the defeat of poverty, which starts with the indifference of one class of men towards another, and from his point of view, is a result of the failure of men who call themselves Christians to live up to their faith. Mina, though a Christian in her own eccentric way, named her boy Helder, not in honor of a priest, but in honor of a man who fought for the poor. Her daughter was named Zenobia, after the Middle-Eastern warrior queen who battled against the Romans, and made that mighty empire quake. When I discovered, in Mina’s shack, a stack of charming children’s books, filled with pictures, which she must have made a great effort to obtain over a number of years, I exclaimed, "How thoughtful of you, to get these for your kids!"

"What do you mean?" she asked. "I got them for me. I mean, we look at them together, now, but I got some of them before they were even born."

"When you were a kid?"

She glared at me, then just shook her head and went on doing what she was doing.

And I stood there, stunned, suddenly realizing my terrible social gaffe, and the terrible plight of this highly intelligent, deeply curious woman, who had never learned to read. So she had taken the only books that she could make any sense out of, the ones with pictures in them to stir her imagination and serve as keys for opening the stories that were locked shut behind the padlock of her illiteracy. In this way, she broke, like a burglar, into the world of Gulliver’s Travels and the Arabian Nights, Aesop’s Fables and the Greek Myths, Pinocchio and pirates, the history of her country, and the crafts and culture of Africa. In this desert, without the water of written words, she survived like a cactus, refusing to let her mind die from neglect. But the hurt of deprivation was plain to see in her eyes. She knew she was missing a leg, and that in other parts of the world, people were dancing.

I told her: "Your kids will read, Mina. And you, too."

She kept on doing what she was doing.

The people are poor, desperate, and angry, and yet, they are afraid and confused. Somehow, when they raise the placard of Che above them, their fear fades away, they stare like him into the face of that which oppresses them with his bold eyes, with the savage pose of his gentleness. From his hand, only, they will take the rifle they have feared to hold for all these years: the rifle that breaks the hypnotic bond between dominant and submissive, that erases the boundaries of safety and makes the world dangerous again, which means, once more, that seeds can grow. Creation is being revisited. The first age belonged to jaguars, the next to birds, the next to monkeys; maybe this one will belong to men.

It all happened very simply, Mina coming up to me at the end of a screening clinic for children, to ask me if I would go with her. "Tomorrow is the convoy," she told me, simply. "Will you join me at Matthew 7:6?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked her. "Are you inviting me to a Bible study group?"

She laughed and said: "No, to the mountain," and she pointed to the ominous, grayish-black mound rising up in the distance. "The garbage trucks are coming tomorrow with a big load. Probably about noon. We’ll start out at dawn from Colina dos Bluns so we can get there on time."

"How do you know the trucks are coming?" I asked her.

She said: "How does a horse find water?" And she added, "Don’t forget to bring your gun."

When I told the civic action team about my plans later that afternoon, they unanimously urged me to reject the invitation. Captain Mendez, the most vocal critic of the idea, told me: "You must realize by now that our civic action program, which is finally, in large part thanks to you, beginning to achieve popularity here in Bairro Capanga, is undercutting the revolutionaries. If the people see that the quality of their lives can improve without the desperate measure of resorting to violence, they will stay on the side of the government; why provoke repression when they have the hope of bettering their lot without going out on a limb? Because of this, you must also see that our program here is sure to have been noticed by the revolutionaries, and to have become a potential target. And you, as our most effective member, must be especially high on their hit list. Before they let us defuse the ticking time bomb of the poor, which they hope to use to shatter the structures of power which exclude them, they will take aim at us. I consider it likely that this woman you have taken a liking to may, in fact, be working for the ERB, and that this trip to the refuse station may be nothing more than a set-up: a trick to lure you away from us, to a lawless and unprotected place where you may be shot down like a dog, or else kidnapped and held for ransom. Even if the guerrillas are not at ‘Pearls to Swine’, it’s filled with gangs and bandits. I won’t let you go."

"We’re here on a mission," I told him, as Dr. Bari listened. "To provide services to the people and show them that they have not been utterly abandoned. Without taking risks, we wouldn’t have made any progress here, at all. Sometimes, you can’t stop. The only way to hold on to what you’ve won is to keep on moving forward. You can’t rest on your laurels, that’s like taking arsenic. Dr. Bari, you must allow me to go with Mina. I’ll have the chance to meet more people, and to do more work."

Reluctantly, after about an hour of philosophical arm-twisting and impassioned reminders of Hippocrates, the doctor agreed. Crossing himself, he said, "May God accompany you every step of the way."

Captain Mendez said: "Don’t do anything stupid. Well, going there to begin with is stupid, so what I mean is don’t do any other stupid things. You’ve got intelligent eyes, I hope they’re not deceptive."

Heart pounding, half believing what they had said, I prepared myself for the trip.

"Bye mother, bye mom," the kids said as we prepared to leave. She hugged them in the dark, and said some kind of prayer for them, which wasn’t entirely in Portuguese. "Bye, Mr. Doctor," they told me. Helder, young as he was, said, "If anybody starts any trouble with my mom, don’t hesitate to use that gun at your side." The Quilombolas, whose names were Benedito and Gabriel, laughed.

By dawn, as the first tints of reddish light were oozing into the horizon, we were at the crest of Colina dos Bluns, which hadn’t been easy to climb in the moonlight. When I asked how the hill had got its name, Gabriel made the motions of smoking a joint, and I realized that somehow the English name "blunt" had worked its way down here, and that this hill was a hang-out for drug users, hardly a place to be in the middle of the night. But for some reason we encountered very little traffic on our way up the hill; only one guy who was sitting alone, smiling, and talking to the night. "No, God," he said, "I won’t join them looking for the shit that’s fallen out of rich people’s asses. You’ve given me stars, and Pari-CA." It seemed like some blood was coming out of his nose, but he just wiped it away and said, "You can just put your hands into all this like water - right into the midst of your worst problems - and pull life right out of the pool; nobody can keep it from you."

"Cocaine?" I asked our guides.

Gabriel said, "The jungles of the north have a lot more to offer than that."

On the other side of Colina dos Bluns, we came at last to the reason for the neighborhood’s silence as we left; most of it was already here, in a little valley beside the ascent towards the refuse station, waiting for daylight to begin the journey up. "My god," I said, "it’s like a scene from the Bible. Like the Exodus."

"Except that the whole world’s Egypt," sai