Three-Part Essay.

1. I’m going to a Festa Junina (Little June Festival) party at our kids’ day-care today. There’ll be dancing and costumes and games. I used to think the Festa da Juninha was one of those weird, politically incorrect hangovers in which Brazilians kind of patronise their rural roots – like the café I visited once, and only once, which offered the peculiar novelty of café do escravo or ‘slave coffee’ served with melado de cana a.k.a. sugarcane syrup. You can perhaps forgive me for reaching this judgement thanks to the weird disconnect that comes from seeing the inhabitants of one of the world's biggest cities dressing themselves and their kids up as country bumpkins, with checked shirts and straw hats for the boys and gingham dresses for the girls.  

However, thanks to the lovely, sparky, switched-on mother & daughter combo who run my kids’ day-care, I now know it's not patronising, as I once thought. It turns out the festa junina is a harvest festival, only one that takes place in a different part of the year than ours due to harvest time being different in the southern hemisphere (duh). I find it kind of beautiful to think of an anthropololgical custom, like a harvest festival, moving around the world, switching over the equator and back again, following the changing seasons.

Anyway, there are tons of cool customs associated with the festival. The two I really like are, first of all, the tradition of bringing along prendas, which are basically your party piece, be it a special cake you can make or a song you can sing, and named for the thing in which you are prendada or gifted. These are then shared out among the guests, as gifts or prizes if they're material objects, or as experiences if they're perishable or evanescent, like a song. The other tradition – which I found kind of creepy before – is for little girls to wear miniature wedding dresses, and it turns out this is actually a joke about the fact that everyone used to get married during the festa, as this guaranteed you a cheap wedding reception because the whole village everyone was already gathered together in one place. (There is, apparently, almost nothing you can do to stop little girls dressing up as princesses or brides.)

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2. Yesterday with my lunch (although by the end I’d lost my appetite), I watched the Panorama episode ‘In the Shadow of the Stadiums’. It was advertised as being about the reality of poverty in Brazil, but it turned out to devote about seventy per cent of its programme time to the prevalence of child prostitution in the host cities, sometimes right in the shadow of the new stadia. It was deeply disturbing, and last night I lay in bed feeling sick that I was tucked up in my bed with all my family safely behind its high walls and all the illusory permanence of our television and our white goods and the safety net of our internet connection and our names on the bills and the salaries that keep us here, and meanwhile there was this young girl Joyce no more than two or three miles away, at this very moment, doing god knows what in the most appalling living hell. Suddenly all our devices and middle-class comforts seemed to emit a death groan. Joyce, I thought, was not going to be celebrating the festa junina tomorrow. She was physically in the same country, but it was a different world.

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3. Back in 2010, my wife and I were walking along Avenida Brasil, the Oxford Street of Brazil, with our obstetrician. We were doing a tour of hospitals with a view to choosing where we wanted my wife to go to deliver our first child. As we walked along the pavement, a dishevelled, filthy young man veered towards us and said something I didn’t understand, but which was nonetheless clearly an appeal for help. Our doctor gave him the brush-off and as we walked along I made some kind of vague bourgeois-guilt-induced aside about wishing there was more one could do to help people like that. ‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about people like that,’ she said. ‘Men like that are only on the street because they’re bad men. They’re drunks or their violent.’ I nodded sagely and didn’t say anything, deferring to her native wisdom and also being superstitiously unwilling to do anything that might jeopardise our karma with the woman who would, we hoped, shortly bring our son into the world. (As it turned out, my wife went into labour on New Year’s Day, and our obstetrician was out of town; she tried to get to the birth, but was sideswiped en route by a drunken truck driver and had her arm broken. While she was unconscious, some nice person nicked her iPhone.)

Looking back, this was patently bullshit. What terrible sin have children like Joyce committed to warrant them being dragged into prostitution? The answer, clearly, is nothing. They’re innocent. The question, then, is why do portions of the Brazilian middle- and upper-classes revile the poor (because this was by no means the only time I have encountered this kind of dismissive, they’re guilty attitude). The answer has to be fear. The scale of the inequality here is so tremendous, and the consequent gulf between the lives of the moneyed Brazilians the poorest Brazilians is so incomprehensibly vast, that anyone who has any degree of security lives in fear of those who have literally nothing, because, with some reason, they think that resentment or envy at what they have will explode at any moment in their safe, ordered worlds, annihilating that fragile sense of normality and security which they hang onto for the sake of their families and loved ones. And when you fear something, you are only one step away from hating it.

It’s not their fault that most Brazilians feel like this. Any anger should be directed at the government which is failing to create proper measures, as well it might, to bring these people out of poverty. However, the moment you start dismissing the suffering of others, you’re complicit to some degree – I’m complicit to some degree. At the party today, as I watch the lucky ones dance and play, I will be complicit, because I’m scared for my own children and I’d do anything to keep them safe.