Crackland: a territory of embrace - Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo)

CRACKLAND A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE

LINCOLN SPADA

Adesaf – Associação de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social às Famílias (Association for the Family’s Social and Economic Development)

CRACKLAND A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE

FIRST EDITION SANTOS 2017

Copyright © 2016 by Lincoln Spada All rights reserved by Adesaf – Associação de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social às Famílias Edition, Graphic Project: Márcio Barreto Preparation: Bruno Nunes Photography: Bruna Stephanie and Adesaf’s staff Cover: Edu Fernandes Translated and revised by: Ana Latrova and Leandro Santos

The cover of this book was inspired by the work of Fátima Reis, a beneficiary who, through DBA’s activities, painted a canvas based on Pablo Picasso’s traces.

Cataloging in Publication record (CIP) (Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brasil) ______________________________________________________________ Spada, Lincoln, 1991 – Crackland : a territory of embrace / Lincoln Spada. – – 1st. ed. – – Santos, SP : Imaginário Coletivo, 2017.

Original title: Cracolândia : território do abraço Bibliography ISBN: 978 – 85 – 5749 – 003 – 1 1. Adesaf – Association for the Family’s Social and Economic Development – São Vicente (SP) – History 2. Drugs – Abuse – Advertising works 3. Non-Governmental organizations 4. Public policies – São Paulo (SP) 5. With Open Arms Program – History 6.

Social service 7. Dependents – Assistance in institutions 8. Dependents – Rehabilitation I. Title.

17 – 06244 CDD – 362.29 ______________________________________________________________ Index for Systematic Catalogue: 1. Drugs : Abuse : Social Problems

362.29

Imaginário Coletivo Avenida Bartolomeu de Gusmão, 85/608, Aparecida | 11045-401 | Santos | SP | Brasil +55 (13) 3467-4387 | mb-4@ig.com.br

7

Preface If this were a poetry book, I would ask permission from Lincoln Spada, the author of this publication, for a brief poetic relieve, democratically, to give my remarks on the texts he translated, starting from the observation in the battlefield, or else, Campos Elíseos (the Elysian Fields, in English). The field in which experiences, stories, emotions and breath were harvested, to follow through exit tunnels which lead to real characters, who shook the consciousness stability of all who dared to face it, and were willing to dive into the complexity of users of psychoactive substances living at the so called Cracolândia (Crackland).

Therefore, if it is not a literary piece of poetic nature, can it be far from being qualified as a science fiction, drama, thriller, terror or self-help classification?

Could it be a mix or more of the same, considering the hours spent by the author with so much effort in the cultural, social, political and historical research, besides interviews, to contextualize the reader on several aspects that culminated on the development of the Crackland, the implantation and progress of With Open Arms program (DBA - De Braços Abertos), which is an effort of São Paulo’s Town Hall, and comment on the State and the press’s behavior over the subject, along with providing information on the arrival and the effects of crack in Brazil.

Even though I lack the technical skills or academic prowess on literature that would provide me with the ability to suggest any terms of gender line to this piece, I requested from my friend Lincoln, in so many occasions, the so-called “relieve” that could make any literate expert annoyed. After all, there were many anxious requests to add a subject, character or a chapter to the book.

My constant requests were based on the hysterical qualms that any excerpt from those last two years could be left out, even though the kindness and sensitivity of the author allowed me to give some suggestions. Still, all the syllables in this book would not be enough to CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

8 handle all the remarkable and touching stories we lived there. Nonetheless, it is comforting to notice that the experiences were captured and patched into the flashes and déjà-vu the brain so generously processed in a matter of seconds, so that we never forget.

Emotions and memories so deep and intense as those on dedication and sensitivity of every employee at Adesaf, who ventured in Campos. As a matter of fact, I take this opportunity and now, without apology or excuse, I break the protocol in this book to add, right here, my special thanks to the valiant companionship throughout the harsh path of Adesaf in the last two years, while the team stood ever united.

We know! Those who will be proudly remembered for their courage and loyalty. Many other excerpts and people deserve the spotlight, thanks to the fast, frenetic-paced work to keep our DBA (as it was fondly named) management running. For those reasons, I could not keep myself from mentioning Sandra Faé, municipal assistant-secretary of the SDTE, which stands for Secretaria do Desenvolvimento, Trabalho e Empreendedorismo (Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Office), the institutional manager of the partnership signed with Adesaf.

Leading the governmental management of the DBA, she was resolute in the journey to make the program happen. Countless times, Sandra would make it clear through words, gestures, demands and, many times, tears, a latent feeling of the truth revealed.

The DBA is a great mission, the kind that only keeps standing when there is a real desire for social transformation, for solidarity, commitment and political awareness, impossible to fake or pretend. It only connects with those who truly believe in the human being’s ability to reinvent and to contribute for a better world.

The first intention of this piece was to present the reader with a viewpoint describing the role of Adesaf at the DBA, but the author ended up determined to widen his research and observation, moved, of course, by curiosity and interest peculiar to him. And there was an even more special motivation.

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

9 It was for realizing that our role in the myriad of actions developed there represents a small piece in the weft that composes the not so invisible rope surrounding the Crackland and draws, ruthlessly, the line between those who prefer to turn their faces and those who benefit from the conditions of those who inhabit or frequent the location. And by us, I mean myself and all the others who live and work in the territory.

What side will the rope burst to? So many questions arose.

Therefore, this is a book to be appreciated with heart and mind fully opened, an immersion into the piece. To that extent, sometimes it will be necessary to choose, whether it breaks your heart or not, to undress oneself of prejudices and to evoke one of the most sublime emotions: love that does not judge, does not punish, does not impose and mostly, does not discriminate.

Imbued with that spirit, even if not so honed, I was faced with the decision to submit the team to the risks of working with people and a program so marginalized by most of the society.

In a 24-month time, every day there were doubts and hesitation, much hesitation to face the managerial challenge; the simple, sometimes distorted understanding of traditional media vehicles; the territory; the consequences; my future and Adesaf’s future after the DBA. It seemed so obvious, and the decision of quitting came to me on the way back home, sitting behind the wheel, going down the mountain range that sets the Baixada Santista apart from the capital city, every day that I came back from Campos Elíseos. But I felt the greatest agony when the certainties hit me almost every long sleepless night, when I had very serious talks with myself about everything and everyone that inhabited the DBA dimension.

Some memories even seemed meaningless, when long before the DBA experience the overcoming story of a friend of mine came to mind.

He exchanged the pursuit for drugs for an entire city’s life improvement, which he will be the main character of. The memories, far from my understanding, did not come by chance. They came to shift the scales and CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

10 to inspire, even more. It was possible, it was real! One more inspiration.

To be in DBA one needs to believe!

Among inspiration, doubts and all the unfriendly scenario presented by the DBA territory, I tried to find even in the astral conjuncture answers that could explain the reason to keep going (although all was pushing against the decision to stay ahead of such a complex program) and not forfeiting Campos Elíseos.

The answers did not fall from the skies, but they could compare to the stars by the hidden glow in the eyes of so many DBA beneficiaries. As a matter of fact, it was a glimpse of those that gave me a sign on the first day I set foot on the territory. It was a sunny Wednesday morning, the first of October. I was so afraid that even the sky seemed colorless.

When standing in front of the building which would be the headquarters of Adesaf/DBA, I raised my head more than I needed to, because the building seemed taller than it really was. The three flats of stairs seemed more like a pathway to slaughter rather than the steps leading to the good work I would perform along with the newly assembled team of Adesaf São Paulo. Between papers, new faces and an avalanche of data, the beginning of a new transition of the DBA’s management to Adesaf.

After hours, with a dizzy mind from all the talking, I went down for a smoke sided by João, a local already known at the DBA and by then, a new employee at Adesaf who would help us with everyday work.

Nicknamed João, he was also proud of his baptism name, because it had been chosen by his mom. And from this point on we will call him João all the time, which is what we all know Leila as.

He looked judicious of me, not letting anyone get close to him. He seemed to make sure he was emitting a magnetic field around his short stature to keep his strict’ reputation of not having too many friends. But in a matter of seconds, that ‘glimpse’ faded and I could notice the amenity in his eyes. João was the first person I ever loved in the Crackland.

Everything seemed better after João. However, by nightfall next day we were still trying to get to the tipping point to start our management, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

11 when I was paralyzed by the first offensive from a DBA beneficiary, attended by me, Brandão and another Adesaf employee, because he thought he was defending his territory.

At that point, they did not know who we were. They treated us like intruders in what we thought was a no man’s land. Little by little, among conflicts and long hours of dialogue, people were establishing trust, bonds and authority – without authoritarianism. We found the conducting line that would define our management procedure at the DBA. Respect for the beneficiaries and all others along the territory gave us the welcome to stay.

With the beneficiaries’ help we established rules and mechanisms so that control and transparency in our program were able to strengthen the local initiative and that, mostly, they had our honest and close companionship to them as a prerogative.

The first year of Adesaf at the DBA went on, with daily support and sleepless nights from Adesaf’s team in São Vicente, along with the tireless work from São Paulo’s team. The hope for success seemed flourishing, even though not everything was nice and sound. Nonetheless, by the following year the massacre from a significant number from press was ruthless. The political event that moved across the country against ‘politicians’ and corruption, which mysteriously seemed to have only a single address, generated a legion of ‘technicians’ and specialists in public policies. On agreement with the so called larger media, these people’s expertise grew exponentially and went face to face with social initiatives such as the DBA and, consequently, tried to get to the human dignity of beneficiaries.

Statements, press releases and social network posts hit and jeopardized all the efforts and achievements the beneficiaries had had so far. In the middle of the electoral process, the harsh comments pointed to no better alternative in terms of damage reduction, and the empty speeches were filled with offensive words to the Crackland’s population and DBA beneficiaries.

By September 2016’s first fortnight, almost like a rebound action, Adesaf promoted the first exhibition Inside the Embrace, together with CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

12 SDTE. The goal was to raise the maimed morale of beneficiaries that took part in the entire event setup, besides giving the spotlight to all their production during the two years Adesaf managed the DBA, from the workforce’s perspective. The bad news about a good share of politicians disowning the DBA did not shake the dedication and attendance of beneficiaries in the program’s activities, neither did it take out the glow and excitement they showed at the exhibition – an effort in which they were the mains actors in a movie going on inside their heads, by appreciating their exposed pieces, available to whomever wanted to watch.

However, some did not attend. Those ‘politicians’ and ‘specialists’ (ha!) did not even bother to show. It was the undisputed and materialized evidence that it is possible to establish pacts of commitment towards building a new public policy that has their user itself as protagonist. Where had the beneficiaries been before the production of canvas and sculptures?

Before the map that quantified the distance of how much they swept and contributed to urban cleaning in meters? Where had they been before the DBA? The equation was simple. For the account, what gives comfort is that on those exhibition days we expected not for the ‘specialists’ to come, but the mathematicians!

It was not different when, by the following month, the Citizenship Cultural Formation activity, common to the DBA’s routine, was taken by the peaceful and legitimate demonstration of the beneficiaries, who felt threatened by the program’s end sign. At the same mansion housing the exhibition, the feeling was now in favor of maintaining the DBA. Writing became the beneficiaries weapon of choice, which pointed to a bullseye where the paper was standing, and the hitting bullet was intended to reach everybody’s sensitivity, who should naturally understand the meaning of those words.

Differently from the time when we got to the program, no beneficiary now had trouble showing up. In fact, they started asking themselves for the photo log of their performed activities, next to their creations, with their friends and team members from Adesaf. That was the result from the process of life redefinition, self-image, the reception, the embrace, the territory… DBA’s consequences!

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

13 Among eloquent clicks from the photo cameras and mobile devices, the exhibition went on smoothly when the excitement, not the one provoked by drugs, gave room to the item most sought by the beneficiaries: The microphone. There were those who wished to use it and those who waited eagerly for the songs that would give tune to that very special day.

It started with the beneficiaries freestyling, they took turns singing from popular songs to original rap songs. The lyrics chosen gave preference to those expressing their own stories, or rather, those representing the life story they dedicated themselves to having.

Márcio caught my attention since the first day I met him in the program. However, it was in this event, when he sang, that he charmed me, just as Cleiton, Sueli, Sorriso, Gaspar, Leandro, Dagoberto, Marcelo, Andrea, Fernanda and so many other charmed me in different ways by widely spreading their potentials and singularities, openly revealing their wishes and expectations. They allowed me – and themselves – to come closer.

Time and time again, they inspired me to stay, focusing on dedicating myself to the maintenance of the program, given that in the command shifting of São Paulo’ Town Hall, facing the declared position of the new manager in the Capital, we could not lose our hope.

The Energy Museum, the mansion located in the surroundings of the Crackland, stood distant from the territory’s agitated atmosphere with its trees and peaceful landscape. It was there the exhibition took place, with the canvas, the sculptures, the static vases that stood under the uneasy contemplation of beneficiaries, happy for their great achievements.

Between the admiration of pieces and talks among talks, a new link between the beneficiaries and all of Adesaf’s team was notorious by the moment Márcio was singing. The singer-beneficiary asked for everyone to follow his cue, besides the voices in the choir. He was immediately heard.

The sound of clapping was almost like another instrument. Everyone followed the rhythm from the chords of his borrowed guitar, which gave the song life.

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

14 Today I still don’t know where that guitar came from – maybe that so called astral explanation – since the instrument’s advent was just like the Sun King, so that the young man’s following days were warmer. With his genuine ways, he let his husky voice out without bothering to mix musical genres, excited by his ominous feeling from playing with someone else’s guitar. The outfit was already commonplace to everyone, since Márcio frequently attended the Esthetics and Beauty course offered by the DBA, intercalating his few suits and dress shirts. To add to his style, Márcio always carried her.

Small, less than a foot long, the buchudinha wrapped in worn leather was his companion over his shoulder, inside which he kept his flaming heavy drink from his trips – ones to which she could never be left behind. After singing, Márcio returned the guitar. It was just like the early break up from a relationship that lasted too little to cause any harm, only sorrow. That was what made me suggest, “I’ll give you a guitar for that” – and pointed to the small companion. “I am very fond of her. It’s been with me for many years” – said Márcio, already practicing to let it go, ungearing the straps out of his shoulder. Without hesitation and following the recommendations, Márcio’s thin hands brought the rapariga to me – as he used to call the buchudinha: faithful companion, witness to all of his sorrow. This man, an orphan that lost his father in his childhood and his mother in his early youth, also feels for his child’s absence. A small correction to the most common expression used by Márcio fits in here, it’s not sorrow, it’s longing – which I wouldn’t even dare to translate.

By the following week, the exchange was made and the replacement for rapariga came in. He got the new guitar. Now it was his, and he could take it wherever he wanted. The instrument started echoing much more than song notes, which lifted up everyone by Adesaf’s headquarters and Márcio’s friends. Compared to an amulet, I pictured it as if the guitar shapes could represent a new path to try, once more, to overcome his addiction to crack and alcohol.

What if this book was one of Márcio’s songs? It could be funk, romantic, bossa-nova, corny… or any other musical genre. However, this definition, just as the literary genre, is what matters the least, because the

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

15 following proposition should be read without standards, no strings attached. Only the reader can determine the rhythm and genre.

I say farewell here, but just in the book! Because even though I respect the advice from my best and dearest friend of all time, who said it was time to escape from the territory, he was outspoken by the enormous affection I have for every DBA beneficiary, to whom I dedicate our staying and maintenance of the program. Have a good reading!

Fernanda Gouveia Founder and President of Adesaf – Association for the Family’s Social and Economic Development

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

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CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

17 Index

Introduction............................................................................................19 Prologue – Blue Portrait .......................................................................21 Part 1 –DBA’s Context ..........................................................................29 Chapter 1 – Mad Pauliceia ......................................................................33 Chapter 2 – Tip of the Spear ...................................................................41 Chapter 3 – Varied Poetry .......................................................................51 Part 2 – DBA’s beginning .....................................................................59 Chapter 4 – The Lighthouse ....................................................................63 Chapter 5 – The Dissolute Rhythm .........................................................71 Chapter 6 – The Laborers ........................................................................85 Part 3 – Adesaf at the DBA ...................................................................99 Chapter 7 – Pure Life ............................................................................103 Chapter 8 – Ground Zero: Floor ............................................................112 Chapter 9 – Magnificat ..........................................................................119 Chapter 10 – Joy Is the Ultimate Proof .................................................125 Chapter 11 –São Paulo awakens ...........................................................133 Chapter 12 – A letter to my fiancée ......................................................142 Chapter 13 – The Yellow Man ..............................................................151 Chapter 14 – Pont Neuf .........................................................................160 CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

18 Epilogue – La Rentrée .........................................................................167 Bobliographic References ...................................................................175 Photos .............................29, 30, 31, 32, 59, 60, 61, 62, 99, 100, 101, 102

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

19

Introduction Being the author of this book, during the entire course of creation, I received the awe of friends when I mentioned the work of visiting the territory known nationwide as the Crackland. “Are you crazy?”, “Have you been mugged there?”, “How do they behave?”, were the common sentences I heard in social circles.

The meaning of this publication is simple. It consists of documenting the work of the Association for the Family’s Social and Economic Development (Adesaf) along with statements from public managers, professionals alike and, mostly, the beneficiaries of the With Open Arms (De Braços Abertos, DBA) program, and the damage reduction first-hand initiative with basic requirements for socially vulnerable drugdependents in high risk in São Paulo and in Brazil.

I owe this opportunity to my friend Bruno Nunes, communications advisor at Adesaf. His partnership for this book on Adesaf’s experience and his leap of faith were priceless, between October 2014 and October 2016, on accord with São Paulo’s Town Hall to manage the DBA workwise.

This piece was essentially possible only because of the welcome and encouragement from Adesaf’s President, Fernanda Gouveia. As an avid and persevering reader, her sensitive gaze was key to proofreading, expanding and publishing the book. She understood all the creative freedom and extended all of her support along with the team to achieve publishing.

The bid for this initiative was signed in July 2015, with a volunteering nature. That being said, it is also fundamental to thank another volunteer to this journey, Bruna Stephanie, who took her photographic camera to register the DBA’s experiences. Our visits to the program at the capital city were between July and September 2015 and from August to September 2016. So, Adesaf’s team also contributes with other images composing the DBA’s settling trajectory.

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

20 This book differs from common institutional publications. As a journalist, I lend my gaze to the narrative as a guest to the NGO concerning the program. Therefore, it is hard to define what its genre is, since I look to add dozens of references – sometimes academic, sometimes journalistic, and mostly, from beneficiaries’ testimonies of the initiative from São Paulo city.

For instance, the book’s title gathers popular folklore concepts (Crackland), from social sciences (psychotropic territory) and from public policies (With Open Arms). For the record, I baptize each and every chapter in this book with names of literary pieces or plastic arts, all from modern artists or those present in the Modern Art Week in 1922. It is because I understand that the former generation’s impulse to redefine the cultural identity of São Paulo and Brazil is the same one that drove Fernando Haddad’s as a mayor to dare innovate with new public policies on drugs in the capital and in the country.

The narrative counts on a prologue which, as a micro narrative from my first visit to the program, sketches the region’s scenario where a good part of the DBA takes place. The book’s first section approaches the social and historical context of the Luz neighborhood, crack consumption and its effects, and a general overview on Adesaf’s gaze at the DBA. The next step presents the municipal project, with statements from public authorities, researchers and journalists.

In the third act, I present the testimonies from Adesaf’s team and its program beneficiaries, their daily routine and how the DBA contributes to reduce damage and also the social reintegration of hundreds of people.

And finally, the epilogue covers my last visit to the DBA, during the exhibition Inside the Embrace (Por Dentro do Abraço), and talks about the future perspective of those attending the event.

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

21

Prologue

Blue Portrait1 São Paulo, July 21st, 2015 “Is he in this hell?”, she whispered while holding a not-touchscreen mobile phone in her hand, and in the screen, there was a blurred image of a middle-aged man, a little apathetic, just as in any official paper report. Her brief complaint consisted of an ocean filled with hundreds of piled ups at the Dino Bueno Grove section, located between Helvétia Street and Largo Coração de Jesus.

The scenario: a few dozens of low farmsteads, one of which a three-store building at most. Although most of the premises were residences, there were some rolling steel doors, closed, common in low to medium-sized business as concealed as the many street façades, between graffiti and paintings.

All this section so typical to large downtown areas stands out for the crowd gathered there, filling every asphalt and pavement square meter, around ten a.m. that Tuesday, just as on many other Wednesdays, Thursdays or Fridays. Crack, the cursed rock that gives identity to that territory, is the same reason that turns most of the anonymous sea of people into clandestine.

Into the Crackland raised right at the heart of Latin America’s largest capital city, the broadcast angles must be concealed, with stripcovered faces and voices from different timbers and names omitted. As a matter of fact, the omitting of certain past sections is perceived as a golden rule to the cohabitation between drug users, and their established bonds with the public servers and authorities, religious missionaries and activists, undergraduates and mostly, reporters.

1

Blue Portrait (Retrato Azul) is the name of a painting by Tarsila do Amaral. In this prologue, it also refers to the described woman’s mobile phone screen.

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

22 Simply suspecting the presence of a photographic camera or a voice recorder in closing in is enough to shift the moods of this microcity, already patrolled with devotion by creatures of the City Security and teams from the Health and Social Service and Development Offices. The drug users inconvenience comes from the constant coming and going of scholars and journalists who have persisted on documenting the local population’s trajectory for ten years now. Sometimes, the spotlights on people intensifies their humanity.

But most of the drug users complain time and again about the bad focused lighting which only empowers the irrational side of the addict, in an uncovered laboratory, potentizing their popular misunderstanding as chainless, unleashed or uncaged beasts. From cages, part of the crack survivors reconciles, and the illicit drug use inherently aligned with the criminal records corroborate the intention to keep it out of more and more tabloid covers.

Crack’s perimeter The opposing tide posing to the canvas is not contrary to the radio beats. With the advent and advance of newer technologies, electronic equipment go from one passerby’s hand to another. Portable radios, earphones and sound gears play distinctive hits simultaneously. In that occasion, axé romances, rap poetry and funk shouts rhythmize in synced waves.

There were those who laid together, who covered themselves in sheets on the curb and a good portion to circle around in greetings and stumbling. Some wearing flip-flops, tennis shoes and a few on distinguished shoe wear. The clothing was distinctive in its colors, clothes, cuts and those who modeled in shorts, long jackets and caps could be found. Caps are most common, although this lack of stereotypes proves that whoever passes by or sticks to Crackland beholds much more of its individuality than its homogeneous population.

During that morning’s accidental meeting, our eyes lack stigma and standards. The color skins vary from fair to mulatto to black. Some hands look younger, some have been marked with years gone by, and CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

23 others have deep wrinkles typical to seniority. There are men’s hands women’s hands. There are also men who dance like girls, and ladies who feel like men. We don’t see any children. Perhaps the one of the few things in common are the fingers and the nails blackened from the contact with the pipe and the psychotropic drug.

The strong stench comes not from the narcotics, but from its effects, which make a person sever the bonds to self-preservation and hygienic conscience little by little. The sweating, the junk and part of the leftovers confuse the senses at first sight. To the point of troubling the woman holding the mobile phone at the beginning of this text. Maria – I shall name her this – walks a few meters before we bring a chair next to the municipal tent set up on Helvétia Street.

Missing Husband With a half-emptied water glass in her hand, Maria tends to reminisce in tears about how crack buried her firstborn, years ago. The desperate search is for her husband, this time, recently released from prison. She went through full sun to spend minutes with her spouse in visiting rooms by the weekends. Went under routine intimate searches in the state center, stripping to third-parties, agents, until she could meet the man who was paying for his miss wrongdoing with his freedom.

Her companion’s release would be summarized by resuming their marital life on São Paulo’s coast, in Itanhaém city. But the calendar went on without news from her husband, who remained in the chaotic capital, specifically on those surroundings. After a call, she went with nothing but the clothes on her back, drenched in sweat from the tension, in a 115kilometer journey looking for one she sees as her better half.

The melancholy stunned her eyes again and, between spaced words, she choked in her testimony. She showed me the face of her man.

She hit the numbers for her husband’s phone. By the second time she typed the contact, his voice replied. She wiped her face when repeating the reencounter’s address. It was the first time we were there – I did not even know her before –, so, after she gathered herself, we went to the destination

CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

24 followed by an employee from Adesaf – the Association for the Family’s Social and Economic Development.

Municipal Program Adesaf is the non-governmental organization managing the municipal program With Open Arms (DBA) in regards to their work.

Regulated by decree 55,067/2014, the DBA is a public initiative aiming at the promotion and psychosocial rehabilitation of people in deep use of psychoactive substances and in a social vulnerability situation. An intersectoral activity based in a network by the Health, Human Rights and Citizenship, Social Service and Development, the Development, Work and Entrepreneurship, and Urban Security Offices, together with the organized civil society.

Set up in January 2014, the damage reduction program with basic requirements is the Municipal Administration’s main verve to create an honest talk about social reinsertion and the population from a micro cosmos which had been growing as a monologue since 1989. An ostensible growth affected by actions from previous municipal and State Governments, mainly negatively registered by the press on the disturbances from police repression activities.

The DBA is a pioneering experience in Brazil, based on wellsucceeded damage-reduction and drug fight initiatives in The Netherlands and in Canada. In summary, more than 450 beneficiaries participate in the project, acting on different work fronts and professional training and then receiving a weekly R$ 130, besides sheltering and food as a compensation.

For being so innovative I took interest in describing the experience of the accord between São Paulo’s Town Hall and Adesaf. Next to photographer Bruna Stephanie, we went on before meeting Maria that morning, in a lift from a car driven by Rafael Bruder, DBA’s Manager for Adesaf. It was our first visit to the program, in July 2015.

Small gestures The deep timber and huskiness that add up to a voice similar to Batman’s, or any other invented superhero from comic books, matches CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

25 Rafael’s 6 feet tall and large shoulders. His athletic build went through several jiu-jitsu belts, and as a former occupation, he dedicated to developing his students and apprentices.

Sweet talker, he went on about the shifts on the tatami, the consecutive medals and classes in an association linked to São Vicente’s Town Hall, on São Paulo State’s coast. As a volunteering instructor on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the sports institution, some six years back, a boy took a blow to his sensitivity. The fact is that even facing a physical disability, the boy kept giving his best at every single practice with his master.

“From that point on, the main goal in my career was feeling useful to people, you know?”, still driving the vehicle. “Small gestures, small words, really.” From the sentences about the Crackland, he remembered a father’s gratitude for finding his son, after the boy had taken a good shower and was working on the surrounding streets. The shower was because the boy had applied to the DBA. “A shower. He was happy because the guy had the possibility to take a shower.” Can you read between those lines?

With the same simplicity, Rafael suggested he guide Maria through the paths outside the Crackland. Her spouse did not disappear into that people fluxo – a common term given to the wandering of drug users in those surroundings - he was standing in wait on a distant square. Walking quickly, we left the street tent.

There, beyond the covered area there is a service central where the social service and health teams gather around. The former wear green vests and the latter wear blue. Adesaf’s staff dress in red uniforms. This way it is easier for the beneficiaries, the other drug users and the neighborhood itself to recognize the professionals tending to the region and ask for attention.

Trusting bonds Having arrived so recently, Rafael still used just his badge, which did not make him different from the routine that demanded calls from the spread team of social operators at Adesaf, and not even saved him from being interrupted by his own calls. “Rafael, Rafael”, waved one of the CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

26 beneficiaries late for her daily service. One asked for procedures to assure their health. Two came asking for their immediate application to the work front. In this case, the list of future participants in the initiative is forwarded through the Social Service and Development Office.

I still remember that another beneficiary run into us just to give us a hug. The small gestures. The DBA manager smiled to the greeting, promptly taking the conversation to explain thoroughly the lady’s needs: sheltering, food, workflow. I could take this time to name each one of them who addressed Rafael in a little less than 15 minutes. However, the problem is he has better memory, calling each of them by their names every time they spoke to him.

The trusting bond is one of the terms I heard the most, whether in testimonies of Adesaf’s agents at DBA, or in the interviews with beneficiaries. The cordial and brief relationship between both sides sounds as one of the main directives for the program to reach the success desired by the Public Government in that Luz region environment.

If you understand that Luz (Light, in English) is the opposite of my description of a little shady scenario, the neighborhood in which the Crackland is publicly known to be located is the Campos Elíseos (Elysian Fields or Champs-Élisées). In Hellenistic mythology, the Greeks referred like this to paradise or the land of the well-succeeded.

“Contradictory to call this place this, to say the least, isn’t it?”, Silva (fictitious name or f.n.) warned me in another occasion. He was a DBA beneficiary who would still philosophize on good reflections during our visits to the governmental initiative.

Network of possibilities As it has been well said, this intersectional program is projected into several spaces. At the street tent, for instance, the drug users are attracted to the place’s well-structured cover, a TV and a condom display. On it, a brief graffiti containing “Comic book, there’s someone who loves you”. In fact, the precinct is filled with a playful atmosphere, some graffiti drawings and a memory table, on which the passersby writes sentences like urban CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

27 verses: “The right can’t pass as wrong”, “I don’t exchange ‘oxente’ for anyone else’s ‘ok’” and “What did you dream about today?”.

Those are possibilities and attempts to get the street inhabitants to wish to reinsert themselves in society and apply to the many public services offered by the Town Hall. Across the street from the tent, was the Restart building, a state initiative also towards the support of chemical abusers, but turned to internment treatment. At the next corner, there is another area from the same program, with a street tent and other services to the population.

As for the DBA, there were more facilities, such as the managerial building and another one for the training of participants, both at Largo Coração de Jesus2, besides a warehouse for attendance, work material maintenance and leisure activities, this one sitting at Barão de Paranapiacaba Grove, at the same quadrant. However, neither of them was seen by the course taken by Rafael, Bruna and myself on that first Tuesday.

Out of the high spots in the neighborhood, two of them are easily spotted, such as Julio Prestes Train Station and the open arms Jesus Christ standing at the top of Sagrado Coração de Jesus Sanctuary, but both of them far in the horizon towards Princesa Isabel Square. Dozens of meters away from the fluxo, our walk became more quiet between stores, bars, little hotels and slums in the area. The clock’s hands registered a few minutes past ten thirty when Maria waved back to her husband.

The woman was in a rush when she walked the pedestrian crosswalk.

The traffic lights were not even green to us. From the other side, her husband raised his thumb towards Rafael. Another small gesture. “So, do you feel useful?”, I turned back at him, expecting that the strong dialogue from the wife trying to convince her beloved to come back home would be as intense as the relation between Adesaf/DBA and their commitment to

2

It was still in 2015 when Adesaf would change their headquarters to a bigger and more suited building for their training actions at 385 Nothmann Grove, Campos Elíseos.

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28 reinsert that part of the community that became the fluxo at the Campos Elíseos neighborhood.

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29

PART 1

DBA’s Context Adesaf

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30

Adesaf

BELIEVE IN YOUR STRENGTH!

“I never leave the desire to be educated, and my fooled curiosity is always insatiable”, Silva, a beneficiary of the program, quoting Voltaire

Bruna Stephanie

“As a program of damage reduction, the DBA is a path”, says Genivaldo Brandão, DBA’s coordinator. “To me, it is a good path”

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31

Adesaf

Adesaf’s President, Fernanda Gouveia, beneficiary Márcio (to the left) and the employee João (to the right)

Adesaf

Many are the bonds formed in a shift of friendship among the DBA beneficiaries and Adesaf’s employees

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32

Adesaf

The DBA beneficiaries are offered a multitude of activities

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33

Chapter 1

Mad Paulicea3 The diminished cracks from the pipe incinerating to the point of calling it “crack”. We heard none of that on our way to Adesaf’s headquarters in With Open Arms (Adesaf/DBA) at the time at Largo Coração de Jesus, next to the fluxo of drug users. Even with the grey, temperate weather on that Tuesday, it still did not dissipate or clouded the recent resetting of Campos Elíseos. The last three and a half decades insist on turning the neighborhood into an accursed land as the consequence of a community living on the streets focused on the search for crack. The municipal program With Open Arms, little by little, designs a new environment in the area metamorphosed in these years.

At the two-floor headquarters, I can see the square with a playground, two multisport courts, a Military Police (M.P.) common base and the city security guards, and sometimes, a few people there admiring the morning. Others were DBA’s beneficiaries, sweeping fallen leaves, thrown-out packages and other litter surrounding the place. However, the Sagrado Coração de Jesus Sanctuary’s tower is what pulls up our gazes, across the square.

The seven meters from Christ the Redeemer stretching his arms to his admirers attract just as much as the other 55-meter-tall tower where the monument onlooks the neighborhood. Built between 1880 and 1901, the classic-renaissance styled temple in the shape of a basilica was notorious for being one of the three highest grounds in São Paulo from the past century. The centennial space next to the lyceum kept by the religious is one of the few remnants of the contemporary Campos Elíseos.

3

Mad Paulicea (Pauliceia Desvairada) is the name of the poem book from the modern artist Mário de Andrade. This chapter refers to São Paulo and to the context in which the Crackland was formed in the city.

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34 Planned Neighborhood Out of all the 1,521 square kilometers housing the Paulistana society (the terms Paulista and Paulistano/Paulistana refer to people or things related to the State and the city of São Paulo, respectively), only a 1 to 3 square kilometers’ parcel from Campos Elíseos was put in lot in the 1870’s, as the first planned neighborhood in the Capital City.

The inauguration of the former railway network São Paulo Railway and the future house water supply from the extinct Cantareira Company, the region corresponding to the Chácara do Charpe was drawn by lots to the opening of streets and residences.

Better yet, small palaces with French aspects from the 16th century.

As a parallel to the Parisian avenue Champs Élysées, where the Arch of Triumph is located, it inherited the name from homes that could not be mistaken with the sober manors and stucco abodes from the colonial era, so common to the Paulistana province. In a short period, the neighborhood grew with its ways paying homage to personas such as the Andradas, Gusmões, General Osório and Duque de Caxias, still at the end of the 19th century.

Until the 1930s, the neighborhood stood out as one of the noblest areas in São Paulo, to the extent of being inhabited by bishops and Presidents of the Province (equivalent to being a State governor nowadays), with the right to Coração de Jesus Lyceum (1885), Campos Elíseos Palace (1899), Pinacoteca de São Paulo Station art gallery (1900), and São Paulo train station (1875), replaced by the current Júlio Prestes train station (1938).

Besides the temple and the school, the Salesian Congregation was also increasing their facilities in these golden times, building the Coração de Jesus Center for Social Integration, a three-story mansion that is nowadays a State cultural heritage place. This one stands right next to Adesaf/DBA’s first administrative headquarters, where we were observing the square from. In fact, the building was also used by the NGO as a center for training the beneficiaries professionally.

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35 Reference and crossing Together, the baron families and the religious order molded the space which, little by little, added more popular colors. The coffee market crisis in 1929 and the acceleration of an industrial cycle in the following decade branded the turmoil in Campos Elíseos, anticipating the reference neighborhood as a crossway at the inauguration of the Luz Bus Station, in 1961.

The huge daily traffic of nearly two thousand buses and multiple taxi stands stretched the establishment of store facilities. They became the ones in charge of getting the Paulistanos moving in that epicenter, because either the rising engine grunts, the traffic jams intertwined with the fear of thefts, or the South Region’s growth encouraged the exodus of a layer of middle and high-class citizens. The golden age’s residences were replaced by little to medium-sized hotels, besides slums. The traffic collapse in the area stopped in 1982 with the decommission of the bus station and, consequently, with the absence of passengers and tourists. Many stores, bars and diners needed to reinvent themselves with the street vendors’ arrival. The hotel network, on the other hand, lost part of their assets to zones of prostitution, especially red-light districts.

Next to the neighborhood of Santa Ifigênia, Campos Elíseos was tangent to the Trash’s Mouth route. However, the marginal cinema and the pornochanchadas, a Brazilian genre of soft-porn movies, shot in the Paulistano downtown barely pictured the fog that took over the former Parisian paradise. State interventions such as small palaces and stations establishing bases to state institutions in the 70’s didn’t stagnate because of the bad environment. There was even an intention by businessmen of revitalizing the region because of its centered location, but the fact was, there, the crossway started subdividing into drug dealing.

The morning didn’t come in at the neighborhood, just as in a fair part of the Luz region. That was when some papers registered the area as Crackland, in 1989. I confess that the name’s origin is a mystery in my research. It was as if the drug besieged a territory that would no longer be successful. A living dead.

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36 Anti-hero rock “Sometimes I feel like an undead, a zombie, you know?”, the DBA beneficiary Silva (f.n.) greeted me when I went down the building. We introduced ourselves on the spot – me, Lincoln, and I grant him the anonymity. “The addiction makes me feel a little like that. I need to get out of it”, with his grey beard coming out of his black-hooded coat.

His hands were shaking, not as an aftereffect from crack, but from the eagerness to see the cover of a book with chronicles I had with me. “I never leave the desire to be educated, and my fooled curiosity is always insatiable”, he stared at me. Do you know the author? “Voltaire”, just as skeptical and philosopher as Silva. He came from Limeira (SP) and because of a family feud and the delusions from other institutions, he found better housing in a bond with the streets and the drugs he persists on quitting now through DBA. More clever and literate than I was, my book was not a gift to Silva, maybe it has always belonged to him. After that talk, a social advisor from Adesaf came close: “He is different, he is smart, he likes to read a lot, he knows a lot. You will realize that during your visits”, as if all of the remaining hundreds were not different as well. The problem is that the addiction to crack often blocks rare gifts from its adepts.

Of the dozens of nicknames given to the narcotic, kryptonite was maybe the best comparison it got in the 2000’s, especially in communities from Rio Grande do Sul. The metaphor of a rock weakening the greatest myth from comic books has similar shapes as the life of a crack addict, to the point of being referred to as “the rock that could take down even Superman”.

This parallel is drawn in the article from Freud Lacan – Escola de Estudos Psicanalíticos (School of Psychoanalytic Studies), written by Bernardo Mantovani in 2012. Two aspects were revealed in his discourse.

The first one on the meaning of the omnipotence that the pleasure from the drug offers, and the second on the way getting in contact with it also reflects on a symbolic fall.

“The rock doesn’t kill, but only signs up the subjects for the register of castration, getting them close to the condition of normal, mortal CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

37 and incomplete”. And it is that fragility that brings Superman closer, from another world, outside his origins. In the speech of the interviewees, “the use of crack makes them imaginarily feel as if they belong to a group, or inserted in a movement”.

Mama Coca Crack itself derives from cocaine – it’s an alkaloid substance, that is, with a basic attribute of reacting to acids, like caffeine and nicotine. It’s contained in the plant Erythroxylon coca, the natural coke from the Andes, where it was cultivated by the Incas in their fertility rituals for millennia, up to the 16th century. The term coca is translated from the Aymara dialect as plant or bush. According to their tradition, the chewable leaves from the Mama Coca, as the tribes called them, empowered men to beat a maleficent god and thanks to them, the privileged noblemen, soldiers, messengers and a few peasants endured hunger and fatigue in high altitudes.

The plant was taken at that same timespan by European navigators to the Old Continent. As the centuries went by, excited botanists and researchers named it the “medical matter treasure”, “healthy and conductor of longevity” and even said it “summoned the organism’s potency”, although few were interested in the results from the constancy of the medication. It was 1860 when the German chemist Albert Niemann isolated the main alkaloid, naming it cocaine.

Three years later, Ângelo Mariani’s wine with the substance as base (with 30 to 70 milligrams per glass) would be a bracer capable of curing diseases, the merchant being saluted by the Queen of England, the King of Greece and the Czar of Russia and honored with a medal by the Pope Leo XIII. In the decade of 1880, Freud applauded cocaine as an inhibitor to melancholy and hypochondria, and later, he would state that its unmeasured consumption would lead to paranoid symptoms, hallucinations and physical-mental decay.

In Brazil, beverages deriving from coke would mitigate laryngitis and cough in pharmacies, with no record of cocaine abuse until 1920. At that time, products containing its essence were cut, because society took part in health campaigns against the non-medical application of medicine.

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38 Eroticized drug Cocaine as a fruition from drug traffic was a common subject for crime sections in America in the 70’s, next to crack, its profitable cousin in the same illegal grounds. Studies disclosed that a kilogram of cocaine can be split into ten thousand portions of crack, and, even though it is sold from R$ 5 to R$10, the trade is 25 times bigger than the illicit powder.

In the 80’s heyday, cocaine dissemination was seen as the “United States drug of elite”. If inhaled, it was an energy, self-esteem and ambition source for young professionals of a high profile, or workaholics (addict to work). Such was its fame that it was even more eroticized in society. And suddenly its lines were exchanged for pipes in the poorer layers of Los Angeles, especially between Negros and Latinos aiming to get into the job market.

“In this context, the war against drugs poses only as another capitalism stratagem to blame the remaining groups for the issues caused by the dominant social formation”, argued Marcel Segalia Bueno Arruda in his thesis at the Nursing School of USP. If drugs used by the richer resulted, at maximum, in health articles, the ones popular to immigrants, the poor and Negros were soon related to violent crimes.

Clearly the low price of the narcotic equals its purity level. It is composed of crystals formed by cocaine’s basic paste refined with sodium bicarbonate and water, and sometimes, other residues. According to a press release from O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper in the 90’s, the drug found in the Capital city was also mixed with lye, car battery solution, chlorine bleach, cement, and cattle hormones.

Consequences of enjoyment Even though it mixes many materials, the smoke from crack when inhaled in the improvised pipe is aggressively conducted to the lungs that, in turn, send it to the entire bloodstream. It barely takes fifteen seconds for it to act on the brain, potentializing the chemistry of dopamine, serotonin and noradrenalin among the neurons. The triad of substances stimulates a pleasure as strong as that of an extended orgasm, euphoria, and a state of CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

39 awareness with the acceleration of respiration and heartbeats. After the intense result from the portion of toxins, the body reacts with a certain anxiety towards the next dose.

Such a relationship when boundless provokes, according to studies, irritations to several human organs, such as cardiac illnesses (tachycardia, hypertension), weakening of the respiratory system (more vulnerable to tuberculosis and pneumonia), huskiness, fever, tremors, mydriasis, itching and other symptoms of hostility and depression away from crack use.

“By maintaining the consumption of higher doses, perceptive illusions are developed (visual and hearing), and finally the cocainite psychosis, extreme hypervigilance, paranoid deliria and hallucinations”, summarizes the article Crack e os perigos de uma viagem sem retorno (Crack and the dangers of a trip with no return), published in an academic magazine from the Centro de Ensino Superior de Maringá in 2007. Another attribute mentioned in the text is the intoxication from aluminum, when the pipes are improvised out of soda cans.

Due to the excess of aluminum aspired, the kidney “cannot eliminate all of the impurity from the urine, making the aluminum remain in the bloodstream and deposit in two main sections of the body: the brain, where it reunites with proteins, and the bones”. Thus, the residue can contribute to the progress of memory loss or Alzheimer’s disease, while the skeleton loses proteins. There is research that worsens this diagnosis.

The permanent contact with the strong narcotic causes the desiccation and wrinkling of skin, blockage of oxygen to the brain disrupting reason and memory, besides reducing the instinct of safety and hygiene. Therefore, the duration of use or the gap away from portions inebriate people to the point of reducing their feeding habits, getting thinner and losing more nutrients.

Midday point The fact is a good deal of the population registered in the DBA and those who go through the streets surveyed by the City Security, given the history before they lived as street dwellers, shows the attributes described CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

40 in the tons of academic paper I bring in my case. Taking a walk around the square, I can distinguish a line forming at the Adesaf/DBA’s warehouse in the middle of the next block, on Barão de Paranapiacaba Grove.

Dozens of uniformed beneficiaries gather in to return brooms, trash cans, and other working equipment, and with their badges they registered their attendance, right next to the social counselors in the program. Each one of them establishes the contract and follow the routine of 25 people registered in the initiative. The bonds formed in a shift of friendship are many. Hence the need for keeping the trust between Adesaf’s employees and the program’s beneficiaries.

“Let’s have lunch?”, Rafael invited us, the manager of Adesaf/DBA. “Today, the ones going back home with you and Bruna is Brandão. He is a good talker to”, he jokes about while we walk through the square until Glete Grove, where a commercial establishment serves the Adesaf/DBA team lunch at fixed prices. There, the so-called Brandão is still on the phone, recently out of a meeting, greeting us. In spite of his filled-up agenda, he promises in a quiet whisper that the interview with him is going to be at the end of the shift.

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41

Chapter 2

Tip of the Spear4

“Is the pizza place called Brandão owned by your family?”, they joke about it as the vehicle goes across Sé square. Brandão, better yet, Genivaldo Linhares Brandão, vertically nods his head and gazes at the side view mirror, keeping the joke with uneven seriousness, “And the round is on me, tomorrow”. Everybody laughs.

The driver here is the coordinator of With Open Arms by Adesaf (Adesaf/DBA). His social attire from top to bottom and the suspenders emit the centered posture of the citizen from Cubatão, even better developed by his glasses’ rectangular frame. The looks sound more prudent than judicious or tough. Out of his goatee, most of his words come out in a soft tone, although when they echo too much, they keep the same didactic, slow notion.

But keeping the silence is a spontaneous virtue of Brandão, who has coordinated the DBA for Adesaf, since the first day of the organization’s accord with the Town Hall, on October 1st, 2014, together with Rafael. The same easy attribute to be disseminated by the headquarters, with the working team.

Far from showing lack of interest, Brandão does not tend to cross his arms during dialogs, he puts his hand in his pockets. That night, towards the Paulista coastline, hands on the wheel.

4

Tip of the Spear (Ponta de Lança) is a book compiling personal opinion texts from the modern artist Oswald de Andrade. In this chapter, it refers not to the modernist vanguard, but to With Open Arms program from the perspective of Genivaldo Linhares Brandão, DBA’s coordinator for Adesaf.

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42 Damage reduction The briefcase Brandão carries with him every day is often filled with papers, generally studies about crack. “Write it down: Dartiu Xavier”, spelling the name of the Psychiatry and Medical Psychology Doctor, and professor at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, afterwards. At that time, he followed the arguments of the professor on the use of marihuana as a damage reduction tool from crack.

In the Californian scientific Journal of Psychoactive Drugs of 1999, there’s the testimony of Dartiu in a controlled situation where 50 crack addicts in a dire situation used marihuana for an entire year when they felt like smoking the rock. The weed, also illicit, contributed already in the first quarter.

“Result: 68% left crack after that experiment”, reminded the scholar in an interview to O Estado de S. Paulo in 2013. In fact, the advised patients took distance from the marihuana cigars. For Unifesp, he acts on the Advising and Attention to Dependents Program (Proad), tending to drug dependents, living on the streets or not, besides training town agents to similar services.

A similar survey was conducted through interviews with 10 patients in psychosocial attention centers in Santa Maria (RS), where most of them put marihuana as an inhibitor to the compulsion for crack.

However, the greatest media repercussion is Dartiu’s public support to the With Open Arms initiative.

In May 2015, Folha de S. Paulo newspaper released an article entitled “4 em cada 10 desistem de ação anticrack de Haddad” (“4 to every 10 quit the anti-crack action by Haddad”), referring to the DBA. That is, the news headline did not disclose that out of the 798 beneficiaries who signed up to the program in the 16 initial months, 60% carried on with the treatment. Dartiu contested the piece: “Before him, 9 to every 10 addicts quit. The program has a lot to improve, but even data like that has changed, and for the better. That is a milder way to address the Crackland population”.

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43 Consented lawlessness “Not Crackland, no”, Brandão corrected me as he took me home.

“I don’t like referring to that region as Crackland”. I respect it. How do you refer to it? “Campos Elíseos, it’s the name of the neighborhood. And the fluxo territory, in fact, I can call it consented lawlessness”. The judicial classification has a point: Brandão has worked as an attorney since he graduated in Law a few years ago, in a career seeking public defense and the criminal field.

Finished in 2003, the university was attended in parallel to his profession as a chemical engineer at the Industrial Hub of Cubatão, where he worked until 2010. The option for the new trade corresponded to his will to defend the rights of the underprivileged or those living in marginality.

Engaging the subject on the people tangent to the law, he goes on: “the beneficiaries have lived there for years in that consented and of lesser offensive potential lawlessness. That is, let’s not be hypocrites by treating all drug users as bandits. The addiction is a matter of public health”.

The DBA’s coordinator for Adesaf beats the social hypocrisy again, “in the sense that some drugs are illegal and others are not. For instance, the alcohol some people drink to cheer up lowers their senses and reason. And to many, the alcoholic beverage serves as an entrance door to other addictions”. Many are the examples confirming the attorney’s analysis, who has never had a drinking habit or tasted a cigarette in life.

Silent army Among the 1,742 from 14 to 25 years old interviewees at the 2 nd National Assessment on Alcohol and Drugs (Lenad), 2012, for all practical purposes, half of the young adults consume alcohol, that rate being 26% among teenagers. From that universe, most of them declares to make abusive consumption of alcohol, and from those, more than a third drinks weekly in that fashion. Such legal drug is so ingrained to the Brazilian culture that it could serve as hinges to bigger detour windows.

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44 In turn, crack has already been tried some time in life by 2 million Brazilians, as per Lenad’s 2nd sample, 1.8 million adults and 150 thousand teenagers, being it 1 million and 18 thousand who smoked the rock in a one year period, respectively. A slice that corresponds to the largest market of crack users in the world, data that reverberate on several journalists, researchers, public policy managers and the remaining influencers meetings.

It is concerning that the first cocaine and its derivatives experience happens many times at the adolescence. From the users interviewed at the national assessment, 45% took it even before reaching legal age. In the state of São Paulo, the rate is 36%, giving it a universe of 600 thousand Paulistas who have already used crack.

Nonetheless, the most alarming information comes a piece of research conducted in 2013 by Fiocruz, an institution at the Ministry of Health. It indicates that in the capital cities of Brazil, there are 370 thousand people using crack regularly, which is equivalent to 0.8% of these cities’ population.

“It takes alternatives when we face this reality, because there is an army of people silently growing, and how many initiatives are tackling this addiction problem?”, Brandão assess as we go through a tunnel.

The vocation theory The path taken by the DBA’s coordinator for Adesaf’s career is, according to him, a common route he follows along in his common life with his family in church. Even though he avoids imposing God, miracles or approaching religion in his talks at With Open Arms, he has had a close relationship with faith since his adolescence. Around his 15th birthday, he got into Sociedade São Vicente de Paulo, a movement contributing to families in vulnerable situation, sometimes by donating consumer baskets (in the lines of the food stamp benefit provided by the American government).

“I see my work as a vocation, you see? I have a theory that says that for everything in life, there must be a vocation. It’s not a precondition, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

45 not just an ability of skill. A vocation would be something internal, more to the intangible, that is latent in us and suddenly, comes forward”, he tries to define it. That same week, he was starting to rehearse a spiritual retreat to couples with his friends at church.

Religious therapies He tells that he read some reportages where therapeutic religious, traditional or Pentecost communities’ success on recovering drug addicts from their addictions is bigger than the different treatments not related to spirituality. As if this relation to faith collaborated with the inmates’ awareness on social reinsertion.

Christian and spiritualist groups frequently go to Campos Elíseos pleading for new adepts to their treatments. Many of these missionaries are recovered drug addicts who make it so their lives are a Herculean march together with those living on the streets. Before the lift, a praising session promoted by some religious institution happened right there, to an open sky, at Largo Coração de Jesus.

After chanting Deus de Promessas (“A God of Promises”) at the loudspeaker, a man preached as if imbued by the Holy Spirit: “The Lord comes to free you! The lord comes to give you true peacefulness! Because many times, we only seek joy in so many places and today the Lord wants to be your source to all the joy, all the love, he comes to your meeting, he comes to pick you”.

And he went on towards the fluxo: “You are capable of much, because the Lord loves you, he loves you more than your family does, he loves you above all. That is why I invite you to come here and pray with us, because I know you need a word. Brother, sister, I invite you here and don’t be afraid, because the love of the Lord shall never be lost!”.

I do not recall if any drug user followed the missionary. In this sort of attendance, those who agree to participate in the initiative stay for about a month in a dorm to take care of their withdrawal, and, if they wish to keep facing the addiction, they migrate to some therapeutic homes along

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46 some months. Those are more secluded, distant places. The genre’s most common are located in farms at the Paulista inland.

According to the monography of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, the social anthropologist Patrícia Melotto states that among drug users “the effectiveness of the evangelical church seems to be also related to the established relationships with the priests in the cults”. In these therapeutic centers, the success “in these locations and the adhesion to their routines is closely associated to the adhesion to the stablished religious principles”.

Clinical admission treatments Therefore, if there is no proper familiar support, the religious institutions try to shepherd the children of God to the good standards.

General hospitals and specialized centers are alternative paths to be taken by the drug users. In turn, the state program Recomeço (Restart) bets on this aspect, on an integrated work between Judicial and Executive powers, tending to users since January 2013, and to their relatives, who seek the admission. Depending on the follow-ups, the admission can be volunteered or imposed to the patients. In these therapeutic residences or assisted homes, there is also a multi-professional team monitoring the inmates and collaborating with their relatives.

But the relapse is the Achilles’ Heel to most of the admission centers, be them governmental or religious. The fact is that when faced with the return to cities, the former patients do not get the same intensive support from the entities, allowing them to go back to drugs and, as a result, their low willpower to fall back in the following turns. The context is even more serious to patients who were previously living on the streets, since after the admissions, they keep homeless and out of support bonds.

At the same time, these reinsertion actions are more effective than others added to such consented lawlessness territory in the last decades, by the Public Authorities. The Integrated Initiative Centro Legal, developed in 2012 in the Capital city together with the former Municipal Administration and State Government, was deemed inefficient by the State Public Ministry (SPM).

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47 Police interventions The strategy consisted of the police occupying the region, blocking the arrival of drug dealers and entering abandoned buildings; in the ostensible initiative from the Military Police (M.P.) to encourage the crack consumers to seek help; and furthermore, keeping the results calculated by the Public Authorities. It was the popular Operação Sufoco (Operation Stuffiness).

Six months later, the consumption and the access to drug remained unaffected. According to the research from Unifesp with 151 drug users, 70% said they still went frequently to the region, 58% still occupied it from the beginning of the police operation and 22% reported to have been victims of forms of violence. Among then, most suffered only verbal assaults, and others were attacked with pepper spray, bludgeoning and minor physical assault.

To half the interviewees, the consumption was unaltered and only a third was offered some treatment to the addiction. Even worse, to 25%, to which the operation did not prevent the access to crack from increasing in the region. To every ten, seven stated that they kept buying their portions with ease and eight assured to be using the same amount.

At that time, a press conference with the Town Hall and the MP replied that the Operação Sufoco was not a failure. By that semester, both the organs stated that there were more than 850 user admissions in the initiative, 7.5 thousand redirections to health services, 542 flagrant prisons for dealing and apprehension of more than 66 kilos of narcotics.

On the other hand, the psychiatrist Ronaldo Laranjeira, one of the founding members of the Research Unit on Alcohol and Drugs, assessed this: “The policy there should be better supported, a policy to take people out of the vicinities, influencing the dealing, instead”. From his point of view, although there was support from the population, the operation did not count as a cohesive integration of public organs with credibility.

According to the article by the anthropologist doctor Taniele Cristina Rui, in 2013, “summarizing, the operation cost money, forced the CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

48 crack users to wander around downtown streets, disturbed the routine of the surrounding inhabitants, employed free violence to no goal”. As a result of this misarticulation, there was their dispersion to other neighborhoods.

The anthropologist’s words give spotlight to a public civil action from the district attorneys from the SPM, which fairly assessed the ineffectiveness of the Operação Sufoco, the setback for the few local active initiatives and the impedance to the street dwelling population’s rights. In the SPM’s initiative, “regarding the sacred right to go, come and stay, people lost it in terms of coming and staying; they could only go. It was not allowed for them to keep in public ways; they had to circle around, even though idly and with no destination, walking the entire blocks in bizarre movements the press called processions”.

Public Security and social services Subjects such as public security are common ground to Brandão.

In fact, he was invited in 2011 by Cubatão’s Town Hall to be the head of a Public Security section, with the goal of promoting the chair as a future Office – established in 2012. By the same year, he worked as Secretary of Tourism, and between 2013 and the middle of 2014 he was head of Social Services. “A segment that works prioritizing the emancipation of the individual, so that he has a proper conscience of his rights and duties”.

Invited to the DBA by Adesaf, his challenge stimulated him to reach his new checkpoint, he confided me when arriving in front of my home. “I have no pretension as to say the program is the main alternative.

As a damage reduction initiative to that shape, a pioneer in Brazil, it’s still a path, because it has not enough time for execution. To be considered a full-fledged project, it takes years. But to me, it is a good path”.

Controversial damage reduction The Paulistano program is an alternative to the basic requirements damage reduction implemented by mayor Fernando Haddad, affiliated to the Worker’s Party (PT). It is a public policy model that obtained visibility starting from his coreligionist, mayor Telma de Souza in Santos, at the Paulista coastline in 1989. That time, the coastal city known as the national CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

49 capital of AIDS, considered bad by locals and neighboring cities, even more because HIV was booming with sexual stigma. The little information on the origins, prevention and treatment of the disease only made the prejudice towards the sick stronger.

According to the World Health Organization, the city with the greatest seaport in Latin America had 60% of drug users with HIV, a serology rate superior to Sidney (5%), Rio de Janeiro (38%) and New York (45%). To fight this chaos, the mayor was a pioneer on distributing free condoms to the population, besides disposable syringes to injectable drug users. The controversial measures resulted in two arrest warrants almost to be executed on Telma, the Health Secretary David Capistrano at the time and other agents, like the infectiology researcher Fábio Caldas Mesquita.

A wide campaign to justify the initiatives gradually refuted prejudice and lowered the epidemic rates. The former Santista mayor is known until present days for her pioneering nature, David was her successor at the Town Hall and Fábio is today part of the WHO team for HIV, STI and Viral Hepatitis. It seems a little natural to me that investments on damage reduction should take some more time to achieve popular appreciation.

Foreign inspirations Other two initiatives were responsible for inciting São Paulo’s Town Hall into dealing with the damage reduction in the Campos Elíseos territory. One by the Public Health Service in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and another by the Portland Hotel Society organization, which develops Insite, in Vancouver (Canada).

In the Dutch capital, there is also a controlled drug use environment, but there the addiction to heroin is one of the greatest evils to the population. Therefore, the distribution of disposable syringes is carried to avoid the HIV rate, and at the same time, the Public Authorities offer methadone as an alternative substance to heroin. Methadone produces the same effect, but acts on a larger gap, reducing the withdrawal symptoms.

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50 “As a result, from 1992 to 2012 there was a big reduction on the number of users becoming HIV vectors; and also, a reduction to the age group of heroin users. Nowadays, more than 60% of these users is more than 50 years old, which shows the shortage in the consumption by young people”, stated Marcel Buster, from the Public Health Service of Amsterdam, on an International Seminar on Drug Policies conducted by São Paulo’s Town Hall, in November 2014. The event counted with the attendance of Liz Evans, Executive Director of Portland Hotel Society (PHS). When visiting With Open Arms, the Canadian cried: “São Paulo has a great opportunity opened. What the Public Authorities supported in the last couple of years, we needed to struggle alone for 20, until we had the governmental support”.

Firstly, PHS offered the daily exchange of needles between injectable drug users. With the Insite program, since 2003 they have proposed the supervised consumption of drugs and the reception of users with sheltering and food as damage reduction strategies. In the community center, the guest has access to health treatments (dental care and detoxication) and can take sports activities, citizenship workshops and professionalization. As soon as they enter the job market and feel capable of social reinsertion, they’re signed off the program. Insite exists in one of the most vulnerable neighborhoods in Vancouver, where there are 12 thousand heroin users. In its official website, PHS explains that they operate on a model that takes an effort to reduce the adverse effects to health, social and economic consequences to drug use, without demanding withdrawal from their use. However, with the reception it is natural that the drug addicts’ statistics would drop. The same reason With Open Arms is based on.

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Chapter 3

Varied Poetry5 Caetano Veloso has sung for years that “every person knows the pain and the joy of being who they are” every time Dom de Iludir gets in his repertoire. The musicians Renato Teixeira and Almir Sater wrote in Tocando em Frente, that “each one of us composes their own story, every being itself carries the gift of being capable and of being happy”. Both of them verse as if our lives would be poetry of authority beyond paper and musical notes. From that on, I name this chapter as a composition of remaining voices that try, cross or are in the tangent points by defining a profile and the plural crack using and street dwelling population’s habits in the region surrounding Campos Elíseos. Therefore, before explaining the implantation of With Open Arms program, it is sensible to highlight the dark facets of addiction in the region’s psychotropic territory.

I open such prelude with other rhymes. From Carl X, a rapper that lived in the neighborhood’s fluxo, but didn’t belong to DBA. “São Paulo by night, the world split in two. / For those who don’t know me, my name is Carl X / Pleased to meet you! / I’ll take the other world where no one wants to see: / The world in which love and evil are no different, / The world that makes a living while making our city dark”. The song was chanted in the show Repórter Record Investigação (Record Reporter Investigation) (April 2015).

The TV show set a cabin next to the fluxo so that any drug users told their lives – DBA’s beneficiaries or not. They recorded people from Alagoas, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Ceará, and with different occupations.

Antônio Carlos, 45 years old, is known as Carl X in the premises. He has spent two years in prison for drug dealing, and when he left the bars, he 5

Varied Poetry (Poesia Vária) is the title of a book from the modernist author Guilherme de Almeida. In this chapter, the name suggests different narratives from Crackland’s fluxo denizens.

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52 got back to crack addiction for the last two years. “The family’s response?

I miss them a lot and I know they miss me too”, says the rapper happily, more comfortable to go back to his home sweet home. The open sky confinement, away from home, has its reasons, as noted by Aparecida Alvarez, Augusta Alvarenga and Nelson Fiedler-Ferrara in their article for the journal Psicologia e Sociedade (Psychology and Society) (2004). “The feeling of shame was demonstrated by them in the [street denizens and crack users in Bela Vista neighborhood] regarding the situation they lived in (…). The adults – including the apparently mature and non-neurotic – present themselves as very sensitive to the possibility of shameful discredit”. The article relates shame to the act of taking impulse and hiding their faces and, consecutively, sinking themselves into the ground.

The rapper comes at night, hugs all his family, especially his mother, weeping. “My door was always (open) for him. He is my son, child of my great love, which God has already taken”. The joy lasts for minutes on TV and in real life. The next day, the musician leaves the cheering mood of his relatives and goes towards the opposite direction of a prodigal son, vanishes again from his mother, wife and stepdaughter’s familiarity.

Surviving on the streets Carl X is an example of the street denizens’ population’s social economical profile at the Paulistano downtown. In 2010, Universidade de São Paulo’s (USP) Economy, Administration and Accounting College research evaluated that most people in this situation lives without any degree of family relations, although they have children. “It’s sensitive to verify that most men and women interviewed worked before losing their homes and getting to street life”. The range of occupations goes from simple categories to more specialized administrative ones. The survey highlighted the abyss between the formal job and that slice of the population. They were satisfied with the income from waste removal, load and unload services, flanelinha (people who help drivers find a parking spot on the street or offer to keep an eye on their car in exchange for money – a service sometimes imposed by them and not always appreciated by car owners) or other low cost services. As a result, “on the day of the interview, almost half of them had obtained small income on typical street activities,

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53 including begging, and spent it on the same day to consume what they considered vital: food, cigarettes, beverages and drugs”.

In an article for the Revista Brasileira Adolescência e Conflitualidade (Brazilian Journal of Adolescence and Conflictuality) (2011), Luciane Marques Raupp and Rubens Adorno introduce two cases of crack users in Porto Alegre (RS).

The first is the young couple Galo and Ágata, who worked at a carwash and an urban cleaning association, respectively. Weeks later, “I talk to Ágata and she tells me she had dropped her job for considering it ‘too demanding’. Her boyfriend was fired because the gas station they worked in was sold. They’re homeless”. The streets changed from option into reality.

Lisbela is another harsh report, of a young woman who could barely establish emotional bonds in her moments of withdrawal from crack. The authors summarize as this: “Since the departure from her own house to live in the streets due to intense use of crack, going through seasons in hostels or in the house of acquaintances or employers and, afterwards, turning back to live in a shelter until she was expelled from it and turned back to the streets”.

The despair away from home and bonds is also the choice of a young man who is the protagonist in the show Conexão Repórter’s (SBT) (Reporter Connection) special edition about the Crackland, in 2013.

There are endless reasons why crack numbs more and more Brazilians and puts the country on the top of statistics in traffic and the rock use. According to the social and demographic profile and use patterns between addicts published in the Revista Saúde Pública (2003) (Public Health Journal), the authors observe four possibilities: greater availability of crack in cities; the migration of injectable drugs to crack as a result from infections via needles; the low cost; and the difference between the effects potential of inhaled cocaine, heroin and crack, being it “equal or even surpassing the effects of intravenous application”.

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54 Inequalities without stigma For three months, I have specialized in more than thirty national and international articles on street dwellers’ communities and crack users.

Justifiably, part of them hopes for common characteristics between those who enter the addictive cycle. The interest in prevention also affects the whole society. However, none of them will introduce innate or religious characteristics as influential factors. What I want to take notice here is that there are indeed majorities in the Campos Elíseos community, such as nonwhite men over thirty with low or middle educational levels, besides the prevalence of people disclosing non-heterosexual orientation. As if the marginality space of all the possible prejudices of our crack consuming leading nation (racism, homophobia, prejudice against the poor and migrants, etc.) faced the most cruel and hostile environment the humanity could wish for: the streets. But it’s notorious that if there’s an aged person in the suburbs, the asphalt also shelters the violinist who played at São Paulo’s Concert Band. There are black and white, rich and poor, men and women, hetero and non-heterosexual people. Those characteristics, however, are not the causes or consequences of entering the addiction.

They are just circumstances, considering crack makes no distinction.

The choices and curiosities that unfortunately end in chemical addiction come out from individual issues, mostly. Determining the pattern of a drug user is to admit being a social myopic. Nevertheless, there are external circumstances that can corroborate the falls and fallbacks. The liquidity in the damaged bonds to family, the pressure over professional success, the inequality of income conditions…

It’s always good to remember that Brazil is still a country branded by social inequality, even though there has been a rise and millions left the extreme poverty line in the past decade, through income transfer programs.

The question is, even so, cities (especially capitals and urban centers) have evolved little to better define who is in the outskirts. We are far from the ideal public quality standards on teaching, health, security, income generation, leisure, culture, mobility and urban development. Larger contexts that little by little undermine the nation’s will of developing itself or achieving better opportunities, making the country bitterly occupy the top position of the global index to crack traffic and consumption.

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55 Absurds from withdrawal The rock cursed by society generates the compulsion of its users, which comprehends losses to people’s health and even withdrawal that makes them so obsessive to the point of inciting them to lie and feign dialogs, losing their relatives and friends’ trust. A mutual weariness of relationship, as per the article in Revista de Saúde Pública (Public Health magazine) (2011) by Tharcila Chaves, Zila Sanchez, Luciana Ribeiro and Solange Nappo.

“The interviewees showed awareness of this change in personality and the loss of trust by many people. Even after leaving crack, the ex-users stated not recovering their trust by close people”, described the scholars.

It doesn’t differ much from the example shown by Profissão Repórter (Occupation: Reporter) (2014). In this issue, they followed-up a 21-year-old young woman, who had been splitting her week between the fluxo and her home for three years. With a promising career, as a former English teacher and college undergraduate on Nursing, she has a troubled relationship with her mother, who declares: “I didn’t raise my daughter to crack. I raised her to succeed in life.

The absurd when seeking drugs are endless, after Repórter Record Investigação. Among testimonies, “I lost my car, lost my family, lost respect”, “mobile phone worth R$ 1,000, I traded for R$ 20” and, what shook me the most was a woman who has “prostituted herself for 15 years in exchange for drugs”.

The TV show presented the fall of an ex-Paulista Karate champion and ex-soccer player to addiction. And as a last entry, Vania de Castro, 28 years old, who agreed to go to rehab, as she is pregnant of her third child.

“I really want a change”, she stated from a clinic, posing as an overcome model.

Feminine vulnerability By understanding her as a model, I’ll end this chapter approaching the topic of women. Throughout all the pieces of research, they represent a smaller number as a street dwelling community. In USP’s Economy, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

56 Business and Accounting College’s survey (2010), the social economical profile of the Paulistano downtown consists mainly of males, and 14% of interviewees were women. Most were also non-white men between 30 and 50 years old. Out of these, 74% made abusive use of some drug.

It is interesting to highlight how much of this parcel is even more vulnerable when in the streets at this point. As per the UN’s report in 2007, the income gap between men and women is at 29%. From IBGE’s (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) 2014 Gender Statistics, the Brazilian women average income represents 68% of men’s.

To women living on the streets, the increased difficulty imposed to their gender to reinsert themselves into the job market is amplified by their obligation to coexist with the solicitation status to sustain their crack addiction. “Half of the interviewed women declared to have prostituted themselves in exchange for crack”, Lúcio Garcia de Oliveira and Solange Aparecida Nappo recognized in their article in Revista Saúde Pública (Public Health magazine) (2008). The paper also points to another dilemma at that time, when they went to the drug territory in the capital city. “Nowadays, there has been a recon of forced prostitution, which is when men “lend” their wives to drug dealers or even other users in exchange for crack”.

Vania herself made a comment to Record’s TV journalism that she suffered two rapes when in the streets, one of which was right after using crack. It replays the trajectory of part of women living on the streets, victims of sexual violence. These traumatizing experiences can certainly compose the notional impression of part of the fluxo’s regulars in Campos Elíseos.

“Come with me, blonde”, said this character to Larissa, played by Grazi Massafera in Verdades Secretas, a soap opera. This is how the sequence shooting of a group rape suffered by the crack addict in the territory, in the eleven o’clock Globo channel’s soap opera in 2015, written

by Walcyr Carrasco, starts. In an article to the Revista Saúde e Sociedade (Health and Society magazine) (2014), Rubens Adorno and Walter Varanda point out that “the level of the women living in the street’s

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57 exposition doesn’t allow for them to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from time to time to their sex partners in their own streets”.

The pair goes on: “some of them can’t even defend themselves when forced to have sex, others go with liquor, or assume very aggressive behaviors to defend themselves and face men that insist on having sexual intercourse”. An unfortunate scene from a previous everyday life, even though less common nowadays, needs to be transformed by With Open Arms into better social reinsertion opportunities to this community.

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59

PART 2

DBA’s Beginning Bruna Stephanie

A DBA beneficiary during the labor activity “Paths of Prevention”

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60

Adesaf

Only the screen showing the streets of Campos Elíseos appears uninterruptedly in mayor Haddad’s office

Adesaf

The initiative offers workshops ranging from digital inclusion and bike repairs to plastic arts and hair cutting CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

61

Bruna Stephanie

In a municipal survey, over 52% of the beneficiaries have recovered contact with their families, which is an important condition for being reinserted into the society

”

Bruna Stephanie The DBA is a program built on dialogue and a permanent engagement with the population, “Preventing is creating conditions for the person to be able to decide for oneself (image)

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62

Bruna Stephanie “Preventing is creating conditions for the person to be able to decide for oneself” CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

63

Chapter 4

The Lighthouse6 The fluxo I described at the beginning of this book has much more peculiarities in Fernando Haddad’s enormous television set. From the anteroom to his office, besides the window view to Viaduto do Chá, the manager is able to simultaneously follow-up the stone path on a single big screen of the many surrounding him. According to the article by El País (2015), there are frames that picture the entrance to the Town Hall, the traffic in the expressways and viaducts, the flood alerts. Visions randomly replaced by other hundreds of monitoring cameras from the sixth largest city in the planet.

However, only the one that reflects the streets on Campos Elíseos is always showing on situational room. The live fed images are from cameras that watch over the territory, circling through the Metropolitan Civil Security buses. In October 2013, the Town Hall acquired five vehicles delivered by the Federal Government to circle around in the capital. Each transport has the capacity to monitor 26 cameras: two internal ones, five on the outside and 19 more mobile, distributed throughout an area of 3 square kilometers.

When the reporter from El País suggests, “Why always the image from the Crackland, Mayor?”, the manager emphasizes. “It’s the project I’m willing to solve the most. It’s something that must persist every day.

You can’t give up on the territory. If you give up on it, it turns into something else”. The situation he tries to avoid so much is returning the neighborhood to the hands of drug dealers. Not randomly, every time he has to go to some point in the city by helicopter, Haddad asks in the speaker

6

The Lighthouse (O Farol) is a painting from the concept artist Anita Malfatti.

In this chapter, the name brings about the creation of With Open Arms as a way of illuminating the Campos Elíseos’ region.

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64 to observe the Luz neighborhood from up there – yes, the pilot disclosed this information I bring into light in this book.

The universe of crack users I unraveled was pretty different from the beginning of With Open Arms program, completed on this Tuesday, January 14th, 2014. At that time, the government’s prediction was that there was up to two thousand users often meeting in the neighborhood by the addiction. A different scenario from my visits to the place, in which, mostly, I found and army of 300 enfeebled in face of the priceless kryptonites.

Sheltering the community DBA’s viability constantly celebrated by the Municipal Administration is a consequence of the firm pulse and the adamant posture of Public Authorities together with hands and the will of the community regular to the fluxo. One of the first greetings came with the opening of the tent and the municipal unit of Helvétia street, on July 22nd, 2013.

At that time, the streetway and the whole block were taken over by wooden or canvas shanties. The improvised shelters on the sidewalks conceived an impassable slum environment to anyone who did not belong to the crack society. The homes to trafficking and drug use also won the locations of small hotels in the premises.

With the public machine’s business hours to the limit, the caseworkers played the mountains behind Mohammed. At every approach, the prophecy dictated the apocalypse according to those who lived in those shanties: they feared the Town Hall would force them to clinical admission. By exchanging the tent’s blue canvases for transparent ones, the natural exodus would take the community of Crackland’s little slums to become regular to the public space.

Between big soups and meals served periodically, the users grew on timbre: in place and voice. They did not need other prophets to mediate their talks to the Town Hall. The issues with abode, feeding and professional repositioning were mentioned by most witnesses in the group

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65 chats. With the familiarity, they voted for the future municipal initiative’s name by themselves: With Open Arms.

Their longing increased simultaneously with Haddad’s anxiety to start the project. Part of the territory’s population would spend hours at the Anhangabaú Palace. Face to face with the mayor, who barely took notice of their criminal records – people who had served sentences 12 to 23 years of incarceration. “From that day, we have been trying to keep the relationship of trust”, guaranteed Haddad in his interview to Estúdio Fluxo (2014).

In a first-time initiative involving the intersectoral team of Town Hall and Military Police attached to the State Government, still at the first fortnight in 2014, approximately 300 crack users would be transferred from their shanties to the regional hotels. In the first week, the mayor highlighted: “We spent six months assessing how to reoccupy that region by the Public Authorities without firing a single shot, releasing a bomb, no batons, no beating. What happened in those three days alone is enough to call attention to this change of paradigm.

Resulting trafficking reduction Although the DBA is a damage reduction program with basic requirements, as a result it contributes to reducing drug dealing in the region. Carefully sewed, the word pact between the Fluxo and Town Hall is a metaphor to how much it shows that the population at high vulnerability risk can be protagonist in the construction of a network of its own public policies.

A permanent dialogue that contributes to preventing the so-called grey power and more stigma to the fluxo. Right on the first ten days, there were 1,131 crack rocks taken away and 25 people arrested for dealing narcotics. Stepping together, within one year of the project, there were 6.3 thousand approaches from Metropolitan Civil Guard and Military Police, which had already resulted in 319 arrests in the region, 91 of which related to dealing narcotics (2.4 thousand rocks taken away), besides the money from illegal trading.

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66 In the beginning of 2015, the Metropolitan Civil Guard counted with a manpower of 168 agents in the area, distributed in four shifts, using 14 cars, four motorcycles and two buses, besides the CCTV units.

Simultaneously, the State Government statistics registered a decrease in criminality.

In 2014, the Military police reported 17 stolen vehicles, and 392 robberies to people, whereas in the previous year, those had been respectively 32 and 582 (a 50 and 33% decrease). Furthermore, the arrests made to drug dealers by the police jumped from 96 (2013) to 176 (2014), an increase of 83% to the reported numbers.

Risky situations Although the numbers show success in the initiative, there are situations that reveal the meaning of a bond between public institutions and to the community. Three situations put the trust relationships’ network into an ordeal. It was around 3 p.m. on January 23rd, 2014, when civilian policemen from the State Department of Prevention and Repression of Narcotic Dealing (Denarc in Portuguese) took action to arrest a drug dealer.

What could be a common ground to the will of governments and the community ended up in an offensive from some drug dealers to one side, and policemen from the other, who took siege under ten vehicles.

Traditional free media registered tear gas bombs. Three policemen and two addicts hurt, besides 34 arrested, four of them actual incarcerations.

The panic atmosphere did not last. The Town Hall would resume the dialogue with the community and drug dependents. Months later, drug dealers and users’ occurrence would fade, but the violent threats of regional criminals made the Public Authorities install, together with part of the users, a metal fence at the corner of Cleveland Grove and Helvetia Street on May 14th 2014.

The controversial barriers were interpreted as a means of monitoring by the administration and to prevent the drug dealers from accessing the area. Since all readings can take a different perspective, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

67 another parcel of crack users and scholars saw the action as a way of gentrifying the neighborhood. On the next day, the drug addicts themselves reconsidered and took down such blockage.

The primary right to come and go would come into discussion a year later. Canvases were raised gradually so the crack users could live on the same corner. The risk of those abodes housing drug dealers made the Town Hall dismantle the new little slum on April 29th, 2015.

A well-interpreted outcome if the public operations did not collide with the Military Police initiative. Disguised, by 2 p.m., the policemen were “spotted” by some users and another clash started. Until 5:30 p.m., Folha de S. Paulo described a policeman hurt, two drug dependents shot, an arson attempt to a bus, another public transportation stoned near Princesa Isabel Square and a fire barricade in the region.

The warlike tension of hours became another failure, since not the Town Hall nor the State Office for Public Security knew about the parallel actions in the same day – a situation both institutions would avoid repeating.

Dignity to the beneficiaries Even with the emblematic episodes and from two different parties, the Petista (affiliated to the Work Party – PT) never challenged or positioned himself against the toucan (as members of PSDB party are known) Alckmin. Cordiality is mutual in their press conferences and interviews. “The program (With Open Arms) is really praiseworthy”, highlighted the State Governor to Estadão (2014).

The trust relationship established is primal to the target audience of the municipal initiative: the crack users aspire social and rights reinsertion. Offering food in the popular restaurant Bom Prato and sheltering in establishments in Campos Elíseos and other neighborhoods and, consecutively, the healthy sleep cycle are essential to any person’s development.

There is a considerable number of researchers and scientists that suggest a straight connection between health and eating well. The hard job CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

68 to me was to describe each one of the benefits of a balanced diet. The nutrients richness in daily meals promotes greater efficiency to the circulatory, digestive, and cerebral system and progressively improves senses and reasoning.

I do not know how you behave when one of your meals is delayed in your everyday life, what is your intention to become acquainted to those next to you, your self-esteem and your work productiveness in the following hours. Maybe it is as bad as losing one hour of sleep. Picture this situation happening constantly to a drug user who is also subject to the remaining vulnerabilities as a street dweller.

The compulsive effect of crack together with narcotics and illicit drugs stimulates sleep deprivation. Added to other factors such as the lack of self-preservation notion, hygiene, and the impossibility to live in a fixed accommodation, makes that person’s attempt of reinsertion as a citizen to society more difficult. The abandoned situations or the necessity of survival reach critical levels to DBA’s beneficiaries community.

This way, both peculiar treatments (the “food stamp” and to abode) could already be well-received. Understanding that citizenship has work and service to population as its main line, enabling a comeback to work fronts and training, even if part-time, is enough to develop some empowerment to these people. From supporting to protagonists.

DBA’s experience is even more wide, in the sense that the beneficiaries, from the moment they sign up with the caseworkers in the program’s tent, they have the possibility of being attended by the Municipal Health Office. For the first time after years, they have the possibility of taking a precautionary health treatment in the territory, making their access to specific sectoral policies for that public easier.

According to São Paulo’s Town Hall, hundreds of thorough clinical check-ups are performed, such as blood tests, hemograms, glycaemia, blood pressure, cholesterol ratio and serology tests to diseases such as AIDS, syphilis and tuberculosis. Health agents follow-up on beneficiaries, and, as much as needed, they direct them to new admission

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69 berths to other diseases, or mental health in general hospitals during their withdrawal crises.

Entering the program The participation of a beneficiary at the DBA happens after their signing up in the Public Administration tent, which redirects them to one of the hotels registered in the program starting from their listing. Adesaf, in turn, makes the payment for their vacancies and manages the members’ daily routine in their work fronts and professional training, also being responsible for their pecuniary benefit (weekly payment to the participants for these activities).

Under Adesaf’s supervision, the member can be directed and choose different options as their office hours for the next two years in the program. Sweeping streets, cleaning Campos Elíseos’ paths and those in the surrounding neighborhoods; gardening at the Green Factory, condom distribution by bike to vulnerable locations, such as hotels and prostitution areas; taking duty at laundry places to beneficiaries and the neighborhood; and building maintenance, among other conservational works at the beneficiaries’ shelters.

Other compensations include workshops for citizenship formation (weekly meetings about human rights and citizenship), social, cultural and professionalizing training. In 2016, for example, there were groups turned to digital inclusion, echo-friendly craftwork (recycling of solid residues), furniture creation from tires, concept arts (from paintings to sculptures), bike restoration, knitting and crochet, and hair cutting.

The Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Office maintains a partnership with a beauty salon school, which cuts hair and shaves the beards of DBA’s beneficiaries, at the DBA’s headquarters. In 2015, there was a professionalizing course to manicures. During the NGO’s trajectory with the municipal initiative, there was also a cinedebate, tour guides for the beneficiaries to visit parks and city squares, gatherings on special occasions and a ping-pong space in their warehouse.

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70 Reinserting in the square Another initiative that deserves attention is a revitalization project at Largo Coração de Jesus’ square, in June 2014, in a Public Authority intervention together with Porto Seguro company. The recreational space counts on an MP community base, two multisport courts, open-sky gym, benches with graffiti, playground and a gazebo, besides the conventional green area. The re-inauguration even had a soccer championship with DBA’s beneficiaries at the time.

This group of activities from the municipal initiative’s calendar is amazing to many crack users as it is their chance to get a life with dignity back. The constant trust bonds and the comings and goings of the experimental program contribute to it, to such an extent that the Municipal Health Office pointed out that the members reduced crack consumption in 50% to 70% in the first months, still in April 2014.

By analyzing these facts, it’s hard for me to consider myself neutral towards With Open Arms’ success. Out of naivety or common sense, at every register, I dare to agree to a good portion of the actions and objectives set up in the program. From its birth to the first steps. From the first meal to the new homes. The next pages will carry that perspective and, being a good author, I want you to know that my present convictions swing towards this album’s sequence. Far wider than one can realize just from the mayor’s office screens.

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71

Chapter 5

The Dissolute Rhythm7 An intersectoral and pioneering public policy envisioning social reinsertion as a damage reduction model. The change in paradigm given by the trust bonds formed directly between the Town Hall and the crack user community. Audaciously, With Open Arms is one of the various Paulistano projects hit by controversy and tension, at the same time as it gets applause from many others. A dissolute rhythm of opinions that have converged and diverged from the first day of operation.

By praising Haddad in his perennial will of including crack users into his public policy’s debate, I paraphrase him in an interview to Estúdio Fluxo (2014). “Unfortunately, I think that right and left have a common ground on the drug’s issue. They take the addict for objects, and they never see those people as subjects capable of signing up a contract with the Public Authorities”.

The manager goes on with his argument: “The right, by generally treating those people cruelly with the use of violence, always has a hygienist, policiesque and repressive vision. There’s always the cleaning side, treating those people as objects to be removed from that site. And the left doesn’t improve in that sense (…), because even by looking at that person as people and not animals or stuff, they have a tutelage vision. They can’t picture those people as capable of signing up a contract or able to discern what’s best for themselves”.

The mayor summarizes well the storm of criticism he gets on account of this initiative, although the right is not so hygienist anymore, 7

The Dissolute Rhythm (O Ritmo Dissoluto) is the title of the book that highlights the modernist spirit of the poet Manuel Bandeira. In this chapter, the name brings about the various mediatic and political tones discussing With Open Arms.

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72 and the left has refrained from taking the tutelage role. But mistrusts expand even more with the strength of media on social networks. The pioneering one is Bolsa Crack’s stigma, which, by the way, does not even belong to the program. The term was first used as a nickname given in 2011, to an initiative of Governor Antonio Anastasia (PSDB) in Minas Gerais, by offering financial support to the families that had addict admitted to hospitals. The nickname stamped Paulista newspapers in 2013, when Alckmin created the same benefit in the Programa Recomeço (Restart Program).

Moral scandal If the DBA was officially launched on January 14th, 2014, by the first hour of the following day, Veja’s columnist Reinaldo Azevedo described the program as PT’s Bolsa Crack. Pointed as a right-winged editorial, the magazine published eight texts from Reinaldo against the program in its website. The arguments were that “the São Paulo Town Hall program is a way of financing the addicts” and that the governmental benefits conclude that “being as addict in São Paulo and in Brazil is morally superior than being just poor”.

Reinaldo states that he disapproves of the damage reduction policies, already in his first criticism. He would name the program as a “moral scandal in itself”, “a failure by definition”, because “in what country in the world would the State guarantee a cash flux to the activity under the excuse that they are promoting the addicts’ integration?”.

In the following assessments, he suspects that “even a few people that voted for him thought he would be a bad mayor. But not even his most fierce adversaries would imagine he could be so bad”. According to him, the DBA “shoots on water”, offering benefits to crack users is “a disaster”, and he doesn’t know how many years it will take for São Paulo “to recover from the tragic consequences of this gentleman’s management”.

Although there is good coherence, Reinaldo goes in the wrong way towards the data presented in my publication. The present anchorman on SBT Brasil, Joseval Peixoto, will complement the criticism in the columnist angle. “Well-intentioned [the initiatives], none of them brought CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

73 a practical alternative to crack users. The addict can’t leave the streets, not even so the addiction”, on April 22nd, 2014.

A Brazilian Tenement The same mistrust was shared by the psychiatrist Ana Cecília Marques, in an interview to Jornal Nacional right on the first day of the DBA: “I think it’s a naive move, well-intentioned, but unfortunately good intentions don’t work in such a dire situation. I don’t see much coherence in promoting reinsertion before making the treatment”.

On April 29th 2015, Veja São Paulo’s newsroom would compare the downtown hotels hired by DBA to the lines of Aluísio de Azevedo in “A Brazilian Tenement”: “[A place where] worming, boiling, growing, a world, a living thing, a generation that seemed to sprout by itself, spontaneously, right there in the mud, multiplying as larvae in manure”.

The amount of debris, clogged toilets and the presence of rats in some of the visited establishments registered the condition of insalubrity to the spaces. “The fire risk is elevated by the absence of fire extinguishers, stolen to become trading coins for crack rocks, the same destination of many other items”, understates the reportage. An occurrence mentioning a beneficiary’s arson destroying two rooms in a hotel’s last floor is on the pages.

Some beneficiaries also have their complaints appreciated. I doubt that this is the attendance regarded as ideal to the Public Authorities, of the places I knew, my perception had nothing of luxury, but also not so desolate as the one mentioned in the file. Anyhow, it actually is one of the few well succeeded attacks so well-articulated in a piece of media and to my point of view, as good journalism, they were meant to be overviewed in the sequence by Municipal Administration. The file would also show the other side, that of beneficiaries that who were employed thanks to the program, from activities offered by DBA through Adesaf, and from hearsay among the beneficiaries.

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74 Domestication display case Carta Capital, turned to the editorial lines of the left wing, on May 16 , 2014, would be even more incisive in its criticism when the Town Hall created the metal fences. The opinion text didn’t even show the Town Hall’s side. It was emphatic. “Right after the fence installation, the users went to the Open Arms tent, base to the Town Hall’s program in that region, and refused to take part in that bizarre human zoo”. In other scenarios, the piece of media would concur to the program’s directive. On an article from Nabil Bondoki (September 2014), the program would be in the right path, even with the resisting. th

Nabil pens that “those initiatives of Haddad face resistance, especially from the most conservative sectors, who notice that they’re gradually losing their privileges. The ‘Open Arms’ program is another one to face a lot of resistance. Despite being a program with the challenge of transforming social roles and one that has humanization as a model, breaking up with such a recent past still demands a lot of effort”. As a result, he would describe the state measures of repression and the Operação Sufoco in 2012.

One of the most active in the Pastoral da População de Rua in São Paulo’s Archdiocese, Father Júlio Lancellotti considered the program “a display case, where they were invested in millions” in an interview to the website Ponte.org (May 2015). “What is the result? That everyone would stay sweeping and went to live in the hotel? That is a domestication result, one of social control”, only providing wretchedness to the beneficiaries, in his opinion, and no voice to disturb the population.

To Brasil de Fato (January 2014), the religious man would observe that “the operation may have its damage reduction aspect and now has great visibility. But we have to see what will happen in the daily routine. There is a political concern of wanting to be different from others. But there’s also pragmatism. It is thought that a result is necessary. I don’t know if the cause was the case, but for now, the effects are being worked on”. In that case, the disagreements are towards another aspect, still the mistrust of the public policy’s results, even without establishing if there is a need for the

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75 results from damage reduction. A long discussion that cannot be explained in details in this book.

To the Father, the initiative can be considered a new mold to promote gentrification and work uniformization in the city, instead of the beneficiaries’ empowerment. Even so because, according to him, “São Paulo is inserted into a competition model of rewarding for consumption, it is not a city turned to aggregation”. Because it is a recent program, and one of a pact with crack users, we cannot help being controversially decisive if that happens or not.

Populist initiative Still in the field of ideologies of the left, the Brazilian Association for Mental Health, the Inclui Mais Association, the Social Cooperativism Sectoral, and the national movements for Human Rights and the Street Population launched a public note on a demanding tone, in January 2014, for the program not to be punctual, but “for it to incorporate the representative of entities and social movements, to monitor, follow up and to propose actions for the solidification strengthening of an intersectoral public policy”.

There were also opposing opinions in the public health aspect. One of the visionaries of DBA, Dartiu Xavier, would complain to the blog Sp no Divã (May 2014) about the lack of medical teams and their training to work with damage reduction and, at the same time, of the success the Municipal Administration tends to emphasize of their program.

In turn, the psychiatrist Ronaldo Laranjeira, coordinator of the state initiative Recomeço, would also reveal himself in further interviews as a little skeptical to the damage reduction actions. Especially because of the services he provided to highly vulnerable addicts, clinical admission would be the most successful path to him towards the recovery of this community’s parcel.

Federal congressman Roberto Freire, the national President of the oppositionist PPS, would endorse the criticisms still in February 2014, when he noticed the beneficiaries’ low attendance. He would also complain CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

76 that the increase on cash flow would only stir up the crack market. “It goes, actually, as a populist initiative typical of those who figure that simply distributing the benefit is capable of solving all problems. Not only does it not, but it can also aggravate them”.

No ideal models When revising all the chapters, dear reader, it’s interesting to notice that any initiative that dares to come out of the standard treatment for crack users will face resistance in many diverse ways, be them of party or ideological bias. Nonetheless, I emphasize that most of the times, the torrential rain that negatively drowns the project is either very recent to the DBA’s implantation, or of little constructiveness.

In January 2015, PSD’s city councilman Andrea Matarazzo, for instance, wrote a new article that treats the crossed look of the program towards the Crackland community as a “mistake”. “The addicts can’t be treated as long as they live next to the drug dealers and won’t heal working in places surrounded by other untreated addicts”. In the sequence, he praised the Recomeço project, from the state government, by the same party which he took part in. Not prior to saying, “we still don’t have an ideal model”.

Of an invaluable cultural curriculum, Matarazzo was known as “The Sherif in Town” when he was sub mayor of Sé (2005 to 2007) and secretary coordinator of the sub prefectures (2007 to 2009), although in that period he did not contribute with different direct alternatives for the chemical dependents beyond the police repression against trafficking, or by preserving heritage and inviting companies to occupy the region.

Negative headlines Newspapers also gave their opinions in their leaders and, by opinion, we understand they follow or make tendencies. The different arguments, by the way, are necessary even to enrich the debate of possible risks. For that reason, I mention them here in this book as I register.

However, two cases are emblematic. The art of journalism is to inform, and for that purpose, to manipulate and analyze data of public or editorial CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

77 interest to describe their actions. The metonymy is a figure of speech in which a part can represent the whole.

On January 17th, 2014, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo published right on its cover, after two days of the program, a photo of one of its beneficiaries consuming crack wearing the DBA’s uniform. “The decision to publish it reflects the myopic part of the newspaper in not trying to understand and explain to the readers what the damage reduction strategies of drug use are, fulcrum as they are in the World Health Organization’s vision”, pointed the psychiatrist and professor at Unicamp, Luís Fernando Tófoli.

The scholar also complements: “Not only that, but the identification seriously compromises the photographed person’s treatment, and there is news that the cover scene had heavy impact on the user”. In fact, to the newspaper Rede Brasil Atual, the girl on the cover furiously cried at the hotel, according to the description.

Another line of great repercussion was given by Folha de S. Paulo, on May 17th, 2015. The controversy was not because of the infographic in the newspaper, which assured that the program made between 70 to 80% of the assisted beneficiaries reduce their drug consumption. Neither because 60% of member users were adamant in the initiative that lasted two years.

The issue was different: the headline. “In São Paulo, 4 to every 10 give up on Haddad’s anti-crack initiative”. That way, even with the positive content, the editors chose the beneficiaries’ negative side (and the minority), those who preferred to quit, and personified the program by giving it the mayor’s name. “The only actual negative part of the article is the villain headline, typical of a media that bets in the wild world”, published the broadcaster Lelê Teles on Portal Fórum, two days after Folha’s line.

From The Wall Street to The Guardian “If the really unpopular mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, was the head of San Francisco, Berlin or any other Metropolis, he would CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

78 be considered an urban visionary”. That is how the Wall Street Journal (September 2015) regarded the mayor’s management, mentioning the DBA among other projects.

The largest press newspaper in Canada, The Global and Mail, explained the initiative in detail in May 2014’s publication. By comparing crack to a king in Brazil in consequence of the strong drug dealing and positioning the good and bad aspects of the DBA, the newspaper yet described that “the program made great difference to the feeling in the Crackland streets”.

Among the interviewees, the head of the Vancouver University’s Institute of Mental Health, Benedikt Fischer, considers that providing safe abode and work will “help stabilize them [the beneficiary]”. He highlights the segregation of crack users and that addiction is high.

For the director of prevention of the National Office for Policies about Drugs of the Ministry of Justice, Leon Garcia, the program “needs to create social response – a place to live, a place to work, the possibility to go back to studies. It’s a treatment offer, a citizenship offer, and you’re not being told to accomplish one to get to the other”.

From all of the remaining international pieces of media, The Guardian is the most neutral one, qualifying it as “controversial” already in the headline, even though they consider it “holistic” for its crossed actions. “The proponents say that it could be a model to other cities in the region. The critics fear that it could delay the rehabilitation of the dependents”. It still doesn’t fail to point criticism to other projects, such as Recomeço and the therapeutic religious communities.

Very humane World-famous specialists went the wrong way towards the negative positions. The one who treated the topic with the most open mind was Carl Hart, P.h.D on neuroscience at the University of Columbia (USA), and the one who backs up damage reduction alternatives. When passing through Brazil, the professional conceded and interview to Folha de S. Paulo (August 2015).

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79 “I am very proud of this program [DBA], because it is very humane and deals with all the human being basic needs: shelter, food and work for personal sustenance and for the family (…). The question is not whether they are using drugs or not, but if they are showing up for work and taking their responsibilities. This is the gauge of success and what we should be focusing on. If those people are not on streets, committing small felonies, it’s a big step. If you don’t have your basic needs satisfied, it is a reasonable choice to rob someone who seems to have everything in abundance. Then programs such as these make everyone in society safer”, he declared.

The scholar didn’t mention the results because he felt he was short on data, “but the fact that there are members in the program is a great sign, because these people aren’t in the streets fulltime anymore”. The neuroscientist even disregards the newspaper’s negative headline concerning the waivers. “If there are more people sticking to the program than leaving it, I understand that as something good”. And he questions the motives to give up, mentioning that he abandoned a post-doctorate at Yale University himself. “Can we say, based on that, that Yale is a failure? No”.

Model of wisdom With a post-doctorate on political science from Harvard (EUA) and as a director and founder of the North American NGO Drug Policy Alliance, Ethan Nadelmann commended the Paulistana initiative. “It’s the right thing to do. It’s a model of wisdom, pragmatism and political bravery, which are key for Brazil to take a step forward in the drug matter in a cleverer way. If the political leaderships persist on the failed policy from the past, the problem will only grow”, he replied to Folha de S. Paulo (October 2014).

Another personality that made sure to visit the program was Prince Harry, the fourth in the line of succession to the United Kingdom’s throne.

According to a note by the British embassy, the royalty member came to Brazil in May 2014 to more than just attending to his country’s World Cup matches, but to learn about social initiatives that could inspire treaties or similar actions in Europe: He showed enthusiasm on knowing of how such

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80 a large city as São Paulo, even larger than London, is dealing with such a heavy matter as drug addiction”.

The Prince did not agree to talk to the press on June 26th, and that being so, there is no record of his evaluation of the project. However, he made sure to talk to the mayor and DBA’s beneficiaries in private. His visit caused commotion in Campos Elíseos, surrounded by shouts of “Prince, I love you”. There is even a rumor that he supposedly agreed to contribute to the initiative.

Emancipator approach To the Brazilian population, the project’s defense is directly made by public managers. To Jornal GGN (January 2014), mayor Haddad said: “I’ve removed 300 people from the streets without a single act of violence against them”. Regarding the state clinical admission program, “[He] doesn’t refuse other approaches. In fact, there are people who are going to need hospital admission. […] But in a city where you have 60 thousand crack users, to think of a voluntary forced admission is a logical handicap, a physical one. Then the mass treatment is ambulatory care [like the DBA]. […] The statistics reveal that the relapse after admission is at 90%, you have as much as possible to create conditions for the person to keep their bonds”.

As per the survey from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, on average, nine out of ten crack dependents clinically admitted by the State turn back to using the drug in up to three months. Another interesting index is that 43.4% had to be admitted up to five times in a three-year-span. Other scientific articles point out that the relapse can be of up to one third. Some more optimistic ones consider the addiction affects the return of admissions at 45%. Even so, the numbers are not so distant from the DBA waivers in its first year.

The low rate of detoxication admission recovery is echoed by an article from Ronaldo Laranjeira himself, coordinator of the Recomeço Program (Restart Program), in Revista Saúde Pública (Public Health magazine) (2011). There, he described a survey with 131 crack addicts who were followed up between 1992 and 2006. After 12 years of discharge from CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

81 the hospital where they were detoxicated, only 43 (32%) managed to keep away from crack. Now 22 (17%) were still users, 13 (10%) were in jail, 27 passed away (20.5%), two (1.5%) were missing and the remaining 24 (19%), unidentified.

To Estúdio Fluxo (May 2014), the mayor would approach other rates. “Out of the 400 members [at the time], 318 are working. Some work for a day, others work five days, but all of them are expecting to take more shifts. […] We already have 120 [members] with their complete document list, birth certificates, IDs and employment record cards”, mentioning that 40 were already considered available to enter the professional job market.

“The program is going the right way”, he repeated in an interview to webTV Candeia (June 2015).

In May 2016, the mayor presented DBA’s good indexes again at the Brazilian Mental Health Congress hosted at the Universidade Paulista’s Indianópolis campus. According to the Municipal Administration, since 2014 88% of the initiative’s beneficiaries declared to have drastically cut on their crack consumption. The data is part of a survey performed by caseworkers who act closely to chemical dependents, and shows that even before DBA, the use of crack per person was of an average 42 rocks a week, and now is at 17 rocks, a 60% decrease among members.

According to the Town Hall, out of the 450 beneficiaries, 84.66% are on health treatment and 72.75% are working: “Other sensitive data is that 52.52% of beneficiaries reestablished contact with their families, an important condition for the addict’s social reinsertion. The Town Hall’s initiative also generated the drop from 1,500 to 300 regulars to the region known as Crackland”.

Improvements in health and assistance Still in April 2014, the first lady Ana Estela Haddad also defended the DBA to Jornal GGN, “Positive data show that all children [from member families] are at school. The pregnant are receiving special jobs also, and in the hotel, so they can do their prenatal. It’s a high-risk pregnancy, because many times they will have a preterm birth".

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82 In the health area, Paulo de Tarso Puccini, the then municipal Assistant-Secretary, emphasized that “They [the jobs] have now been intensified as well in the health field. Then [their] regaining the possibility to work and, simultaneously, getting psychological, therapeutic support, etc., that’s our path to seek alternatives for these people”, to Rede TVT channel (January 2014).

“That region has always suffered with erratic programs, arbitrary interventions and the gentrifying logic. Now São Paulo gets connected to the new tendency of staying away from the ‘war on drugs’ approach”, celebrated the official Secretary, Alexandre Padilha, in an interview to Carta Capital (April 2016). In the file, the enthusiasm was backed up by public data pointing out to only 5% of beneficiaries admitting being under the drug’s influence all day. After the program started, 65% admitted to it.

In videos posted on social media, Padilha reassumed the good news two months later, when they readjusted DBA’s tent on Helvétia Street. “An environment with more dignity, more coziness and now, besides showers and bathrooms, it counts with a laundry room run by the program workers. There is room here for workshops, breakfast, and soup for lunch. Another step towards creating new conditions that allow the person who abuses drugs to gather strength and leave their destructive use of substances, go back to work and reestablish social and family bonds”.

A step towards security and citizenship The intersectoral perspective is endorsed by the Public Security Secretary and DBA’s coordinator by the Town Hall, Benedito Mariano. In an article to Folha de S. Paulo (March 2016), the manager took note: “With the treatment still in the open, by inserting these highly vulnerable people into society, we will achieve more success than with the traditional policies. The program proposes full attention to psychoactive substance users, guaranteeing them abode, work and health care”.

The Municipal Coordinator for DBA was one of the public managers that fiercely defended the program. In his article, “we have three ways of treating the users who lost their family bonds and were placed as marginals to the society. The first one, already tested and failed, is CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

83 repression. The second one is making-believe we don’t see them. The third one is having the public authorities welcome them with open arms”, comparing DBA to the “most visible trench in the anti-asylum fight and the renovation to Brazilian psychiatry”.

In the media, the DBA got the same treatment in the voice of former Human Rights and Citizenship Secretary, Eduardo Suplicy. On Mariana Godoy Entrevista (August 2015), he testified: “A little bit more than two months ago, the mayor summoned everyone [the members] and listened to their many testimonies. For instance, one of them said that ‘I’ve been here for ten months, and I used to smoke 30 to 40 rocks a day, now I’m having only two. I’ve restarted living together with my family and I’m studying now. There is a possibility I will even take on ENEM (National Exam for High School)’ and so on”. The host of the show smiled.

“This experience is the same as many other testimonies I’ve heard during all my visits to the program”, Suplicy told me on a certain occasion in a vibrant tone. “I believe the person living on the streets and crack user will have a life with more dignity when they have a proper social service, health care attendance, which encourages them to leave drugs. I firmly believe in the DBA”.

Another one who reinforces the DBA is the Social Service and Development Secretary, Luciana Temer. “São Paulo’s Town Hall is investing a lot of energy in a very brave way (…). We have a really significant decrease in the so-called fluxo (…). As I said before, 70% of these beneficiaries’ consumption has dropped, and to some of them, I can assure, they really left it, and they are formally employed”, evaluated as a project with very encouraging and positive results, in an interview to Jornal da Câmara de SP (February 2015). “[In total] 41 one of those people went back to their families”.

From interviews to narratives Every instant, the public managers were questioned over DBA’s progress by the traditional media, free media and also by college students.

The Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Assistant-Secretary, Sandra Faé, was one of the first interviewed by Roger de Oliveira Franco, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

84 in the survey The Paulistana Policy for damage reduction of psychoactive substance abuse from the view of a jurist, by the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.

In his research, Sandra approaches the narrative dispute with the press: “Part of the media, on their account, insist on putting the DBA in the political dispute arena [parties]; this way, it doesn’t report the program’s positive aspects and progress, focusing on the delicate points, through a negative process. The disclosed information usually doesn’t mention the effort employed by Public Authorities, nor does it report the progress achieved towards the society; not in the slightest way what the DBA program means to the lives of those people”.

The Assistant-Secretary completed: “The program brings the perspective of work as one of the main pillars for the treatment of chemical dependence, which, in turn, is a matter of public health. The program’s actions are developed in an articulate and sectorial fashion, thus achieving better results and loyalty from the beneficiaries, who begin to see themselves as citizens. This approach, based on damage reduction and stimuli to labor activities, has proven to be more effective than the policy of repression that had been adopted in the area so far”. As you can see, a bigger context that demands more well-based and constructive opposing arguments.

In his academic paperwork, the recently-graduated scholar points out: “It is possible to convey DBA program’s significance as an official health policy. Taking São Paulo City as an example, the damage reduction must also be incorporated by other institutions (Federal Union, States and Local authorities), always in accordance with every region’s specifications and shaping itself towards the different contexts”. By describing his thesis with the objective of deconstructing the common sense spread in the beginning by some of the press, the researcher reports that his expectations are for the DBA to: “produce fruitful work, since it is being received by participants in the program, towards the goal of reestablishing trust and sociability bonds”.

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Chapter 6

The Laborers8 “With Open Arms [DBA] was one of the programs that didn’t count in on the mayor’s base plan for the 2012 elections, even because he didn’t have a final proposition on how to deal with that situation. But he really aimed for that matter [of street dwellers and drug consumption in Campos Elíseos]”, underscored the Municipal Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Secretary Artur Henrique. “And there was already a debate among the active people in our party, from health, solidary economy, anti-asylum and anti-drug policies, among other areas”.

During the interview at the Office headquarters, Artur stressed the pride he took on the party activity in the Capital city, especially of the Petista coreligionist mayor Haddad. “The Crackland didn’t begin in 2013.

And what we observed before was cleaning, which worsened the situation, because not only were they spreading the [chemical dependent] population, but were also trying to hide those people under viaducts, in a process of violence and persecution”. In didactics terms, he was discussing it with international damage reduction policy models, and he accentuated: “The DBA is a program built on dialogue and a permanent engagement with the population”.

Not by coincidence, the terms dialogue and engagement ran through all his enthusiastic and almost non-stop speech for 50 minutes. At 55 years old, Artur is an articulator in constant ascension. At the age of 21, the electricity worker was elected the laborer’s representative in his company. At 26, he graduated in Sociology, meeting the student’s movement. At 33, he was one of the spokespersons against privatizations throughout Brazil. At 38, he was the mediator at the Central Única dos 8

The Laborers (Os Operários) is the name of a painting by the modernist Tarsila do Amaral. In this chapter, the title is an allusion to the trajectory of São Paulo’s Official Secretary of Development, Work and Entrepreneurship.

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86 Trabalhadores (Unified Laborer’s Center (CUT) within the academic field.

From 39 to 42, he commanded CUT formation in São Paulo. From 45 to 50, he was the President of National CUT. And since he turned 52, he has assumed this position in the Town Hall.

In his journey, he participated in discussions over countless topics.

Among the causes he opposed were mass layoff, salary devaluation and the feeler for Petrobras’s privatization. Just as any good scholar, he organized a book on his term as CUT President, reporting his fights for minimal wage, social security and union autonomy. These topics are present in his analysis in his wordy blog with thousands of posts from 2009 to 2012.

It’s part of the essence of the present Secretary to imprint his world vision to a vertiginous pace. The sociologist-union representative background induces to a paced timbre of incisive sentence in any chat groups. As a good talker, he chants analyses to several pieces of media connected to his left-winged ideology. He does not spare criticism not even to himself or those who follow him – CUT made twice the number of union strikes in the Lula Era (PT) in comparison to the FHC Era (PSDB).

Demanded answers Artur Henrique became Municipal Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Secretary in March 2014, two months after DBA’s start.

He remembered the program’s noise in its initial process: the different perceptions from the offices on damage reduction policies and the basic requirements from beneficiaries; issues such as hotel maintenance (some beneficiaries did not cope with it and sold the establishment’s props to consume drugs); the negative articles by traditional press; and the Town Hall inner conflict expecting results.

“Society and various institutions demanded a [quick] response. We demanded a lot from ourselves, expecting an immediate result, but we must understand that it consisted of building a way out. You can’t solve the problem from day to night”, said the manager. And because it was a firsttime program, the NGO that initially took it over had no previous experience. Then, by its first semester as head of the case, Artur published CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

87 a public summoning together with the Health and Social Service and Development Offices to hire an institution to be responsible for the DBA. Artur argues with two reasons: “One of them is that we needed a vision and team rotation, because in the DBA we learn every day. Another is the necessity of having an organization with a background in this sort of public policy [damage reduction]”, justifies the manager. This way, Adesaf won the public announcement in September that year, “and we already noticed that the entity started solving problems. For instance, when regulating beneficiaries shifts in work fronts. Today, from the systematization point of view and access to information, there is no denying to their progress in comparison to the situation the DBA started in”.

The beneficiary’s simple gesture of clocking in is stressed by the Secretary not only because it is more fair to their pecuniary benefits, but also on diagnosing what are the most and least active days in work fronts.

And because of that, “we brought solidary economy inside the DBA, with trainings on craftsmanship, pottery, painting, clothes. From the social point of view, these productions are a result of these people’s effort on damage reduction. Without the program, they wouldn’t have that break, that time to dedicate themselves to that matter”.

From those who were professionally reinserted to those who returned to their families, Artur coincides every argument with a positive example within the DBA by involving beneficiaries in work fronts and workshops. “I defend that work by itself doesn’t transform society, what transforms it is man, and that truly transforms society. The work must be seen as a way of relating to yourself and to those around you”, the Secretary envisions. “Even those who are number-freaks, who only see through numbers and cost-effectiveness, they recognize that investing on a beneficiary for damage reduction policy is half the cost of a clinical admission”.

Evaluated profiles To the number-freaks, the study performed by the Brazilian Drug Policy Platform better pictures DBA. Doctor on Social Anthropology, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

88 Taniele Rui has coordinated a team of 10 researchers to the survey report of preliminary evaluation of the program, applied between May and July 2015. The work was based on the Paulistana initiative’s beneficiary’s universe at the time.

There were 400 members then, 370 being over 18 years old. As previously registered on other surveys, the street dweller’s populational profile and drug addiction in the Luz region is diverse. In a sampling model, 80 DBA participants were interviewed, showing a 95% reliability coefficient.

In terms of gender, 58% men, 37% women and 5% transsexuals.

“The significant proportion of transsexuals can be a pointer to their higher vulnerability and this group’s difficult job market insertion”, the study reveals. Regarding sex orientation, 18% declared themselves nonheterosexual, which can also configure this population into a low income and higher social vulnerability group.

In the racial/ethnic self-declaration, 68% are black or mulatto, and 23% white. In terms of age, 77% of DBA’s inserted population is over 30 – about 40% between 30 and 40 years old and 27% from 40 to 49. Among the interviewees, about 60% were born in Greater São Paulo, almost 75% had children (30% had more than three). During the research, 47% declared themselves single and 29% married or living together.

In schooling, the sheer majority can read (96%) and finished Elementary School (79%), but few managed to finish High School (20%), an index close to the educational reality of low income population, according to the survey. On professional life, 51% worked in the service sector, 10% in civil construction and 8% as commercial employees.

Over 90% of interviewees declared a main occupation – although 54% stated not having an employment record card. And so the report indicates: “The value placed on work shown by the DBA’s beneficiaries can be interpreted as traditional to Brazilian society. Beneficiaries take pride in talking about work they perform or performed, and could come to do”.

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89 Measured perceptions Still in the quantitative step, the Brazilian Drug Policy Platform report presented the beneficiaries’ perception on their health diagnosis: 19% has tuberculosis, 18% hepatitis, 14% have high blood pressure, and 12% are HIV-Positive. At that time, regarding drug use, “65% of beneficiaries declared having dropped their crack consumption after entering the DBA and over 50% said they dropped tobacco and inhaled cocaine consumption”.

As an advance, if you consider the survey highlighted that 51% took previous treatment in their fight against drugs, 32% were admitted in specific clinics, 29% underwent ambulatory care, 26% in groups such as Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous and 21% under religious or spiritual treatments. Concerning bonds and relationships, 47% declared not counting on friends’ support, and 36% had already broken family bonds.

Furthermore, regarding their life backgrounds, 66% stated having been convicted, about 25% were committed for felonies still in teenage years. Among those who already entered through the socioeducational system, 54% were charged of robbery, 15% connected to drug dealing.

Because they have been living apart from their rights, not randomly part of the beneficiaries declared being afraid of the police (30%) and of drug dealers (19%).

To 95% of the beneficiaries, the DBA resulted positively in their lives. 76% participate in the work front, and among those, 97% approve of the activities – in this period, already managed by Adesaf. Those who have not joined the work fronts, presented medical or maternity relieve, or other occupations (such as recycling) as the main reasons for not adapting to such activity.

In a lesser degree, part of the program’s beneficiaries was unsatisfied and evaluated negatively the conditions for them to be in the work fronts (14%) the sheltering conditions (36%) and the food menu offered at state restaurants (55%). According to the report, the DBA needed to improve at certain points, such as: opening communication channels between professionals and beneficiaries, improving beneficiary CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

90 membership, expanding the abode locations, and a building maintenance work front. All of which are initiatives the DBA took over during their accord with the Town Hall.

A thread of hope “Having a program that gives a person a home, a place to eat every day, emotional and health support, besides other activities to partake, can’t be too bad anyway”, says Fernanda Gouveia, President of the Association for the Family’s Social and Economic Development (Adesaf), the institute in charge of DBA. “I particularly truly believe in the program”.

The statement was made as we left the headquarters of the Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Office. Fernanda exchanges phone calls with the municipal institution daily. To Brandão, Adesaf’s DBA’s coordinator, she makes at least 30 calls a week, besides emails, SMS, and other texting apps. The last time I went to Adesaf’s headquarters in São Vicente, there were not many moments in which the phone in the President’s office was not being used.

Although the organization does take other projects with Town Halls from Baixada Santista and the State Government, “DBA is the apple of Fernanda’s eyes”, as an employee of Adesaf once told me. She guarantees herself that the program “does not compare to any other action we have ever taken”. From the coastal city, she monitors the status of the staff, the beneficiaries’ attendance, she keeps up with the pay slips, notes, and absences of the population who is part of DBA. All this history storage is made possible by a data integration and monitoring software created by the own institution.

Being agile as she is, Fernanda can: Swiftly narrate about important dates throughout Adesaf’s history, even the week days; mention the names of hundreds of DBA’s beneficiaries and their respective profiles in damage reduction; and she can even quote some speakers. To be more specific, in a congress Fernando Haddad asked her: “DBA is hanging by a thread, but please do not give up on it”. Walking the tightrope comes because of opposite politicians, old-fashioned media, and the internal problems of a program under implementation.

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91 Even though they are based in São Vicente, the team also familiarizes themselves with the project from an 80-kilometer distance.

When a DBA beneficiary passed away in the capital, the atmosphere became sour in the headquarters, since the employees had followed his recovery from drug abuse. The President refrains from crying in front of the team, but the academics have come to the consensus that a good memory is the result of great sensitivity.

Decades of democracy The first pinnacle of altruism as food for the senses hit Fernanda when she was still a teenager. The classroom was the meeting point for other activists, where she started experimenting militancy for social causes: “I presided the Municipal Union of High School Students in São Vicente, I took active participation in the caras-pintadas movement against Collor (impeachment of Fernando Collor, former President of Brazil, in 1992), and I also acted along with the National Union of Students, the UNE”.

During the process of making Brazil a democrat country again, the political parties soon became robust, since party members had been collaborating with a country that had not had elections for 25 years. In this context, Fernanda took part in youth movements while she was getting into Social Communication college. Giving her life a different turn, she finished her course on Pedagogy and decided to step away from politics.

“I am not criticizing, just stating that the political parties orbit around a system I did not feel like being part of anymore. I wanted to accomplish other initiatives, in different fronts, regardless of political parties, although I was holding the same flag for social justice”. Her appreciation for social values was learned at home, mainly from her father, and is shared today with her family, especially with her daughter. Within the community, the main concrete gesture of such sensitivity takes place next to friends who help develop projects for the NGO.

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92 Not-for-profit sector’s millennium Adesaf NGO was funded on April 1st, 2001, with the goal of contributing for a more equalitarian and fair world. Aiming to become the reference of public policies in the not-for-profit sector, they now develop works related to the Sustainable Development Goals, a campaign of the United Nations (UN). As founder and President of the organization, Fernanda spends most of her daily life in her second home, Adesaf’s headquarters.

With 7500 square feet, they have their own facilities in the neighborhood Parque São Vicente. The handicapped have easy access to administrative rooms, extra-curricular activities, audiovisual recording and editing, the foyer, and a wide room for handcraft activities and workshops.

That is where the team gets together – one that is formed by administrative, social communication, financial, human resources, and legal, entrepreneurial and accounting assistance personnel.

By implementing and discussing public policies, and by being civil society, the organization has been part of São Vicente’s city council working in the following areas: Child and Youth defense; Tourist, Cultural, Architectural and Historic Heritage Defense; Food Safety; Environmental Defense; Social Service; and, in the national scope, it has been part of the Council for the Youth between 2010 and 2012.

Throughout its 15 years, the NGO has accomplished over 40 initiatives in the State of São Paulo.

With policies for the youth, it has performed actions with young volunteers, projects for citizen leadership and social inclusion, help to victims of violence or sexual exploitation, and was a university hub of Distance Learning and for the federal program First Job, among other actions. Concerning income generation, it has made partnerships with Senai and Via Rápida, and has also managed skill-enhancing courses for the work market and for sustainable fashion and craftwork.

In health, it has managed programs for the Family Health and has managed agents for the community, for Aids/STDs risk groups damage CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

93 reduction, for nursing maternal health, and for the implementation of the Kangaroo Method in public nurseries. Concerning social service, it has graduated professionals of the area, developed a network of social protection with other entities and coordinated a program of family service.

In the educational segment, it has enabled hundreds of counselors for day care facilities and executed a program to improve young people’s educational performance and professional qualification, the ProJovem Urbano (Urban ProYoungsters, in English), from the Federal Government.

In the cultural area, it has curated photography and plastic arts exhibitions about the history of São Vicente, has put up artistic shows, drama contests, courses on audiovisual production, theatre, music and craftwork. It has also managed the Natural Sciences Museum Joias da Natureza (Nature’s Gems), with courses for almost 15 thousand students.

Guinness Records Nights However, when it comes to numbers, “the largest project we had ever taken care of was managing the play on São Vicente Island’s Foundation, between 2010 and 2012”, as said by the President when we were driving back to the Baixada Santista. Overall, more than a thousand actors from the community take part in a show starred by celebrities to tell the history of the city in its birthday’s week, in January, amid schools’ vacation.

Some of the manager’s responsibilities include casting, rehearsing, artistic production, getting funds for clothing, scenography, bleachers and for making previews. He or she must be able to do this in order to put up the season of the largest theatre play performed on beach sand in the world, according to the Guinness Book. There is a whole preparation to welcome over 50 thousand spectators annually. Having had this experience, Adesaf took over a similar type of staging in Ubatuba, on São Paulo State’s coast, in 2012.

But the NGO kept even more projects in 2016. Besides making virtual exhibitions available on all sorts of themes (natural sciences, history of São Vicente, Brazilian democracy, and the Port of Santos), the entity CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

94 has two partnerships with the public government. Alongside Cubatão’s Town Hall, they offer courses free of charge for professional improvement and workshops on job and income generation in neighborhoods categorized as vulnerable. Furthermore, they provide specialized personnel to work at the Unified Social Service System (SUAS, Sistema Único de Assistência Social). Together with the State Government, Adesaf provides services to over 90 thousand craftsmen from São Paulo registered in the Community Office of Craftwork (Sutaco, Subsecretaria do Trabalho Artesanal nas Comunidades), managing invoices issued, moving and fixed shops, advertising, and professional specialization given to craftsmen registered in all areas of São Paulo.

As with other partnerships, the possibility to manage the DBA appeared when we saw this piece of news posted on a website for public notes. Fernanda remembers, “It took us weeks to elaborate the program and apply to the contest”. While she was developing the managing project, she invited Brandão to coordinate the future team, since he had worked as a Secretary in Cubatão’s Social Service Office before.

A week of challenges A mixture of fear and enthusiasm overtook Adesaf’s first week at the DBA. There was no interaction with the previous NGO during the managing teams change, which was mediated by the Town Hall. Therefore, “as soon as we arrived, on a Wednesday, we had to sort of change the tires while the car was still moving”, remembers Fernanda. Besides having to adapt to the work itself, the second day was somewhat scary. In a land ruled by trust, any action taken by the new organization would generate rumors in the neighborhood.

A change of staff is common in a transition. Initially, just one third of DBA’s staff had been altered by Adesaf. In fact, there are some technicians who have been in the program since the beginning. But there were also some people who were not happy to hear about certain layoffs.

On Thursday, Fernanda, Brandão and one more technician worked out a strategy for the payments, and when the night came, they went down the stairs of Adesaf/DBA, which was located at Largo Coração de Jesus at the time.

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95 “When we were going downstairs, this guy came to us and said, ‘Were you the ones who fired John Doe? Do you think you can come all the way from Baixada and just stay cool here in the capital? You are all going to die!’”, narrates the NGO’s President. “We were all petrified”. As the man stepped forward, Brandão asked him his name in a really loud tone of voice. He diverted from the answer and stepped away cursing threats.

Later on, they would find out he was one of DBA’s beneficiaries and that he left the program at his own will.

Perhaps due to Brandão’s experience with legal matters and the physique of Adesaf/DBA’s manager, Rafael Bruder, “there were always people who thought we were the police whenever we walked by. There was a lot of retaliation from some beneficiaries and thus, we had to use a great deal of diplomacy to deconstruct these wrong perceptions”, says Fernanda. She felt the impact of the first week in moments when she was questioning her decision to stay in the program and for three months of crying. An occasional lonely crying, for there were already enough concerns surrounding her.

Months for the transformation She told me in confidence that her daughter had a recurring fear in the first few months. “She would call and I had to say I was not at the Crackland, because she was not confident about the place”. Nowadays, the tension at home has been undone. “I talk to my family a lot about the drug abuse issue and how it takes place in the heart of the family”. Now, it is her daughter who begs, “Mom, Adesaf cannot leave the Crackland. Do not let go of them”.

But the eternal militant still holds an unanswerable dilemma. “At the end, this is a lonely reflection. Because it is a strong emotion to prepare yourself for the DBA. And, since this is a damage reduction program, the participants expose themselves, they speak openly about their vices and it is all laying there in front of you”. Living in Campos Elíseos neighborhood makes you question yourself.

“Besides the drugs, the lack of infrastructure, the poor education, and the social inequality, what other problems could lead these people to CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

96 this situation? And when we rethink about these topics, we can even imagine where we fit in this system, how we collaborated with this, be it through the way we deal with relationships, the way we raise our kids, the way we perform our roles in the society. To what extent were we not part of this situation?”, she thinks out loud.

Fernanda looks forward to at least contributing with the improvement of the society. “So, if all these beneficiaries, who carry a sad family history or have difficulty fighting addiction to chemical substances, get up every day to be there, to contribute with the maintenance of urban organization, who take workshops, then who am I to feel weak or leave? If each one of us does their part…”. Therefore, Adesaf did not back away from the program, thus prioritizing the development of trust circles with the participants, avoiding any conversations with other groups from the territory who could represent a conflict of interests.

“If you get all the news clips in the media, since we got here, the complaints have dropped. It is not because we work for the press, but because we have adapted to improve DBA’s management”. In six months, the NGO launched and electronic system to control the beneficiaries’ attendance to the program. All the participants wear a badge. “Many of them did not want to have their photos taken, but we explained that that was necessary to prepare the income statements to the NGO, to make the payments, and also for them to identify themselves. In case they were approached on the street, they could show their badge and say ‘I have a name and I am part of the DBA’”.

A tender calendar The system also discloses all the times beneficiaries registered in shelters and work fronts, as well as their occurrences and situations.

Furthermore, Adesaf has established an ombudsman agency in their headquarters to hear the members’ demands. Around the anniversary of the partnership with the Town Hall, the organization began to take initiatives towards the improvement of citizenship with the participating groups.

In the second year, they enlarged the headquarters by moving to a new address. They increased the number of workshops, opened individual CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

97 bank accounts for the monetary aids (wages paid for the task performed in the work front) and, for the staff, offered institutional monitoring at their demand. All these steps have been described along the pages of this book.

Approaching the coast, Fernanda’s automobile was given other names.

“The key is to listen to what people have to say”, she says when she mentions improvements in the lives of Rodolfo, Maria and Kátia (fictional names).

The latter is a young beneficiary who looks after her child and her younger brothers. “She has a mild disorder and her mother is in the program, too. They are both addicted to thinner (a solvent for paint or varnish), and every now and then we had to go after her in the street parties.

Kátia is very cheerful and lively, but she fell off the wagon frequently and could not fit any work group”.

She did well in a patternmaking and sewing workshop. She seldom uses the sewing machine. Instead, she is happy to use her hands. “That is why, even though some activities have only a few participants, they are worth it, because the beneficiary needs to be understood in an individual fashion”, says Fernanda with a spark in her eyes, near the end of that car lift. Before she left the vehicle, she wondered tenderly. “You should see the sunshine in Campos Elíseos one day. The sun gives that population the hopes to a new day”.

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PART 3

Adesaf at the DBA

Adesaf With many work fronts and activities, the initiative goes beyond Campos Elíseos and its surroundings

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Bruna Stephanie Whistles, cellphones’ clicking and applause were all dedicated to the beneficiaries walking down the red carpet

Bruna Stephanie Plates are sculped and get mortar for a smooth surface. Giant stars, animal chimeras and a dancing pair are present

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Bruna Stephanie One of the neighbors gives support: “He is a man with a dream. He wants to work and get his own place. He talks about that every day and he is going to get it!”

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What is it? What is it? What is it?

ART, LUCK, POLITICS, INACTIVITY, BAD LUCK, PRIVACY, LIFE, RIGHT, WRONG

Bruna Stephanie Rodolfo’s desire is that the DBA serves as a good transition so he can walk alongside his young girl on many tomorrows

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Chapter 7

Pure Life9 “Using crack does not feel good”. Rodolfo Pereira de Almeida’s friend warned him before he opened his hand, showing him the pipe and the rock to be lit. That happened when he was only 15. His friend knew about the paranoia and the delights of the consumption, he was Rodolfo’s classmate. The coertion was as high as his grades at school. But little did that help, for his curiosity to taste the crack rock was greater as he lit up the pipe in that Rock concert in greater São Paulo. The exhilarating taste in the first blows was enough.

The attraction for vices and pleasures was an old friend of his. It started as a child. A lemon drink. Not a drink, but the drink. The eldest of a family from Perdizes savored the taste of alcohol with the citrus fruit still in Primary School. Hiding well behind a counter, when his father asked him to help keep an eye at the bar. The sun was at its peak. The establishment was managed by the father. “My dad acquired this bar in the East Side of São Paulo. He did not have a clue about the sips, and that is how I dried up liters of liquor with time.”

Having experiences simultaneously with school, the expert in sitting at the back of the classroom at Antônio Adib Chammas State School started to share his daily life among school and his home, in Santo André, and his father’s commerce in São Paulo, where Rodolfo spent a good part of his childhood and adolescence. Out of his favorite classes, the nerd loved literary debates and geopolitical matters. History and Geography were his strong points. “The only thing I can’t read is Sanskrit”, he says jokingly, as he spoke brilliantly about the characters and pages of A Clockwork

9

Pure Life (Vida Pura) is a piece composed by maestro Heitor Villa-Lobos, a member of the Arts Week of 1922. In this chapter, it makes a reference to the interview with the DBA’s beneficiary.

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104 Orange, by Anthony Burgess, 1984, by George Orwell and 50 Shades of Grey, by E. L. James – “How this book sucks!”

The long-lasting romance with library books started with a passion for the Sociology class teacher. “Oh my, I can’t remember her name. I can only tell that, because of her, I took more interest in discussing society”.

The atmosphere in the greater ABCD Paulista (area in São Paulo comprised of the following cities: Santo André, São Bernardo, São Caetano and Diadema) and its industrial hub reinforced Rodolfo’s will. “At that time, labor unions were very strong over there”, he remembers, gathering up in his memories the debates of a Portuguese teacher on the works and theories of Mark and Engels.

The young man dedicated himself to following political talks in the city with people from his generation. And at the end of every month, rock music would tear down the streets. The same way he would free himself through these critic and questioning paths, he would also start sinking his teeth in drugs by getting closer and closer to them. The rock music riffs still shake his playlists. Natiruts, Coldplay, Radiohead, Keane and Carcaças. As for the drugs, at the August interview he said he had been away from smoking crack for weeks.

The relationship that was forged with the addiction made Rodolfo, now a 48-year-old family man and former public server, get divorced and quit his job many times. For six years, he was a frequent goer of the Campos Elíseos area. He would come and go, alternating between sessions in therapeutic communities and hard street partying, until he was one of the first members of With Open Arms (DBA). Our dialog took place in an afternoon, at the Adesaf’s old headquarters at the DBA. Fat, bald and married In the first semester of 2015, Adesaf assessed 224 out of the 334 beneficiaries of the program who were apt and active in their work fronts.

In the interviewees’ universe, Rodolfo is one of the most enthusiastic and lucid ones, very aware of his trajectory so far. His example is perfect fit for the profile traced by Adesaf in 2015. Most beneficiaries are men (63%), are over 30 years old (81%) and have children (76%).

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105 To be more precise, there are people between 18 and 29 years old (19%), 30 and 45 (57%), 46 to 60 (23%), and 1% of senior citizens. For those who have generated kids, there are mothers and fathers who have one to three kids (48%), four to six kids (20%) and over seven kids (5%). As for the educational background, Adesaf’s research shows that “it is very clear that most of them is literate. And there are still beneficiaries who have some sort of diploma as undergraduate and graduate students”.

The level of education is very diversified. Most of them isn’t just literate. They have at least eight years of educational experience (67%).

Besides different ages, the program includes illiterate people (4%), those who did not finish Primary School (17%) or that have finished it (17%), those who started high school (26%) and those who have actually finished high school (26%). In smaller numbers, there are those who started a university degree (5%), those who hold a diploma (1%) and those who have a post-graduate degree (1%).

The research accounts for their wishes and expectations. Among the interviewees, 42% claim that they want a fixed job above all. Other 34% want to finish school. And there are 24% who want to have some professional qualification. In fact, professional and academic success would be the greatest achievement of 14% of the beneficiaries. Other 14% prioritize their getting rid of drugs.

Having a house of their own is the main goal of 20% of them, but the search for a new family life – be it the reconnection with parents, siblings, spouses or children – is the main life project of most of them, 30%. Coordinator Genivaldo Brandão revealed to me that “an interviewee once wrote that his dream was to grow old being fat and bald next to his family”. Still dealing with big data, 17% could not decide, 4% avoided answering and 1% would be more focused on being successful at arts and sports.

Being socially marginalized is their greatest complaint (38%), they say it bothers much more than being forced to take attitudes that do not please them (23%), to go against their values (22%) or not to be acknowledged by their accomplishments (17%). Most of the ones I have met, for example, hated that they had such a close bonding to crack.

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106 According to the Town Hall, initially, seven out of ten of those who registered had a criminal record, and they still wanted out of this marginalization. Therefore, it is not that the participants did not care about the addiction and the criminality, but their biggest reason for feeling discouraged was the distance and abandonment of those who used to embrace them in the past.

Guilt at home Rodolfo’s father, as he likes to put is, was a reserved man. The few conversations they had came to a silence when he passed away due to a cancer. “I took this as an example for myself, concerning drugs. For the more natural or tender it may seem, the drugs push you down when you aim high”, he told me, summing up the loss as a dystopia. The shock was even bigger when his mother quit being by his side.

She would watch him fall off the wagon consecutive times in his adulthood. In the last six years, he had given in to crack for good.

Regardless of birthday, Christmas or New Year’s celebrations, the last memories she would have would be with him under the effect of drugs. “I am very guilty of my mother having died without ever seeing me sober”.

His former wife did have any better luck for the twelve years they shared a roof. He has a 15-year-old daughter from this marriage, and the break-up was due to the life he was leading with the addiction. Although he says she loved him dearly.

There were moments when the bills were late and stacking up on the bedside table. There were consecutive nights he would not return home.

There were absences at his job as a clerk in public organs. “I went on a 40day vacation to know if I would be able to readapt to working, but then I used cocaine on the weekend”. For all these moments, his old partner was still there by his side. He described a scene to show how his last memory made him choose to live on the streets, and it was on the day of his own birthday.

Once, his wife and daughter spent the morning and the afternoon using the time he was out of the house to decorate the living room with balloons, they had ornaments all over the place. They invited the family CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

107 and even told him about, so he would welcome them well in his surprise party. “Except that I disappeared after I took drugs at a fluxo. I returned five days later [after the birthday party]. When I got home, my wife wasn’t there, and she had left me a towel, a bar of soap and a pair of sandals on the bed”. Rodolfo then goes on telling about his spouse’s adventure in meetings with other people in the same situation (a group called Amor Exigente, or Demanding Love) and her visits every weekend when he was at the therapeutical community.

Other routines His search for recovery came at his own will. He lived for eight months at Cristolândia, a treatment facility that followed religious activities he used to go against. “Today we have a doctor and social assistants here at Campos Elíseos. If you want to quit, or try, you can do it”, although he had fallen back from time to time after his time in the clinic.

He might have conquered his ability to overcome the addiction at the therapeutic community Bezerra de Menezes, an institution in São Bernardo do Campo. “In these facilities, we usually get up at 7am, then we have a moment to share out stories with other interns at 9, then we have a one-hour lunch and the afternoon is usually free. In this second community, what I enjoyed was the “medical confrontation”. It was a moment in which we would write a text of our own assessing our lives, and then the doctor would confront us on how to overcome the situations”.

In his follow-up sessions, he listened very often that he had another path to follow from the beginning, that he was able to choose. And as for previous traumas or disappointments, that he should live by good old Carpe Diem. Despite his efforts, abstinence kicked in the first week back to normal routine. These experiences had little or no value at all to him, if the confinements and detox sessions were far from the fluxo and his daily routine. Further and further from family and in disagreement with the religious teachings, the paths to find the light at the end of the tunnel became imprecise and unpredictable.

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108 Streets with no personality To be able to live marginalized in the streets, Rodolfo would take up temporary jobs, because, like he said, “I’m not the type of guy who lives out of robbery”. He revealed he tried that once in the Municipal Market, but then he says he was afraid of himself. The former best student of the class was living at the mercy of crack rocks and the fluxo’s unpleasantness.

“When you smoke the rock, the euphoria ends really fast. Then, when the rock is over, depression hits soon after”.

Rodolfo believes that the means influences who you are and, in regards to the addiction, “little by little it takes everything away from you.

Your character, your understanding, compassion. Besides not having a place to stay”. The shelters in the region were not very different than life before the DBA, “there was a lot more booze going on than today”, for example. And when he talks about abstinence crises, he says “the effects are terrible, from excessive sweating to mental burnout, you know?”

A body that is so used to the effects of drugs can barely react. The fight needs to be fought individually, psychologically, according to the interviewee. Addiction does not see ethnics, skin color, gender or diploma.

“At the Crackland, I have met professors, lawyers, doctors, college students. There was even a successful dentist who had sold all his equipment because of crack”. The solution was to apply to this damage reduction initiative when it was announced in January 2014.

Rockstar routine Rodolfo’s participation in the initiative met his dreams, in the sense that he was seeking a full life and reaching out for new perspectives.

He affirms he wants to go back working with paper toys and stickers.

Feeling cool and laidback, the anarchist with a tattoo of his family name came to the interview wearing a rock t-shirt and a typical bracelet. “I feel like I’m the best”, he bragged as he progressed in the treatment.

In his free time, he can keep busy by going to museums and cultural centers in the city. At the DBA, the same sampling performed by Adesaf indicates globally its target public’s preferences. For example, 69% CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

109 of the members prefer outdoors activities. From the capital city, they would like to visit more artistic exhibitions (29%), movie theatres (28%), libraries (13%) and, most of all, public parks.

Rodolfo gets along well with actions towards the environment and arts. Among the beneficiaries, these preferences correspond to 17% and 21%, respectively. The other percentages wish to have more experience, courses or professional improvements to work with machinery and exact sciences (27%), physical activities (16%) or animals (19%).

From their own backgrounds, the members themselves indicate their main skills for their daily lives, such as dealing with nature and animals (21%), speaking in public (18%), comforting underprivileged people (18%), physical resistance (16%), artistic presentations (18%), and conveying knowledge (11%).

Adesaf’s survey also specified habits or preferences in free time, such as watching TV (23%), doing sports (15%), getting involved with arts (13%), reading books (12%), making things (11%), fixing them (10%), or renovating them (7%), besides taking care of flower and vegetable gardens (9%).

Rodolfo chooses to spend his free time in his hotel dorm, “playing videogame while listening to the Rolling Stones, and reading all things possible, such as Sesc magazines (monthly issues of interviews and agendas), Sophie’s World and The Shack. By the way, I cried a lot with this book”.

Bicycle riding Rodolfo’s present and future no longer make a reference to crack.

The man from São Paulo is one of the hundreds of beneficiaries who, through DBA, reduced drug consumption drastically. Almost nine out of ten members have reduced the contact they used to have with pipes once they got involved with the program’s activities, according to data from the Town Hall. The daily life of this chapter’s main character is an example.

The clock barely hits 7 am and he is already leaving his dorm. With a shower taken and his bed made, he walks towards Bom Prato to have his CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

110 breakfast – the first of the three daily meals he has at Largo Coração de Jesus, 28. “I have adapted to the routine and the diet is good. The food is very simple, it fulfills my needs. I have put on weight, from 78 to 85 kilos, which is a good number for someone 6.1 feet tall”. Some colleagues from the dorm wake up a little later, when Adesaf’s counselors go pick them up so they can start their routine.

Around 8 am, he smiles as he sits on DBA’s bicycle, after having his attendance taken with the code on his badge at the headquarters. “I have never owned a bike”, he says jokingly, wearing a uniform, carrying packages of condoms to be distributed in places and to people who are most vulnerable to getting Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases. “I take condoms to nightspots, porn movie theatres, nightclubs. That is great, because we really do need to be aware of the importance of prevention. We have to bombard them with more campaigns about this subject”.

Before noon, he returns the vehicle at Adesaf/DBA’s warehouse and, with his badge, he clocks out. He is seldom absent, unless he has some health problem, but rarely because he does not feel in the mood. His good humor continues at lunch and he pays close attention to the extra calendar offered by Adesaf/DBA. On Wednesdays, he shows up at the Social Integration Center Coração de Jesus10, at the same location, where he is one of the most disciplined students at the course he takes to become a hairdresser. Getting his professional life back on the track is his next step.

He says as he fixes his glasses back on his face, “from time to time, I check the news on public contests openings to see the possibilities”. He has a little myopia.

However, he has great sight for other horizons. At the same center11, he spends his Mondays at the cinedebate organized by Adesaf, full of movies, debates and popcorn. “I was the one who suggested we 10

Months later, Adesaf/DBA’s administrative headquarters was moved. Both the course for hairdressers and the cinedebate started to be taken at the new facilities, at 385 Nothmann Grove, 350 meters from the old address.

11

The same.

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111 watch Dragonfly. The guys felt a little lazy watching the feature film, but Kevin Costner is the best. And the movie teaches a great lesson, which cheers us up into a non-stop search for the best, especially when we live in such a heavy atmosphere”, he softens as he advises that the best way to keep in abstinence is to avoid going by the fluxo near the square.

“Anyway, the program helped me to gradually develop more selfcontrol, you know what I’m saying? Some days, I go for a walk. I went to the Oswald de Andrade Cultural Center, have you ever seen their exhibitions? Yesterday, I went to Sesc’s digital lab and watched The Piano.

A good drama film”. Since leisure activities are usually for free, part of the money he makes he spends on “snacks and things to munch on in the afternoon and in the evening. I save the rest”, he says a little before going to have dinner at Bom Prato. Before going to bed, he sketches and scribbles fanzines, which is a hobby he has carried since he was a good boy.

His greatest conquer is rekindling with his family, especially with his daughter, the apple of his eyes. “DBA got me closer to her. We now talk as much as we used to. I remember when we used to go to the mall, which is like going to the beach when you live in São Paulo”, he says as he laughs. I was touched when I heard him talk about the online chats he has with his dear heiress. Naturally, he wishes the With Open Arms program serves as a good transition so he can walk with his young girl on many tomorrows, enjoying full happiness.

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112

Chapter 8

Ground Zero: Floor12 Right there, on the benches of Largo Coração de Jesus’s park, fifteen beneficiaries of the With Open Arms program (DBA) make a circle at 11:30 on that August morning. Broomsticks and bins are resting on the floor they have just cleared themselves. A couple of participants approaches as Adesaf’s social counselor goes after three other people around the square. A beneficiary was in the Fluxo wearing a uniform. The NGO’s collaborator raises his eyebrow to her in disapproval as he rushes back to the square and she follows him feeling down.

Social counselor José André Aniceto dos Santos reports that “in total, there are 25 beneficiaries under my supervision. I must be aware of everyone in my work front, especially because the area they work at is right here, really close to the fluxo. Most of them do come to work, but when they are absent, I always check their hotels to see what happened”. The 33year-old man comes from Alagoas and has lived in São Paulo since he was 18, always watching out for the most vulnerable ones.

In his new city, he has helped street dwellers who seek shelters and has worked as a caretaker for elderly citizens in rest homes. His professional experience overcomes his academic history, because he started a university degree on Social Services, “but I’m not ashamed to say I haven’t managed to get a diploma yet”. At every step we take, he tells me in detail how he follows up each one in the program. “Those two gentlemen”, he shows me, “have never, ever missed a day since they started the program, four months ago. I will soon try to get them a job”.

Ground Zero – Floor (Marco Zero – Chão) is a romance from the modernist writer and playwriter Oswald de Andrade. In this chapter, it refers to the streetsweeping work front in Campos Elíseos, ground zero for the DBA. 12

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113 Nogueira (fictional name) waves him hello. He is a 44-year-old man from Bahia who dresses up like a farm coronel from olden times. He shows off his cowboy hat, wears a belt with a silver buckle, a golden chain on the neck and has his hands heavy from wearing so many rings. “Rumors have it that Mr. Nogueira has gotten twenty-eight women pregnant since he got to São Paulo”, José André says as he introduces me as the journalist.

“Twenty-nine”, Nogueira corrects before he moves on towards the fluxo area.

Ornaments such as chains, bracelets, hats and rings are not exclusive to the last passerby. Most chemical dependents present in Campos Elíseos, in the fluxo or the DBA, bring some sort of amulet or tattoo with a transcendent meaning. Crafts or names remaining from the natural hope to go back mingling in the society. “We are all working so well that we deserve a pizza”, one of them suggest in the circle in the park.

The others five a round of applause.

Familiar territory José André calls out for attention as he walks in the middle of the circle, “Hold up, I want silence and respect. I will highlight some points we are discussing, ok? First of all, you have to register your attendance in the warehouse in the morning, when you pick up the material, because if you forget it at the moment, you will not be able to receive your payment for the day, and that is not cool. I don’t want that to happen. Second, respect among the team. I have noticed some issues and… We all like to be respected”.

One of the participants interrupts the counselor abruptly, casting a deadly look towards her ex-husband. A colleague asks her to stay calm while the other one makes fun of her. José André asks politely for attention and is promptly helped. There are three couples in his team. Affairs, dates, marriages and bad relationship break-ups are common in any community, be it in Pakistan, Chile or any other corner of the world. The same situations are recurring in Campos Elíseos, especially when bonding with family and old friends is so rare. In December 2014, there were five mothers with newborn babies registered at DBA. Some of them had gotten pregnant after joining the fluxo.

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114 The urgency in treating affection is usually hidden, and that is what mainly differentiates the population leaving in the streets and with drug dependency in that area from the other ones spread under marquises and living in alleys around the city. Meeting and rekindling with partners in the same unhappy situation have made that place a characteristic ghetto for over two decades. They live like a family made up of crack addicts. And speaking of family, the ex-husband laughs as his old partner pushes him and her two friends try to stop her from making a fuss. Bad mood was building up with the rock abstinence. “Done? Can we come back to the circle? The third thing is, I’m reducing my team so I can afford to have new entrants. So please, be absent only if there really is no other way, really”, he says followed by a great silence. “We all have our addictions, I can’t live without my cigarettes. So let’s be a bit more responsible and make an effort towards damage reduction, alright?”

The last member of the group comes in late and, unaware, almost sat on a trash collector full of mud. “Careful with the bin, Mr. Ferreira (f.n.). You’re going to sit on a heap of shit”, someone alerts. “Shit? Shit reduction?”, another one says laughing. Most of them feel relaxed with jokes and laughter. Then the counselor calmly says, “I was going to pay you a compliment, Mr. Ferreira, especially because you have been able to reduce the crack consumption”.

Right next to me, I hear two guys whispering, “The problem is that when I go back smoking, I smoke twice as much”, and the other replies, “That’s complicated. Now think of me, I still have HIV and Syphilis.” For some time, José André makes recommendations openly to each one of the participants.

From the streets to the university One of the guys is advised to avoid the consumption because he is taking medicines. The other one needs to get himself together because he is about to become a father. “I want to see each one of you guys well. And you, lady (staring at a pregnant girl), are living for two people, all right?”.

Then this other guy has a spark in his eyes when he hears about the possibility of getting a job. “And look at Cláudia (f.n.), she deserves a round of applause. She started going to college this month”. The group CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

115 applauds her a few minutes before the clock hits midday and they pick up their tools to take to the warehouse.

Cláudia was born with the body of a Cláudio, a man, twenty years ago in Ribeirão Preto. “I take marijuana and cocaine, and I also go under treatment at the Centro de Atenção Psicossocial (Psychosocial Support Center)”. It is common for the beneficiaries to be forwarded to other municipal services. This lady has been in the city for five years, two of which she has spent at the territory more specifically. “I have to look after myself. I sought this project because I like being independent. I have a son and I pay his monthly allowance. I also have to buy my stuff. I have a lot of dreams”.

She continues explaining that most of her enthusiasm comes from the friendship she has with José André. “I don’t see him as a counselor, I see him as a friend”. Remember when I talked about circles of trust? “Ever since I met him, I learned to trust him and others, to interact more. I am now taking the first term of Civil Engineering. I am following the steps of my half-sister, who is four years older than me. She lives in Italy and she has already told me she will get me a job in the area there after I graduate”, Cláudia says with tears of joy.

Outside jail bars The reason why most start and addiction is due to involvement with crimes and teenage years. Seven out of ten beneficiaries of the DBA have a criminal record. There are three reports that make a good example.

One of them is about Mr. Douglas (f.n.), a gentle elder man who used to sweep the streets at Barão de Limeira street. “I caught my wife with her lover, and where I come from, there is no such thing as forgiveness for these things”, he says as he calmly comments on the murders. “I didn’t have a place to bury them, so I kept them in my backyard, in the countryside”.

Police investigations dug up his words and the bodies. Mr. Douglas spent years in a cell in Carandiru prison and even managed to escape the bloodbath that took place there in 1992, resulting in the death of 111 prisoners. Now at 60, he questions, “How can you live a normal CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

116 life?”, trying hard to stay away from alcohol and other substances. He points to the sky and says, “I am sure I am leaving this place tomorrow and I will have a house again”.

I have also taken notes of Renato’s (f.n.) statement, a beneficiary from the countryside of São Paulo and who is always in a good mood and who also sweeps the streets at the capital city. While he says it was downtown where he first tried crack, he complements, “I’m a hillbilly who came here looking for a job. In my town, it was all a rural area. But down here, for Christ sake! When I got here, I crossed paths with a couple of thieves who took all of my clothes. Then I went after them and, at Luz Station, I saw this crackhead wearing my shirt”. He makes everyone laugh as he tells that.

“I asked the guy what he was doing with my clothes, then he took me to Crackland and I saw this little tent at the Fluxo selling everything I had. It was sick!” He makes a lot of gestures to tell how he started a friendship at the area. Then the story ends when he tells he got addicted with the pipes of the territory. End of line. “I spend seven years in jail.

Yeah, it is an obscure past because of an article I infringed, 157 [this is the article that describes theft in the Penal Code]”.

The next testimony is from a former drug dealer. “Unfortunately, I wanted to try out crack and never stopped. All my cousins had a connection with the drug trafficking at the outskirts of the city. There was a time when I was making 25 grand a day”. Although he now prefers to stay strong with the DBA, away from that rocky road. “I thank God every day”. Talking with a celestial Father, angels and orixás are a common practice among the program’s beneficiaries.

Transcendental instinct Religion is a fundamental dimension for many people and it has incisive impact on the society as a whole, maybe because believing in other universes of life after death is an instinct to every human being, maybe because religion is one of the points of greatest influence in people’s culture and behavior. It is so much that, for those living in the margins of society, religion might be the little or only bond left with a sense of CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

117 collectiveness. Or maybe because the institutions where most of the beneficiaries has already undergone treatment use faith on a daily basis as a practice.

Leaving the digression aside, I will tell the story of a visit in the following week. It was Ayrton’s (f.n.) turn to treat his relationship with God. “I talk to Him every night. I cry a lot and I feel that he hugs me when I’m reading the Bible. He is my brother”, he feels touched and coughs.

“Excuse me, I have pneumonia, Aids and a bunch of diseases like most of the others”, he says as he shows the scars of two bullets he took a few years ago in his belly. Then he picks up his employment record card and goes over the stamps from the time he used to work as a general assistant, “You know, the program is really good, there is a hotel, there is a bed, I don’t have to spend the night sleeping on a curb. But I would like to be working on the books”.

Silva comes next and says hi. A partner from previous chapters, he spends the morning talking about his origins. “My story began before I was born, Lincoln. My grandfather was a construction foreman at Sabesp and sent his two daughters to school. Then everyone decided to destroy my family. I was born well after and the whole family stigma fell over me”.

The sentences catalyzed an apocalyptical view about his imperfect past.

“At 27, I found out that my mother had taken part in a satanic ritual and had offered me still as a baby to get back her part on my grandfather’s inheritance”.

The belief that laid problems as the responsibility of a pact in the previous generation extinguished any of Silva’s vocations. “When I learned about that, it messed up my mind. That was when I understood why I was troublesome at home when I was young, why I left home and fought with my family”. Although he is one of the most understanding and kind-hearted, according to the counselors and some of his colleagues, Silva preferred to surround himself with solitude. “Today I can only find myself in books. Through the books, I remain sane and feel not so skeptical, not so tormented”.

Adesaf/DBA’s manager, Rafael Bruder, took my break to show me around the other sweeping points. Out of every ten beneficiaries able CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

118 to work, seven are screened for urban cleaning teams. Each team is followed by their own counselor, like José André’s group at Largo Coração de Jesus, near those who clean the crossing between Cleveland Avenue and Helvétia Street.

At the north of the square, another team looks after Ribeiro da Silva, Cleveland, Glete Streets and Rio Branco Avenue. This last avenue still divides two other groups: One that provides their services between Eduardo Prado, Nothmann and Barão de Limeira Avenues, and another one that covers Nothmann and Barão de Limeira Avenues, and Helvétia Street, next to Princesa Isabel square.

The last three teams work a bit farther from Adesaf/DBA’s headquarters. One of them cleans up the streets between Helvétia and Guaianases Streets, and São João and Duque de Caxias Avenues. Another one cooperates in Freguesia do Ó’s main square. The last one covers Largo do Arouche, where Rafael was about to take me. On average, each team sweeps 0.9 kilometers daily.

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119

Chapter 9

Magnificat13 A nice car honks the horn at Largo do Arouche. A senior citizen wearing a suit and tie leaves the car and walks towards the DBA beneficiaries, who were sweeping autumn leaves and litter disposed of by pedestrians from the streets. They talk, they sit, and they keep on talking.

Neighbors start to take a peek at the windows to watch them talk. Also pedestrians walking by feel attracted by the conversation. Based on mutual smiles, this honest talk made the worker’s day.

This was the first of numerous displays of incentives that the local team received throughout the municipal program. When we got there, the participant was very anxious. “Did you see it? He turned to me and said good morning!”, the DBA beneficiary told the Adesaf’s social counselor excitedly. “And you replied to him, right?”, as he grimed timidly. “Before the program, there was no communication between chemical dependents and the population. This is the path that needs the most development, bonding with the community”.

Although he always sounds like a reserved person, the Adesaf’s employee understands the importance of such simple acts and greetings.

Recording of these moments were in the media. A beneficiary once told Rede TVT channel (in January 2014), “I’m very anxious, you know? It’s our first day, everyone looks at us differently”. And he shows his uniform proudly to the camera and says, “They don’t look at us like we were crackheads, addicts, thieves. They see us as a worker. Even the people from

13

Magnificat is a piece composed by maestro Heitor Villa-Lobos, a member of the Modern Art Week of 22. The word is famous in the Christian tradition as the song of Maria’s cousin when she heard the good news that she was pregnant. In this chapter, it refers to the good news the beneficiaries hear regarding their experiences at the DBA. CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

120 the stores say good morning and offer us a cup of coffee. It is already different than it was yesterday”, he celebrates.

At the same time, Brasil was recording Sidney’s first day sweeping the streets. He is another chemical dependent who lives in Campos Elíseos.

He said, “Yesterday, I didn’t take anything so I could have my body rested for today, you know?” The TV show Profissão Repórter (Occupation: Reporter) (in May 2014) also broadcast these demonstrations of support.

A woman from the neighborhood told the reporter, “He is a man with a dream. He wants to work and get his own place. He talks about that every day and he is going to get it!”

In fact, a year later, the above-mentioned member Welton de Oliveira, then 27, was already smiling as he was working as a kitchen assistant serving clients at a restaurant in a mall. Through DBA, he stopped taking drugs and, little by little, got transferred to other municipal initiatives, where he gets psychological and social treatment. His wife and two kids have also applied to other charitable public services.

A visible condition In other times, the population in general saw crack consumers as noias, marginalized by the society. In an article by Luciane Raupp and Rubens de Camargo Ferreira Adorno, published in Revista Ciência & Saúde Coletiva (Science and Collective Health magazine) (2011), a young man from the neighborhood affirms, “They are noia! They hang out over there, taking their drugs, and don’t mess up with anything. At least no one messes up with me! It’s going to be a problem if they do! They aren’t crazy”. The possibility of getting robbed, according to him, was after 9 pm, because that was when most addicts and drug dealers were walking around the so called Crackland.

Both writers highlight that, at the time, both sides of the society were indifferent with each other. “There are cheap hotels in front of which one could always see a family talking, listening to music, not seeming to care with the addicts nearby”. Thus, there was an agreement of invisibility between society and the alienated ones. Of course that rescuing the self-

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121 esteem generated form the positive bonding with the society is important for the dependents’ recovery.

Sometimes, that even takes place when they get their identifying card from DBA. Until they have all their registration complete in Adesaf’s electronic system, the participants go through a long process of awareness raising. They learn how important this document is when they report their activities at the end of the day and so that they have a follow-up on their progress throughout the program. Thus, they allow their photos to be taken so they can wear a badge.

One of Adesaf’s collaborators reveled that, “as they were wearing badges, many of them were recognized in the surroundings and started being called by their names. So some of them feel really proud of their badges and actually use it as an official ID card. They feel like real citizens.” I can reiterate that with an experience reported by a social counselor from Adesaf, when she says that, leading a work front, “we walked down the streets saying ‘good morning, everyone!’ and, little by little, the people started greeting the beneficiaries. It was tough. We still had to carry gallons of water because, under that heat, store owners were still afraid of offering them water”.

As weeks went by, a salesman offered his fridge so they would keep the water cool. A few weeks after that, a snack bar on the street began to offer them water. On another avenue further down, the people had stronger reasons to be scared. One of the beneficiaries avoided going there because he had already robbed the stores to sell things for crack. After being pushed by the others when one of the store owners recognized him, he looked at him in the eye to apologize.

The social counselor remembers that, “until 2014, nobody could get off at Júlio Prestes train station because they were always afraid of being mugged by crack users. Now the number of robberies has dropped down because, among other reasons, the beneficiaries sweep the streets in front of the stores and are therefore easily recognizable. They don’t steal anymore and, as far as I know, they even pick a fight with those who are even thinking of robbing one of the stores around there”. This is a side effect of the DBA. CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

122 A truthful embrace The smallest area swept by the work fronts and the one that is located the furthest from the fluxo, Largo do Arouche is a portrait of the harmonious relationship among beneficiaries of the program, store owners and locals. During working hours, those wearing a uniform are treated like any other citizen and are even sort of spoiled with a daily cup of coffee, water, restrooms and a nice chat with waiters and taxi drivers who wait around the area.

As Rodrigo (f.n.) states, “the With Open Arms program is great to me. It welcomes me very well. Nowadays, we feel good about coming here.

I have a place to sleep, to eat, to drink, I can take up courses, keep my head busy and away from the addiction. I think fondly of Adesaf’s team. I can feel it and I feel embraced by them. Embraced lovingly”. Tears come to his eyes as he opens his arms to his counselor.

Having been an orphan since he was born, Rodrigo came from the city of Sorocaba. He got married at 18, became a father at 20 and then had two more kids. “Crack doesn’t choose people. In the countryside, a rock costs R$ 10”. His addiction came to an end as he took up a new life in Christland, “and I was a missionary at Crackland, started preaching, but then I fell off the wagon. I stopped going to church, my wife had to be admitted to a hospital, I went back to sleeping on the streets…”

Nowadays, he is more aware of how much the addiction costs and, with his money, he tries not to buy the rock. “I reduced drastically, but I still use crack. It is awful, I don’t even want to talk about it”. He barely mentions this when he talks to his wife. “I say that I’m okay, I lie to her.

But I have to lie, because she and my kids hope to see me well soon”. His savings are sent to his family on a weekly basis until he accomplishes his dream: Getting a stamp on his employment record card.

It is always good to highlight that breaking up with the family is one of the main factors for the chemical dependence to come and go. On a crack users profile published by the Crack Observatory, researchers point out that losing parents in the childhood and a poor level of social skills contribute with giving up treatments. It happens as frequently as when they CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

123 have mental disorders in the family or are alcohol dependent, among other factors.

Mothers, wives and children The information shows up in an article written by Luciane Raupp and Rubens Adorno in Revista Toxicodependências de Lisboa (Lisbon’s Toxic Dependence magazine) (2010). In this article, solitude was a reason for drug abusing among interviewees, “revealing the presence of something imaginary in common that they always referred to in order to justify the consumption”. The article then goes on to comment on a student of Journalism who left everything behind after having a fight with his mother, who learned about his involvement with crack.

The motherly figure is also of utter importance on preventing drug abuse, according to another piece of research from Revista Gaúcha de Enfermagem (2013). The writers note that, “as far as preventing drug abuse is concerned, studies show that the greatest influence and the best relationships come from the mother rather than the father. Youngsters who respect their mothers’ feelings seem to have greater influence when deciding not to take drugs”.

They also mention a study carried out in 14 capital cities in Brazil that state that many chemical dependents enter this life because of family problems, peer pressure, search for pleasure and personal conflicts. Still in Largo do Arouche, Adriana (f.n.) explains that she first got in touch with crack when she was forced to live in the streets. “I came from Salvador with my mom at two years old. At 15, she sent me away because she met a new guy. That is when I was introduced to drugs”.

After six years, she was arrested for possession of narcotics. With a partner, she bought a house in Praia Grande, on the coast of São Paulo state, where she had two children. A fight made her move back to São Paulo, where she started working as a hairdresser and moved in with her aunt and her two kids. She even received visits from her mother. “Then on a certain day, my mother went away with my kids, I got the news that the father of the kids had been arrested and, in the same week, my aunt passed away”. Feeling the unpleasantness of family abandonment, she returned to CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

124 the marginalization almost two years ago. Her wish now is to give up drugs and get her kids back. The melancholic tone of voice quickly disappears.

A child approaches her, along with his parents, who live nearby, and greets Adriana ‘good morning’. She gives back a smile and hope.

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Chapter 10

Joy Is the Ultimate Proof14 The spirit of Christmas hit With Open Arms (DBA) a bit earlier that year, December 23, 2015, more precisely. In groups of ten, the beneficiaries contributed with the celebration. Some of them created Christmas wreaths from recyclables, others looked after the Christmas tree, and others took care of the decoration. That day, 150 participants reunited with Adesaf’s staff at the Adesaf/DBA’s headquarters.

With the goal of being informative, the event had a short movie about the Christian origin of Christmas, followed by a theatrical intervention. The good old man’s presence represented the celebration’s symbolism. A legacy of cultural syncretism of various legends, the Santa Claus is the myth that reunites the tradition of a white-bearded Nordic god who distributed presents to the younger ones, the generosity of a holy bishop who helped vulnerable children, and a day assigned to the birth date of the most worshipped man in the West.

We all know that Santa Claus is the tradition that reminds us the most of our first homes, our family and childhood. Therefore, regardless of who revisits this fantasy, this encounter is full of emotions. As Rafael Bruder explains it, each one of them would sit next to the character and his throne and get a kit comprised of a photo with Santa Claus, a portrait and a Christmas cake to celebrate later.

This joy filled the following semester with another celebration, a morning learning about the month of June’s traditions. In fact, there were two mornings, each one estimated to receive from 70 to 80 participants.

14

The Joy Is The Ultimate Proof (A Alegria É A Prova Dos Nove) is one of the most celebrated verses of Anthropophagus Manifest, brought together by the modernists. In this chapter, it is an allusion to celebrations and excursions given by the DBA. CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

126 This time, the decoration was organized only by Adesaf’s staff. In the event, there were songs from the Northeast, quadrilhas (typical folk songs played at June parties), and typical dishes such as white hominy, popcorn and hot dogs to be appreciated by the beneficiaries.

Just like everybody Although they are pretty simple, these specific parties have a good reason behind. For the research developed by the Brazilian Platform of Drug Use Policy about the DBA, the celebrations, moments of chatting and external activities are the most desired leisure activities present on a list in which some beneficiaries also mention drugs as a form of entertainment.

Therefore, the initiative goes beyond Campos Elíseos and its surroundings.

Some of Adesaf/DBA’s experiences include trips to municipal parks and squares. A former technician from the organization comments: “I have already taken them to Villa-Lobos Park about four times. The first time, we had a conversation to talk about behavior, for them not to take drugs or smoke over there. The trip went well. It is a different atmosphere, there are lots of green and animals. They also went to Ibirapuera park. We had two full vans and I even offered some seats in my car, because they all enjoy this contact with nature a lot”.

She remembers a certain time in which one of the security guards approached her and asked, “Are these Haddad’s crack users? They are way better than any kid from private schools”. Despite the bad comparison, in a way this compliment highlights the bond built between professionals and members. “In the van back home, they said, ‘Did you see how they treated us here? Just like everybody!’”

Another sweeping team had a leisure day at Jardim da Luz park.

One of Adesaf’s social counselor laughs as he says, “everything went fine as far as possible. It couldn’t be perfect because some of them wanted to use the kids’ playground. But they were well accepted, they went to open air gym. They were so euphoric that some of them asked me to take their photos with my cellphone. They really enjoyed the experience. An older man in my team even said he had a new perspective about parks, because he used to go there solely to smoke”.

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127 All the technicians I talked to, especially coordinator Brandão, were unanimous about the need to make more field trips viable. Those with better aptitude for greeneries could explore a work front taking place at the Green Factory.

Therapy, flowers and salad Around there, long lines of carrots, beetroot, lettuce and herbs gardens. Lots of herbs, some of which are grown by the hands of Renan (f.n.). Timidly watching details of the grains and the earth, little does he speak. He says, “It is really good. Staying here is kind of therapeutic. It gives us a second shot at leaving this life behind. When they admit us, we soon fall off the wagon. Over here, we have time and feel comfortable to improve”.

His roommate is called Alan (f.n.). Offering a salad and a nice chat, he says, “Thank God we have this opportunity to get off the streets.

In the ghetto, life is all about crazy people and ups and downs. Now I can get off a club or anywhere else and come to my place, have a shower and change clothes. I can leave my house knowing that tomorrow morning I will have a place to go back to. I can go to funk parties, go for a ride at Ipiranga or downtown and say ‘Look, I’m going now. I’m not sleeping on the street, I’m going to my room’”.

The breather is the moment for the work front team to enjoy the salad they grew themselves. The DBA participants work in a nook that has a greenhouse with a sowing machine and a larger area where they can grow fruit, greeneries, seasonings, medicinal plants, herbs and flowers, such as the Peace Lily. The fertile environment generates from spices to strawberries, from boldo to common rue plants. They can also learn from gardening and composting techniques to collecting fruits from the earth.

The Green Factory is located at Complexo Prates, at 1,100 Prates Street, in Bom Retiro neighborhood. The public facility comprehends an area of eleven thousand square meters comprised of four buildings. Together, they make up for five thousand square meters of built-up area. Inaugurated in March 2012, the place has an integrated support center for children, a lounge, a shelter for adults, and an area for CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

128 psychosocial care, where public health social service professionals can keep track of and reinsert those who are living on the streets, who have chemical addiction and who are highly vulnerable.

Territory to teach Josineide de Oliveira Almeida, a 34-year-old social counselor of this work front, told me once, “It is wonderful to see life germinating and working the earth. Around here, there are daisies, peppermint, lemon grass, medicinal plants. Oh my, there are so many species.” Until she was 18, she used to work with agriculture in São Raimundo Donato, a city in the state of Piauí. She came to São Paulo to stay at her aunt’s house when she turned 23 “with nothing but a lack of judgement”.

Her aunt was emphatic to point out that even working as a housekeeper in the big city was a better deal than living in the desert. After a month trying to adjust to life in the capital city, Josi says, “I started working at a house and my bosses encouraged me to study”. At the university, the fulfilled the dream of becoming a teacher as she took her internship at the last term of the Geography course.

She filled in for a teacher who was on sick leave and took up a few classes at state public schools. She took up groups at Primary School and at High School. “Teaching is wonderful. Firstly, because students are people who have a whole life ahead of them to discover the world.

Secondly, because then I can plant in their hearts whatever they need to follow a better future”, she says as she relates teaching with sowing the earth. Her metaphors are often inspired by the lectures given by Mario Sergio Cortella, her favorite intellectual, professor and philosopher.

After her replacing the other teacher ended, Josi got a job at a snack bar. And then she heard about a job position at Adesaf/DBA from a fellow teacher. When she was walking down for the job interview, a municipal guard warned her, “Listen, be careful because Crackland is over there”.

She replied saying, “But that’s exactly where I want to work”. She was excited about the new job, despite the reality shock since she hadn’t heard much about this territory.

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129 Sewing Godmother The first group of beneficiaries she guided was the Green Factory one. Other times I visited the program, she was already starting a workshop of sewing and knitting. She says, “There are nine people on the list among men and women”, emphasizing that just a few knew the basics such as putting up a button, but now they have progresses and can use a sewing machine pretty well.

In the group, there are two men who stand out by making decorative items and tablecloths. But the Adesaf’s employee strong bond was formed with Kátia (f.n.), “a beneficiary who could barely put the thread in the needle, but who related greatly with the project. Nowadays, most of the items are made by her. She can make tote bags, blankets and other things”.

It was a real evolution in less than three months for the young seamstress, who is a user of thinner, like her mother. The oldest sister among four kids, she takes care of the family and is also concerned about her teacher. “I’ve never had a Godmother. Do you want to be my Godmother?”, she invited Josi, an invitation she accepted without hesitation. She feels touched just to remember. Josi’s greatest wish is to applaud Kátia and the other participants as they walk down the aisle showing off the clothes they made or restored themselves.

As good as it gets The work groups and workshops for a smaller number of people in the program has become common throughout the partnership between Adesaf and the Town Hall, aiming at personalizing as much as possible the improvement of the beneficiaries’ skills and aptitude to generate income.

In 2014, the Social Integration Center, at Largo Coração de Jesus, hosted most of these specific actions.

The cinedebate project was a pioneer, in April 2014. The first afternoons were for three to five people. In August, the audience having a blast with a bunch of popcorn increased to 20 or 25 beneficiaries. “They become children again, every week we pick a movie that teaches a lesson, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

130 so they can get something out of it. Every other week I choose the movie, and then, they do”, reports a former employee having fun as she tells the stories.

The filmography includes 12 Years A Slave, The Untouchables, Beyond Borders (lots of tears that afternoon), Inglorious Basterds, As Good As It Gets, Anaconda, and King Kong. The former employee laughs as she says, “There was a girl who left the room because she didn’t want to see the monkey die. Then I left and she asked me if it had died again”.

After the movies, there is a discussion to talk about capitalism, bravery, motivational moral, or hope of a better future.

Self-esteem looks The three-floored building has also hosted other events and courses. Since the movie club took place every Monday, the Wednesday afternoons were booked for beauty salons. One day, the men took care of the beard, hair and mustache. The other day, it was the women’s turn to fix the look. And it is all free for DBA beneficiaries. The new look is a strategy to recover their self-esteem.

As a technician from Adesaf observes, “It is very common for women to look in the mirror after getting a haircut and say that now they feel like a human being”. The haircuts are performed by a group of professionals from the beauty salon Teruya, a partner of the program through the Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Office. Students also cut hair, since this institution is also a school. The salon also offers every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon a two-hour course on hair cutting and manicure15. “Look, the ladies who cut our hair have a badge and a booklet just like ours. I will get a diploma just like hers”, says one of the beneficiaries happily.

15

With Adesaf’s new headquarters in 2015’s second term, the haircut training took place in the new building on Nothmann Grove, 350 meters from the former address.

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131 I went up to the last floor of the building with Bruna Stephanie, this book’s photographer, as we listened to Brazilian musical group Skank.

The instrumental song was played by Iuri (f.n.), one of the three beneficiaries graduated in hair cutting by Teruya. Jacira dos Santos, one of Teruya’s teachers, gives them support and says, “This group is more dedicated than other students, they will soon be able to open a beauty parlor”.

Finishing up a new hairdo on the mannequin’s wig, Iuri encouraged his colleagues through songs. He came up with chords from hits by Titãs and Capital Inicial, two Brazilian rock bands, also cheering up the manicure students nearby. Rose Abreu, another teacher from Teruya, replies by saying that “the courses are short, about three-month long. I really enjoy learning from them, because when you see this reality in person, not on TV, it is different. They are very capable people, look, I would never be able to play the guitar”.

On the other hand, she prepares four women to become manicures.

“They are doing very well, they show interest and can do nails very well.

It doesn’t even take much learning, it is more about perfecting what they know”. Rose explains that, in between the classes, they enhance techniques to paint nails, pick cuticle, hygiene, posture and behavior talking to the client. She barely finishes the sentence, a new song by Iuri comes up.

From the gutter to the booklet Iuri has a strong accent like any real carioca. He was born at Complexo do Alemão. “I lost my mom and my brother in the streets”. He got involved in local drug dealing and, at 27, underwent the government’s inquisition when the area was designated to be occupied in 2010 by a future Pacifying Police Unit. “I spent a whole week living in sewage tubes not to get killed. I think you must have seen in the news about a truck being chased by the police on an interstate road. I got shot in the foot”.

Back at Complexo, he spent another 20 days living in the sewage.

“At the time, I couldn’t figure out what would be worst: to fall in disgrace with the police or to be caught by factions. I’ve seen many bad guys, gangsters, being executed by the special forces. Well, I used cocaine, CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

132 snorted for real, I really enjoyed cocaine”. So to escape from the persecutions, he put on dress pants, a glossy pair of shoes and held a bible in his hand. Pretending to be a missionary, he went to Petrópolis (RJ), where he got a job as an industrial manager at a brewer through a friend.

He worked there for two years until he suffered an accident on his face. “I have two kids and I saved each and every penny I got from the indemnification for them. Since part of the family lives in São Paulo, I moved here, but I was already taking drugs on the way here. I thought I was going to be the thing. None of that. Abstaining from cocaine, I got in contact with crack and spent up to R$ 800 every day. I moved to a slum in Tucuruvi and heard about the DBA on TV”. Desperate for help, he went looking for Brandão and got a place for him and his wife.

Between abstinence and hunger, he committed an offense right on his first day in the project. He spent four months in jail and only after being released, could he restart his life. With so much misfortune, he made the decision of his life. “I am still addicted, but nowadays, if I smoke two rocks a day that is already too much. I will be lying if I say that not smoking is easy”. Then he gets up and shows off his physique. “But look, being able to have a cellphone, to wear an original pair of trainers I paid with my own money feels really good. Thank God I can go back to work and study, and I have a wonderful woman”. As he chose to live an honest and rightful life, Iuri walks up and down the street with his booklet for the hairdresser’s classes. In the book, there are lessons on curling up hair, fixing curls on the back, making light waves, using hair rollers, and even curling up hair using your fingers. However, the cover contains the most precious message of all: “I hope this course changes our lives. Count on me always. I love you, my husband”.

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133

Chapter 11

São Paulo awakens16 When the foot reaches the pedal and he moves it back, the gears move as the chains make the second tire roll. The front tire moves subsequently in contact with the ground and is used to steer. With handlebars, the cyclist can move around at an average 20 km/h. In June 2015, Haddad’s government expanded the bike lanes net from 63 to 330 kilometers in the capital city.

Bicycle riding has numerous benefits, the most visible one being not emitting polluting gases, differently from vehicles with engines. Those riding on two wheels also benefit from better health. According to the London School of Economics, cyclists fall sick about 7.4 days a year, whereas non-cyclists spend about 8.7 days a year sick. This means of transportation prevents obesity, improves bodily joint movements, and strengthens the respiratory and cardiovascular systems.

With that in mind, Gilberto (f.n.), a 41-year-old man from the state of Paraná, is one of the most excited ones in the Paths of Prevention group.

This is the work front where part of the beneficiaries ride their bikes and distribute condoms in vulnerable areas. As six thirty in the morning, he gets up, has breakfast and then goes on to promote prevention campaigns at his morning job. “I see this as an opportunity in my life to quit smoking crack and to feel useful helping out people”.

He distributes condoms and informative leaflets in Centers for Testing and Counseling for STDs and Aids. The cyclist explains excitedly that “This Tuesday, we are focusing on the central region, which covers

16

São Paulo Awakens (O Despertar de São Paulo) is the title of a book by the modernist Menotti Del Picchia. In this chapter, it refers to the Paths of Prevention group, an Adesaf/DBA’s work front.

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134 NGOs, hotels and low-cost buildings”. There are another dozen beneficiaries who do the same job as he does in this work front.

Gilberto moved to Sorocaba (SP) with his family as a child. His moving to São Paulo with his sister later on in life took place for him to conquer a better salary. “I used to work painting walls, but then the crack presents its high costs. Some friends offered me rocks in nightclubs”. Little by little, the young lad dedicated to volunteer work and a master in capoeira began to freeze his future.

“I started to realize how bad it was. It got my blood pressure out of control. I was lost. I would have been lost without this program”, he laments. He also mentions that his brothers complained how unable he was to recover from the addiction. He was left with his mother’s will power and prayers. “She is the only one who won’t give up on me. She says that humans make mistakes. I want to go back a better person because, when I left home, she said, ‘Go, go on, I will be very proud of you’”.

Trash scavengers work front Adesaf’s socioeducational counselor Flávio Jesus assures that Gilberto is not the only one who goes bike riding happily every morning, as he stands in front of Paths of Preservation. “We used to walk to distribute condoms. But when they promised us bikes and they actually arrived, the beneficiaries seemed like children. It is different from sweeping the streets, it is almost like a playful activity”.

Flávio reinforces the need for constant innovation in the show.

“Everything that is new becomes very important for them and they embrace it. If you look closely, you’ll see that this group has a high level of attendance. We don’t have any problems with absences anymore”. As we talked, he was paying attention at three subsidiaries – agents being closer to them in smaller groups allows for a bond of trust to be formed.

Gauberto Gonçalves Costa, a former technician at Adesaf says that “We have been threatened and cursed at times, maybe because of their abstinence, but on the next day, they apologize. We end up creating a very strong bond with them. I have noticed they get very attached to their counselor. To them, we are like family. They trust us and feel considerate CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

135 about us. They begin to understand us and we also understand their side”.

The old employee used to follow a different work front: the trash scavengers group. There were about twenty members to the program who had already worked picking up cardboard and other remains disposed of on the streets. The scavenger who collects recyclables has an important, albeit unofficial, role in the mechanism of disposing of solid residue.

Dragging wheelbarrows around, about 25 thousand people walk on the streets of São Paulo searching for cardboard and plastic so they can resell it to collection and screening stations. In 2014, the recycling index in São Paulo reached 1.8%, mostly due to the scavengers’ work.

According to some articles and a mapping of trash scavengers in the city of Santos (2015), this work is usually taken by immigrating men over 40, married with children, and who have a roof over their heads.

Although this last feature does not apply to the people registered at the DBA. “They are restless, they want to go back working with recyclables collecting, but there is no prediction of that happening yet”, says Gauberto in September 2015, as we stood at Adesaf/DBA’s warehouse. “You know how the Crackland is a micro cosmos where all sorts of people, from all sorts of different backgrounds, get together. There is a man from Nigeria who has won several championships as an athlete. He comes here every week to have fun playing ping pong17 with other beneficiaries”.

Requests and weeklies Located at Barão de Paranapiacaba Grove, Adesaf/DBA’s warehouse comprises a storage room for uniforms and tools for sweeping and for other work fronts, besides holding six counters to help the beneficiaries. During work hours, Adesaf’s employees take notes of complaints and requests made by the participants. They write down about 17

In the year of 2015, Adesaf/DBA’s warehouse used to have a room with a table for ping-pong for beneficiaries. The activity ended up being replaced during that year.

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136 30 every week. That is also the place where they clock in and clock out each day. And it is where they would line up every Friday afternoon18 to receive the weekly pecuniary aid – or weeklies, as they like to say it. At around 2pm, over a hundred people went there to earn their livelihood.

The financial aid has been established by a decree taking into consideration the beneficiaries’ daily participation. When they take part in a work front, they earn R$ 35 per day. From there, they build up raises from R$ 15 to R$ 25. If they attend two days, they earn R$ 50. For three days, R$ 65. For four days, R$ 105. And for five days, R$ 130.

Since the first business day of the working schedule is a Friday, that means that, even if they miss a day but decide to work hard and take up the activities from Monday through Thursday, they can earn a bigger portion of the wages. It works like a bonus to encourage their participation.

Citizen’s wages Between October 2014 and August 2016, a total of 692 beneficiaries were helped by the DBA, part of which has been disconnected from the program. This is either due to a period of absence longer than one month, some medical treatment, a new job, among other reasons. With Open Arms usually looks after groups of about 450 members.

Let us look at the figures pragmatically. In August 2016, the initiative had that number of members on average, most of which attended their activities (around 290 people or 65% of the total). Thus, the other members had been declared inactive. Since many times this happened because of physical impairment, they continue to receive other services from the DBA, such as shelter and food.

18

At that time, DBA’s partakers would be paid in cash. In 2016, Adesaf/DBA instituted the wired transfer via magnetic card, opening bank accounts for members in agreement with the Town Hall.

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137 Out of the total, 35.5% work sweeping the streets (5% in Freguesia do Ó neighborhood), 7% with plastic arts and reusing wood and rubber tires, 6% in the Green Factory, 6% with hair cutting, sewing and knitting, 4% with bicycle maintenance or in Paths of Prevention and, among the newest workshops, 3% in community laundry and 3% in digital inclusion.

The average of active members who fulfilled their tasks daily used to be of 50%, considering that another good amount attended three to four days a week. Therefore, a good number received the aid with some discount for not working. There are still those who receive the financial aid for being in a special condition: either on a sick leave, admitted to a hospital, on maternity leave, or going through probation in a new job.

Just to make a comparison, in December 2014, there were about 80 members in these special situations. In October 2016, there were 30 in the same conditions, which shows the effects of DBA’s damage reduction program to make the beneficiaries migrate to an active status. Notice that whoever is arrested by the police, in case it is proved that they committed an offense, will be excluded from the program automatically.

It is important to highlight the value of receiving a payment once you have provided a service to the community. Having a compensation for work you have done is tightly attached to feeling like a citizen in this world we live in. Talking about the initiative, Magistrate Antônio Malheiros once told TV channel Record (April 2015) that, “The moment you stop begging for alms and earn for a job you have done, knowing you will be able to sleep on a bed, take a shower and have three meals a day, that’s when you feel like a human being”.

Self-discrimination Feeling human is unusual for crack users who are highly vulnerable. On a certain morning, one of the members was ranting out at an Adesaf’s technician complaining about her situation with her exhusband. It was the same one who snapped the other day at Largo Coração de Jesus. The agent calmly said, “I just think you need to be more understanding of each other”. A few minutes later, the sobbing woman came out saying, “I am sorry, none of the counselors are bad. We are the CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

138 worthless ones. We smoke, we drink, nobody is obliged to being with us, to putting up with us”.

Technician Priscila Basilo de Oliveira Medeiros noted that it is very common for the members to have a guilty conscience and to selfdiscriminate. She explains that “They discriminate themselves and react with distrust towards everyone, since they have been victim of prejudice other times”, considering that they absorb and reflect the stigmas they have been labeled with.

Indeed, the vulnerable populations carry “a feeling of distrust towards the society, external providers, and their own capacity to face their needs and most urgent desires”, as observed by Aparecida Alvarez, Augusta Alvarenga and Nelson Fiegdler-Ferrara on an article for Psicologia & Sociedade magazine (Psychology and Society magazine) (2004). That is why the three authors point out a single way for the treatment to work: “a state of trust must be the most basic requirement for the therapy”.

The same issue appears in a publication by Bruno Ramos Gomes and Rubens de Camargo Ferreira Adorno in Revista do Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (Anthropology Investigation Network Center magazine) (2011). As for the users of crack observed by another organization, “the NGO’s damage reducer usually establishes a relationship of proximity with the users, thus trying to avoid conflicts and to stimulate self-care (…). The reducing factor is also perceived as someone who is there to interfere with their existence, hence the idea of taking care”.

This is the trust circle they all aim at when technicians and counselors at Adesaf talk to each other. Priscilla, a 33-year-old woman who has worked with the society for eight years, says as she fixes her jewelry and lipstick, “In my career, I have learned to put myself in the other person’s shoes, to make myself more available to them”. She remembers being in a ty-library playing with kids who were at a risky situation.

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139 Conscious commitment Someone I have met often at Adesaf/DBA’s warehouse was the former technician Eduardo Fidelis. “I have worked at the Crackland since 2004. I started in a project in the health area for street dwellers right after the ‘Sé Square Massacre’. It was a request from those fighting in favor of this population”. The massacre was an attack to fifteen homeless people who were hit on the head in the street between August 19th and 22nd that year. Seven of them were murdered and nobody has been arrested yet.

“It was really the beginning of my career, I was 22. I heard about the opportunity through social service organs. Ever since, I haven’t stopped. I love working for the society. It is very compensatory to work with people and for the people”, says Eduardo. The employee is an eye witness to the changes that have taken and still take place in Campos Elíseos.

“In the last few years, the most extreme situation was having to rescue a man who was having a seizure in a drug den they had created in some abandoned house. In the old times, the buildings used to be locked up by the Town Hall. The government wanted to get people out of the Crackland by the use of force. Now this government has a different way of looking at it, with damage reduction and forming strong bonds”. Do you believe its success? “I strongly believe the DBA”.

Among the points he makes, he affirms that “if the guy was going to stay high three days in a row with drugs, now he has a reason to stop.

He creates a commitment to work, to reinsert himself. Little by little, we work for his well-being”. Eduardo had been in the program from the beginning, from the first semester of 2014, even before Adesaf took up the challenge. The NGO has managed DBA since the end of the contract between the Town Hall and the previous managing entity.

With the other management, the technician at the time was in charge of following up with the shelters where the members were being hosted. “We used to have this honest conversation with them, we asked about routine and dreams. We do that nowadays as well, it is just that now they come to the warehouse to make the requests. There are moments when CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

140 they fall off the wagon and, unfortunately, go to the Fluxo. Then they regain conscience and come here because, deep down, they feel awful.

They don’t want to see drugs in their rooms. They want to have a uniform and go to work. It is very clear to see”.

Houses under repair Until October 2016, Adesaf was in charge of affording the shelter provided for the beneficiaries, through control and authorization of the Town Hall’s Social Service and Development Office. In these two years, ten facilities spread around Campos Elíseos, Santa Ifigênia and Freguesia do Ó have been registered in the program. Throughout this period, some had to be unregistered due to inappropriate conditions.

With the eight participant facilities accounted for up to September 2016, the contract assured the reservation of up to 448 beds, considering that each building has a different capacity, ranging from 40 to 72 places.

Adesaf’s counselors also search actively for the beneficiaries in their addresses, keeping up with their progress in the program. In the second semester of 2016, DBA increased its services related to sheltering and started to manage Hotel Parque Dom Pedro, located downtown. I will talk about this new address in detail in the next chapter.

On the one hand, there have been reports of hotel items that have been sold in order for some people to acquire crack rocks. But on the other hand, most stories report that the residents are ready to cooperate with making the neighborhood harmonious. The NGO also commits to keeping the facilities in order by designating a work front specifically for maintenance. It is a group of four members who make repairs under the supervision of Sílvio de Campos, one of Adesaf’s counselors.

Our first encounter was when he was gauging the electricity coming out of the outlets in the dining room at Adesaf/DBA’s administrative headquarters. Rafael Bruder introduced me to him: “Morning, Sílvio. He looks after our maintenance”. The socioeducational counselor went on a coffee break. “Every now and then, this group I am following turns up wearing their uniforms helping me with small jobs in the hotels and in Adesaf’s building itself”.

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141 According to Sílvio, “the biggest problems with this group I monitor are alcohol-related other than crack-dependence. When you drink at the same time as you snort, then it is a shock. What I have been trying with them is, outside work hours on weekends, we go watch a soccer match or just hang out somewhere. But they have to take it easy on the alcohol”.

This is an alternative to intensifying social bonding and damage reduction.

Henrique (f.n.), a 32-year-old man born in São Paulo, is one of the members in the maintenance work front. “I entered this life of addiction because I was living as a squatter in a building that was demolished, then we had to spent six months living in a slum, in a really small shanty, me, my wife and our two kids. Think of a small shanty”, he says as he demonstrates how small it is with a hand gesture. “Then I joined the DBA, but my wife left with my daughters. I know it is complicated, but my dream is to be able to reunite the family again”.

Henrique is always optimistic. He says he has always foreseen a bright future for him, even when his parents kicked him out of the house, “because they didn’t accept my wife. Well, the most important moments of my life were when our daughters were born”. When he is not fixing things, he is walking downtown on the weekends (“seeing squares, theaters and museums is very interesting”). And he finishes his testimony with a share of positivity, “I find it magnificent to think that if each one of use woke up and gave a little bit of ourselves to the other one, we wouldn’t be where we are today. In fact, do you need any help?” I smile with an empty cup of coffee in my hands.

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Chapter 12

A letter to my fiancée19 The last time Robson Carlos da Silva took drugs did not give him any pleasure. The moment belonged to a Robson of the past, from one decade ago, when his addiction for alcohol began. In the last few years, “I smoked a lot, I took crack three days a week. On Fridays, I smoked about ten rocks. And had about four or five ‘big bellies’”.

“Big belly” is a nickname to cachaça bottles that have that shape.

It is a drink that accelerates blood circulation in the body extremities and the skin, giving the user the false sensation of warmth. That is why it is such a dear among homeless people to help them go through cold nights.

For about three years, Robson lived like this. Now in September 2016, at 33, he has a fiancée, kids, a job and has gone almost a whole year without taking drugs. A bitter regret knocked down the addiction.

The reason is Marizânia, 35, his fiancée. As a beneficiary of With Open Arms, the DBA, he met her as she was working at Bom Prato, a lowcost restaurant. “I got really attached to her because she gave me attention when my heart was forsaken in the gutter”. The exchange of looks between them inspired him to ask her out for a walk at Jardim da Luz, where they first kissed. Hugging his loved one, he tells me that hours after walking her to the bus stop, he fell off the wagon. “I thought to myself, ‘How am I going to look at her tomorrow?’ I felt really depressed, it was a shock”.

To reach self-control in his fight against drugs, the man from Belo Horizonte went on a long journey. Short-tempered as he was, the catholic boy who used to go to church with his mother never made it to the eighth grade at school, as opposed to his older brother, who took professional 19

A letter to my fiancée (Carta à minha noiva) is the name of a book by the modernist Guilherme de Almeida. In this chapter, it refers to a love letter from the DBA’s former beneficiary to the one who inspired him to leave the addiction.

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143 studies. When he was young, between wine and beer, he was attracted to cachaça. “I started drinking more heavily when my first wife got pregnant and lost the baby”. He lost his five-year-long marriage, his job, and his financial independence, going back to his mother’s house.

Rice, beans and love “I used to be a rebel”, he regrets. He came to São Paulo at 25 to live with an aunt, but could not adapt. The sad rocky road lead him to a public shelter, to becoming a trash scavenger, to working with recyclables and to living on the streets. Through a former partner, he joined DBA at the end of 2014. Through the public health system, he got a lung surgery and medicines for tuberculosis and pneumonia. “With no self-esteem at all, I just lived inside my room, I didn’t even feel like taking a shower”.

After long and difficult eight months, “the DBA came in very handy to me, because I got over the tuberculosis, the pneumonia, and I was thinking about stopping drinking. Of course it wasn’t easy at first, I gave the staff a hard time. But I can only thank their patience with me. I progressed a lot in the project, I learned how to value the family, not to be a rebel anymore, and to even value money, earning it every week”. This man with a conscience is the one Marizânia invited to a Christmas dinner in 2015.

When Robson entered her house, he met her family: Mother, stepfather, aunt, siblings, nephews and her two kids. They enjoyed the dinner before midnight because of the kids. Nowadays, he shares a roof with his two step-kids. “I am still going to give the little one a birthday party”, he says excitedly and thanking God at every sentence. He proves his fondly feelings with a chocolate basket or a teddy bear he gives his wife. “There can’t be a lack of rice, beans, love. There can’t be a lack of anything at home”.

A kiss good morning His new home has a new routine. In early 2016, the couple of owners of the hotel where he was staying with the DBA employed him to work as a receptionist at another inn near Campos Elíseos. “Thank God it CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

144 is a different life, because they see me with different eyes. They don’t see me as a troublemaker, they say I am healthier, I look better, I put on weight”, he laughs at the growing list of compliments. “They give me strength every day”.

Nowadays, the morning kiss is the first commitment between Robson and Marizânia, at 4 am. In forty minutes, they have a cup of coffee and get ready to walk together to the bus stop. He leaves her at the restaurant where they have breakfast at around 6:30. Then he walks to work until 7 am. At 3 pm, he meets his loved one again and, hand in hand, they walk back home, where they have dinner at around 6 pm, while they follow the kids’ studies.

As Robson himself highlights, all this change is also due to his times as a DBA beneficiary, followed by Adesaf. Through the initiative, he has worked with the sweeping work front, digital inclusion, and has earned a certificate on eco-friendly furniture with the use of tires. “With all the material in hand, you can make a stool in three hours”. Then he gives details about the process of sewing the piece, stapling the foam, attaching wheels and making a cover.

New home The workshop was given at Adesaf/DBA’s new headquarters in November 2015. A bit further from the psychotropic Fluxo, the building is located at 350 meters from the previous facilities and it is now at 385 Nothmann Avenue, in Campos Elíseos. The three-story building used to be a clothes store and hold a few offices. Being much larger than the previous facilities in Largo Coração de Jesus, it has also replaced the activities done by the NGO at the Social Integration Center, at the same address. Full of alarms and closed circuit cameras, the grey building with steel gates holds a large lounge for citizenship lessons and chats. Right next to it, there is a space for the hairdresser’s course and a few rooms with glass walls, where the workshops for making furniture out of tires and craftwork from recyclables take place. All the bookshelves there have glass bottles with sketches on them, three mirrors on the wall framed with small seashells, a clay water filter colored with ethnic patterns, and tables painted with

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145 gouache and oil paint. They also show off a 30-centimeter high piggy bank in the shape of a hawk painted black and white.

Bernardo (f.n.), a fan of comic books, shows me a painting, “this canvas here is about a super hero that I created”. Plastic arts helped him channel all his passion for Marvel and DC Comics. He tells me about the classic final dialogue between the Joker and Batman in The Killing Joke, about Deadpool’s origin in the movie theaters, and how he sees himself as one of the X-Men. It is just that the mutants’ saga tells about people who do not fit it and are badly welcomed by the society, after all, the group led

by Dr. Xavier lives a story about respecting others and fighting for civil rights.

A bit older than the average, half a dozen beneficiaries lead the room, especially Fernando (f.n.), who has been putting up the skeleton of a boat for the last ten days. It is almost half a meter long and is made of wood sticks he picks up on the street and put together with pieces of rope or wire. For him, the workshop is therapeutic because, as he says, he spends the day thinking of how to build his master piece instead of sinking his teeth in crack pipes. “Everyone around here ends up reducing the consumption through art”. The others wave as a sign of yes.

From repairs to strolls On the first floor is the dining room and a conference room for Adesaf/DBA teams, where there are the table and chairs as usual, but also a cabinet with literary romances by Jules Verne, Chico Buarque and Aluísio Azevedo, among others. Then in a room with glass walls, there is the workshop for basic maintenance on bicycles. From Tuesday through Friday, every morning, almost ten members of the program make repairs on the vehicles. On the walls, there are posters about biking events and a box full of tools – screwdrivers, pliers and pulleys. Lots of pulleys. “We take up two to three service orders per week, since the neighborhood itself sends bikes to get fixes”, as explained by the former technician Ricardo de Souza Queiroz Xavier.

The workshop also has bicycles specifically for training repairs.

They can practice adjusting tires’ air chambers, fixing tires, improving the CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

146 direction box, and fixing the so feared brake system, since it is more difficult. “There are women enrolled, but most participants are men over 30. One of them actually worked with this bike business before”, Ricardo comments. Every now and then, the beneficiaries go for a bike ride on Fridays. Besides the interaction, the group learns how to use the bike lanes around the city and learn some traffic laws. They ride for about 6 kilometers, all the way to Parque da Juventude, where they get some rest and chat a little before coming back to the NGO’s headquarters.

Incendiary moon studio The top floor of the building hosts the administrative department and the coordinator’s exclusive office. Brandão is the program’s coordinator at Adesaf. At the other side of the building, visitors can access the rooms used for sewing and knitting, making sculptures, and for visual and plastic arts. In the bigger lounge, there are over 60 canvases spread or leaning against the white walls, most of them unframed. Easels, bookshelves with paint and long counters give an artistic atmosphere.

One of the members feels honored with the presence of a friend who came to look at his paintings exhibited in the room. The friend brings in another friend. And the latter brings yet another one. This time, it is João, from Adesaf/DBA’s staff. “Wow, this painting is totally crazy. Did you do it?” The author agrees and explains the motivation for each artistic production. Another guy points to the drawing of a naked man and laughs his head off. The laughter is cut off by an imaginative trip, where each one interprets a story differently for each painting in the room.

One of the pictures shows a woman kissing a pet with just a few traces. Another one has a red moon with oriental references setting the purple canvas on fire. Then a butterfly painted in primary colors fills out a panel with image duplication. There are also those who paint gardens with roses and Calla Lilies, a muse holding a glass of wine, couples dancing tango in off-white shades, and those who prefer to study the movement of traces in monochromatic pieces.

Next, a beneficiary hands me a pile of paper sheets with welldefined pencil traces. Among his drawings, there is a native Brazilian CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

147 admiring the landscape, an impressive bodybuilder lifting a Jeep, and the portrait of a princess. But the one that outstands the most is a self-portrait, in which he is putting on a jacket in the middle of the street, with a flower being born on the corner of the asphalt and of the sheet. It comes with a poem that says: Evil does not dominate all things because God is the opposite of evil and keeps the balance.

The versatile gentleman It is commonplace that the images be the fruit of the DBA participants’ memories. Jéssica Formigoni Araújo, a socioeducational counselor, reveals that “There is a gentleman who draws a lot about his exwife. Another one has always wanted to have a car, so he keeps sketching one”. In general, it takes the members of the program two to three days to get their pieces done. The ones that need concentration the most are those working on sculptures. From sketches made on paper, they sculpt Styrofoam plates and get enough quantities of mortar to cover the piece so that it is soft on the surface. There are giant starts, animal chimeras and a couple dancing among the pieces being shown.

However, Jéssica is not the one in charge of the activities in the studio, but Roberto Vivas. “He is a really wise man. He is humble, patient and understanding of the students. He really likes what he does and enjoys introducing people to the world of art”. Wearing a grey suit and dress clothes, Roberto Vivas is an old school gentleman, who advises with quick touches and long advice to each one of the beneficiaries. He only raises his voice to make a compliment or encourage his pupils.

In his eighties, Roberto Vivas still has an Argentinian accent, although he has lived in Brazil since the 70’s. He has also lived in Europe and in the United States. He is an expert in urban arts (graffiti), plastic arts (paintings) and sculptures (bronze, stone, aluminum and silver), gathering a collection of up to two thousand pieces, half sculptures and half paintings.

A good number of them is exhibited in mansions, galleries, national and international hotels and at the homes of former presidents of Brazil. Out on the streets, the is responsible for the sculpture at the entrance of Sesc Interlagos and the Monumento ao Tango, in Higienópolis neighborhood, among other places.

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148 Hangers with clean clothes There are other classes included in DBA’s calendar. For instance, there is a laundry in the municipal building on Helvétia street, where one can find a tent on the street that is used for interaction between the homeless or drug-abusing population and the agents from the Social Service and Development Office. From the back of the lot, a counter goes around the entrance door to the newest service offered by the municipal program.

Inaugurated in June 2016, the laundry’s creation took a whole semester and about ten DBA beneficiaries enrolled for a course on industrial laundry at Sesi-SP. Lasting for two months, the course presented methods for planning and for production control, applying safety and health procedures at work.

“When I entered the course, I thought it was women’s stuff”, says Orlando (f.n.), one of the students. At 45 years old, he lost this prejudice.

“Especially because, besides operating machinery, I can deal with the public, be in contact with people. Now we don’t see people wearing bad clothes”. Besides him, 14 other participants have joined the community service, which aims at helping not only members of the DBA, but mainly people that have been marginalized.

Over a thousand pieces were cleaned up with this service in the first two months. When a user delivers the clothes, they get a ticket and the clothes go over a pre-laundry process. Then they go on to one of the laundry machines, are hanged on a clothesline outdoors and, finally, hanged on hangers or wrapped to sit and wait on the aluminum bookshelf at the community laundry. There numbered labels on each collar with the same number as the one on the ticket the user took home. The whole process is free of charge and takes up to three days. The activity is going through an experimental period and deserves restructure and evaluation.

Perla Gardênia Sousa Marques, one of the socioeducational counselors, explains that “It is a matter of health and hygiene, because sometimes the homeless people wear the same clothes for three or four days in a row, and then they dispose of it. We often hear that now with the CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

149 DBA, they feel pleasure taking a shower and having clean clothes to wear.

It is also a rescue of citizenship and humanity”. They even wash up designer clothes and shirts given as presents by the clients’ parents.

Adesaf’s technician Renata Dias Almeida tells me that there are people who mix this service up with winter clothes donations. She says, “The neighborhood is famous for being really cold, and you can see for yourself that most clothes we wash are warm”.

Out of the memories she has of the project, she says, “There are two moments that touched me the most. One was a beneficiary’s mother saying that she prays for Adesaf’s staff every night because we helped her son reduce his addiction and change his behavior. And the other one was a letter from Orlando (f.n.) thanking us, because the initiative cheered him up so much that nowadays he has control over himself and has a drink only once a week”.

Chance conspires by email The excitement is shared among other participants of the DBA: the one that recently got a certificated of digital inclusion from the Centro de Apoio ao Trabalhador (Worker Support Center) – CAT Luz. The partnership began in the first semester of 2016. The classes are given in an acclimatized room on the second floor of the municipal building. The lab has two rows of computers and soft chairs (25 individual pieces of equipment on the counters), a blackboard and a security camera.

With a projector, Adesaf’s social counselor Glauber Cruz shows the Excel tools to the group of students. In fact, the screen has shown the Office package, internet browsing (social networks are restrict) and also Photoshop, Movie Maker, Publisher and other virtual software and applications. “The initial idea was to present the basics, but each one searches for and likes a certain type of software. Then we share the contents with everyone”.

But there is always the enthusiast who prefers to learn Excel.

“Deep down, he is the one teaching me, because he researches and discovers how to apply several formulas”, says Glauber. In the classroom, there are six beneficiaries who show more interest and attend CAT Luz CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

150 every week. A couple of participants does not get sick of making love declarations on Power Point. Another one spends hours sending resumes to companies on a quest for a job.

“And then there is Matheus (f.n.) who, amazing as it may seem, found his sister’s email address on Google. It was totally by chance, since they hadn’t spoken in ten years. Over the internet, they rekindled and he could give his mother, this brothers and his nephews a hug”, says Glauber.

“Nowadays, he likes to join chat rooms to make friends, share about his life, exchange emails. I am sure he has made many friends like this”.

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Chapter 13

The Yellow Man20 He crossed his legs, covered himself with a sheet and looked to the distance. “Yeah, I don’t know where I come from”. At 56, Yuhki (f.n.) knows he is descended from Oriental immigrants, but he cannot recognize his father, his mother or possible siblings. He has a clue of how old he is because of a registration card he keeps in his pockets. “I know Quércia, Covas, Maluf (former governors of the state of São Paulo), but I can’t remember myself”.

Claiming to have his memory attached to distant flashbacks, “I can’t even tell whether I had a childhood”. He has used crack for over 30 years and suspects he lived on the streets a long time during that period. It is only assumptions, for he is not able to affirm if what comes to his mind are memories or illusions. Speaking slowly, he says with certainty, “I can speak five languages. They come up spontaneously when I meet a foreigner on the street. And I have been to all capitals of Brazil”.

With disperse thoughts, he says a motherly voice wished he became a doctor, so he majored in Psychology. He also has a diploma in Journalism from a university in the countryside, and was a cultural programmer in the state of Pernambuco. However, whereas his memories might trick him, the canvases in his room tell the story of an anonymous artist. The expressionist fingers delight among forty foreign inks. On the canvases, there are psychedelic serpents and contours of couple in intimate moments.

Forever a bachelor, Yuhki saves his libido for artistic creation.

Usually at nightfall, he feels an inspiring force that takes up his reason and 20

The Yellow Man (O Homem Amarelo) is the name of a painting by the modernist Anita Malfatti. In this chapter, it refers to the artist beneficiary of the DBA. CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

152 his painting like a lightning. That is how it was with a one-and-a-halfmeter-tall painting sitting next to his bed: A child running. The easel was exchanged in the drug Fluxo, the frame was found on the street, and the unfinished portrait was given to him by someone from the neighborhood.

It all integrates the Puerile spirit of the piece put together in less than a week.

A peculiar child He accredits his gift for coloring to “Daddy, the conductor of all the belongings that come to my hand”. The bookshelf is full of donated books, such as The Dreamseller, by Augusto Cury, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. “I feel a little bit of a child and I feel a little peculiar. Have you ever read this book? It is an orphanage located at an island that gets bombarded in World War II”.

Yuhki gives the spoiler alert: “The misses from the title is a hawk and she creates a breach in time so that every day is the same in the orphanage, thus keeping the children safe. Except that they all have special powers”. However, his favorite book is one with paintings by Van Gogh.

Instead of Van Gogh’s solitude or the theory about him waiting for a friend, family or a beloved one, the third view of Bedroom in Arles is a futuristic view, according to the With Open Arms’ beneficiary. The light on the painting’s floor represents, to him, the shades of a metropolis’s buildings.

Having lived under a tree on Júlio Prestes square, now he has been inserted in the initiative for almost two years. With the program, he has psychological follow up, medicines, social care, daily food and shelter. All these rights had not crossed Yuhki’s mind until then. Making paintings instead of being in the Fluxo “is an opportunity only Adesaf and the DBA have been able to give me”.

Feeling festive, the beneficiary says, “Adesaf and the Town Hall are responsible for all the things I do, for everything I can develop nowadays. Thanks, Daddy. I can’t vote, I don’t even have a voting card, but I wanted to thank them, because I haven’t heard of, in all history of São Paulo, a government that has done so much for us [the government at the time]”.

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153 A hidden identity I met Yuhki in his dorm room, near his artistic productions, clean clothes, and his book shelf. That is a way of preserving his memories and identity through the DBA. He actually shares his room with another beneficiary at Hotel Dom Pedro, destined to the DBA and managed exclusively by the Town Hall in partnership with another NGO downtown.

The building is eight stories high and has 28 rooms, four per floor, except for the top floor. There are apartments with double rooms, with two or three collective rooms, all with a bathroom, and some guests can take electronic devices or small appliances into some of them. On the top floor, there is a lounge with a community cafeteria and where movie sessions take place. The agenda is posted on both elevators, right next to the spiral staircase. On the ground floor, a warehouse and a store share the façade.

The experience with the new hotel began in August 2016.

The idea of having a hotel managed by the public power with the third sector came up in a visit paid by municipal coordinator Benedito Mariano to the Open Society establishment model in Canada, which works toward damage reduction of toxic dependents. In September 2016, about a hundred members are staying at Hotel Dom Pedro. The other ones are being hosted in rooms at Alaíde, Avaré, Impacto, New Luz, Santa Maria and Semer hotels. Each one of them has its own history related to the program.

Thrown away from home, sheltered at the hotel A survey conducted in 2015 by the Brazilian Platform of Drug Policies presents special reports about Hotel Alaíde, whose name is inspired by its owner. “Besides offering the beneficiaries free laundry, a service she does herself by washing guests’ clothes and bedsheets, Alaíde complements, with her own money, the salary of a beneficiary who also lives in the place and is in charge of the cleaning in general.

According to research, the employee was called Marcele (f.n.).

Thrown away from her home at 14 because she acted like a girl, the transvestite worked as a housekeeper in exchange for food and a roof. She CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

154 was forced to work as a prostitute until she turned 18, when she moved to Italy. She kept doing the same job and got deported at 20. In São Paulo, the next year, she fell in love with a crack user, who brought her into the addiction and stole her belongings.

Living life as a prostitute, she saw her former boyfriend get murdered in a reckoning. Then Marcele also found herself involved in drug dealing to sustain her addiction. After being arrested several times, living in a shanty in Campos Elíseos and undergoing treatment for double pneumonia, she managed to join the DBA. With the new journey, she “stopped smoking crack every day, now she only smokes on weekends, a frequency she does not think is a problem. Quite the opposite, she is highly aware that her work, the home, friendly and calm relationships in the hotel have helped her reduce the consumption”, as concluded by the report.

A shout out, João The same research also argues that some hotels in Campos Elíseos and its surroundings did not present appropriate conditions for serving the DBA, and got unregistered by the Town Hall. Whereas the municipal administration is responsible for registering the hotels and booking the rooms, it is up to Adesaf to pay the hotels for the rooms. However, the organization was a target for protests as if it were responsible for the situation.

In October 2015, demonstrations, offensive posters and threatens were made against the NGO, which had its headquarters broken into at Largo Coração de Jesus. In the following month, the organization was transferred to a different address, 350 meters away. One who felt solidary towards Adesaf/DBA on the D-Day was João. Living in the neighborhood, he was hired by the program on the first day.

“There was huge pressure on account of the hotel getting discredited, but the families were blaming the NGO for that, because they wanted Adesaf to keep paying for their place there. So they wanted to organize a demonstration”, João explains. He had advised a beneficiary earlier, “Look, if you want a home, a residence, you can’t condemn the employees. It is not our fault”. He got swear words as a reply.

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155 Another day, when part of the staff clocked off, dozens of protesters went to the headquarters at Largo Coração de Jesus. João had spent the previous night and day talking to the community in the neighborhood to get ahead of the facts. It was really tense. While the city security was planning how to protect the organization’s headquarters, he had an idea and worked it out with one of the protesters: “Girl, ever hear of Chico? Let’s go listen to Francisco?” He said that and mediated an encounter between a group of the protest’s representatives and the NGO’s coordination team at the DBA. The complaints ceased after the conversation.

“The truth is that the DBA is really good. The guys are consuming much less. It is very different from the Crackland of two years before.

Nowadays, there are people going back to their families, getting back to work, feeling pleasure having a better life. Even the police have changed their approach. I know that Adesaf had a meeting with them so they would stop handling drug users with gas bombs, that is not how you treat people”.

A sad path Born in the countryside of Minas Gerais State, João went on a long journey until he became an operational helper at Adesaf in São Paulo, now that he is 32 years old. “My mother passed away when I was six. We were twelve siblings, six of which were twins, like myself. We didn’t even have an ID, because my mom couldn’t read or write. Some of us even have different last names”. The trauma made him go quiet for a year and two months, being an introvert as he was.

He does not have good memories of his father: He used to be an alcoholic and beat up the kids. A neighbor called the Child Protective Services. When the judge acknowledged that his father was under no condition to raise him or his brothers, João was nine years old. It didn’t take long for him to go from the orphanage to a new home, but his biological father did not allow the first adoption. Later on, at another moment, he was about to get separated from his twin sister, but the Justice denied it. “Throughout all my adolescence, I was adopted and abandoned eight times”.

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156 A good heart Not fitting in with a new family life or in his studies, he never finished high school. “I got kicked out of five or six schools. I became a rebel”. Still as a teenager, he remembers going to the Juvenile prison and providing community socioeducational services (sweeping the floors in cemeteries and squares, and as a volunteer in NGOs). For a period of time, he got involved with drug dealing.

João does not reveal who took him to the illegal market, but he claims to have tried some drugs since he was nine years old. For him, each product resulted in a different reaction, ruling out the possibility of having a different addiction. He also hates alcohol. His anti-hero temperament, realistic to the extent of being dry, could have been the result of negative experiences. According to him, he was a victim of meningitis twice, both of which brought him temporary effects: once, amnesia, and the other time, muting. Still as a child, he also eye-witnessed attempts of sexual abuse to his sisters and niece, defending them from the aggressors.

“I became selfish, unmannered, an ignorant. I have already been a very mean guy, but I have always had a good heart”. The arrest was due to drug dealing. He was transferred to a penitentiary in São Paulo at 23. A Catholic, he believes he got out because of his faith in God. And woe betide someone who says, in front of him, that they doubt the divine force. “Life taught me from my falls and my pains”, he says as he tells about the cases when he had pneumonia and tuberculosis. “After God took me by the hand, I stopped fussing around. I apologized to the people I hurt”. In São Paulo, he started living in inns and shanties across the neighborhood, until he heard of the DBA. Right on the first day, he offered aid to the old organization and, determined as he was, got his employment record card stamped. With time, he began to help children who needed extra assistance with school subjects in his spare time, and loved the Paulistana initiative.

“With Adesaf, I started smoking less. I seldom smoke now. The DBA cannot end. What is going to happen with everyone if they go back to the streets? I know it is hard, that an employee once passed out and that another one turned around halfway to the Crackland… But please, do not give up on us”.

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157 Daily life As said by João, Adesaf/DBA makes an affective effort because of the psychotropic territory. According to technicians from the group, the damage reduction allows for greater confidentiality among the participants and their counselors, since they can talk openly about the drug consumption until they can fully take control of it. There are still the bonds that come undone when a beneficiary passes away due to health problems or cases of violence.

“A beneficiary who used to be in my work front was stabbed to death by her partner on a Saturday night, last semester”, reports a socioeducational counselor. “I got the news on Sunday, but I felt the shock on Monday, when the other participants were present”. It was impossible to hold the tears back. In chat circles throughout 2015, Adesaf realized the need for psychological supervision. Since January the following year, psychologist Arlindo Cândido Pereira Filho, from São Vicente, has followed the staff weekly, including technicians and socioeducational operators.

Having known Adesaf’s work from previous encounters and seminars, Arlindo is a specialist facing and preventing domestic violence, and he has already worked for other organizations with both clinic psychology and institutional supervision. “Work with this public takes place within the field of humanity, for we are no different from them”.

With grey hair and being very tall, he slightly bends down to hear me. He is always interested in talking about different subjects, especially public policies.

Arlindo points out: “Within the approach I work with, as a fundamental psychoanalysis concept, all of us human beings are permeated by the position of death. That is why poems about losses sound beautiful, because they express the idea of human death. The DBA is in direct contact with this process, and we are transformed every day with the position of death. And obviously, the degree of destruction to the people living in the [psychotropic] territory is much higher”.

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158 Pains to deal with According to the psychologist, the damage reduction program makes the NGO and the Town Hall perceive drugs not only as substances, but also as a substance that relieves some personal suffering. The question is, what would give the beneficiaries some sense of life to an extent that would get them rid of such painful process? “The point is making the individual change his position of death into different ways of living, be it through work fronts or through the workshops. And hope that with such experience, they reflect on how they see themselves and the world”.

In this sense, the supervisor mentions that, as public policy, the DBA facilitates conceptual milestones. “The program does not want to use an ideological concept so that the person becomes a revolutionary or a servant to God, but a person who transforms society being a citizen”. The point is to serve the population living on the streets and drug abusing not to feel superior nor to project our own pain. “There are people who offer a bowl of soup and say, ‘I help the miserable on the streets, so I don’t have any problems in my life’”.

At the same time, he gives the example of those who feel ungrateful for having given too much of themselves to other who, abusing drugs, have not reduced or stopped consuming it. “But you found him at a very late moment in life. Why does he have to stop now? The supervision, therefore, works towards waiting for the mesmerizing moment to come, with the bond between an Adesaf’s agent and the beneficiary”. And those who are more marginalized, recognize the humanity in the other. “It is not easy to live with this situation every day, dealing with the other person’s and with your pain”.

Reflective action Arlindo went through many articles and pieces of research to follow the group, showing two cultural perspectives as dilemmas among the NGO’s employees. On the one hand, damage reduction is a brand new concept in Brazil, as a policy of not hurting each other’s individuality. On the other hand, the conservative idea of blaming the ones taking drugs is still a very strong one in the city. This new way of looking at drugs suffers CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

159 the pressure of the society to deliver fast solutions. Emotional balance is necessary for any professional of this area.

Traditionalism is present in the perception of sin. He mentions the case of a pregnant woman in the Fluxo: In general, drug users attack her violently, and public agents treat her with prejudice because, to all of us, the figure of a mother should be related to being a saint or giving yourself completely to the children. “She is left unassisted because, within this territory, the feminine and the not-straight are those who suffer the most”.

The talk generates a long and collective destruction of ideas in the team, until they can see the beneficiary simply as a woman, as a human being.

“We need to learn how to put ourselves in each other’s shoes”, as recommended by Arlindo. Thus, the daily life results in the team constantly feeling the results of being impotent. “The DBA teaches us how to deal with our impotence. And then, what should we do? The alternative is to calmly and reasonably respond to the beneficiary by not giving back to this situation in a passive or aggressive way, but permanently a reflective action”.

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Chapter 14

Pont Neuf21 “Francisco, congrats to you! Not absent a single day! (…) Guys, you are sure to get a job. (…) I even cried”. Francisco Jorge Oliveira is excited. A 57-year-old former crack user, he managed to take control of his life again as a cleaner in a company. He got the job thanks to the With Open Arms (DBA) program, in mid-2014, and his statement was published in Veja São Paulo magazine (June 2015).

A few dozen Franciscos had the same luck, working with urban cleaning, administrative positions in public parks, driving or secretaries in private or the S System institutions. Out of those, there are some who have stayed strong in their new jobs and got reinserted in the society, and some who did not manage to keep the good progress and ended up returning to the DBA, in search for better rehabilitation.

For example, there is Antônio (f.n.), who reported to me that “Through the project, I had the opportunity to get a real job. But seven months and twenty days later, I had to apologize, but I preferred to come back here. I didn’t get fired, didn’t misbehave, didn’t steal from anyone.

But I need more time. I still wish to be able to reconstruct my family through work, because working is something beautiful. It makes us see like differently”.

The so desired job to be conquered by DBA beneficiaries is a collective fruit, because it comes from the willpower and from the conditions of the beneficiary’s recovery. It also comes from the professional training that the program gives to its target public. “This is what differentiates our program, something that even the Ministry of Justice has been pointing out. We dare to include them in the professional 21

Pont Neuf is a piece from the modernist Tarsila do Amaral. In this chapter, it comprises the chat groups of beneficiaries to Adesaf/DBA’s team.

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161 market at the same time as they go through the damage reduction process”, as explained by Sandra Faé, Assistant-Secretary of the Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Office. Through the Town Hall, they have a partnership with Adesaf at the With Open Arms program (Adesaf/DBA).

Her statement was given in a meeting with professionals from Adesaf in August 2015. “I celebrate a lot Adesaf’s role in this partnership.

I always say that the first part, which includes dealing with the sheltering, payments and work fronts, we have won. Now there is the great challenge within this process, which is creating alternative jobs. It is a matter of creating measures that assure the beneficiaries’ financial independence”.

Sandra justifies the difficulties of going back to the professional market. “We can enumerate a series of reasons why it is not viable to have them work at a private company with a fixed salary. The working hours, from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, for example, is not very simple for someone in rehabilitation. Hence the government’s parallel jobs seeking damage reduction. Now we have to take the opportunity and help them use the payments to create other ways of generating income”.

Enabling steps Subsequently, Fernanda Gouveia, Adesaf’s President, took to explain the new step that the organization has taken with more depth since September 2015, near the renewal of the partnership with the Town Hall concerning the management of the DBA. “Our enabling model aims at promoting the beneficiary’s development, by creating opportunities for them to have professional qualification as a citizen, in a clinic and liberating way”. Here is the citizenship formation as idealized by Sandra Faé, Assistant-Secretary of the Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Office.

The initial plan was to conclude the action in the last quarter of the year, in a weekly rotation of groups of beneficiaries at the Tuesdays and Thursdays’ experience sessions, at the Social Inclusion Center. The experience takes place during the working hours and those who attend it receive the financial aid for that day. With time, the formation of citizenship began to be offered permanently at Adesaf/DBA’s current CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

162 headquarters, on Nothmann Avenue, 350 meters from the previous address.

“What we wish for is to create real incubators, so that they can be effectively inserted in the professional market, so they can also support themselves outside formal jobs at big companies”, Fernanda brings up. All the work developed by the beneficiaries could have been made evident in September the following year, at the exhibition Inside the Embrace (Por Dentro do Abraço). The exhibits were displayed between the 5th and the 16th of September, 2016 at the Energy Museum (184 Nothmann Avenue, Campos Elíseos). Free of charge and with activities open to the community, the event was an opportunity for the locals and college students to get to know the experiences and activities performed by the group helped by the DBA. The activity prepared with dedication by the organization was a milestone in the dialogue between the NGO and the beneficiaries of the program, reinforced mainly during the formation of citizenship.

Citizenship outside the classroom From spending mornings near the fluxo to nights spent among research and reports, Nayene Carmo is the one in charge of forming the Adesaf/DBA staff, decisions that had a consequence on the citizenship formation of the program’s beneficiaries. The experience came from years spent in educational projects, such as coordinating the program ProJovem Urbano, through the Ministry of Education. As a professor, she already used to walk around Luz neighborhood, but she did that to take students to Sala São Paulo, near Júlio Prestes train station. It did not even cross her mind that the psychotropic territory was less than two blocks away.

With Adesaf/DBA, she came up with the step of citizenship “by following the beneficiaries’ lives, their daily routine. Because what good does it make to give them enabling tools if you don’t know their reality?”

She spent a week following Liz Evans in São Paulo, in 2014. Liz is the executive director of Portland Hotel Society (PHS), which works on damage reduction in Canada. Accumulating these experiences resulted in a series of pedagogical practices that Nayane uses to raise curiosity in the

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163 technicians and social operators who, in turn, take the dynamics to be developed with the groups of beneficiaries.

“I bring these pedagogical tools to the encounters so I can tease and prepare the team for when they work the content with the participants.

For them, it is important to understand about pedagogy, even if they need a plan B during the encounters”, Nayene justifies. In practice, all the talk circles during the citizenship formation contemplate a diversity of subjects approached and as positive by the DBA members: Life projects, preventive health, hygiene, human rights, and the professional world.

TV, Olympic games, discs Brandão gave me a ride the times I followed the first week of the citizenship formation, still in September 2015. He looked anxiously for any shortcuts so he would not be late, and at the same time, he would chat with me: “This professional enabling step is something we already had, actually, except that there was little attendance and it wasn’t systematized. From now on, we will include for good the concepts of work, cooperation and solidary economy. It will certainly shed a light on all beneficiaries”.

We were excited as we arrived downtown, where more than thirty beneficiaries lived their trajectory again and again on stepping stones and in damage reduction. Like the story of Silas (f.n.), a 51-year-old black belt wrestler who was caught in the doping tests during Seoul’s 1988 Olympic games. “From there, I was ostracized. The drugs were all I had left and I began to steal and do whatever I had to do to take them. I went to prison at 36, spent 9 years behind bars”.

Nowadays, the married and soon father-to-be man thanks the project: “The opportunity to change. Yes, I do want to do a workshop and get a job, grow. Who knows I can even help develop Olympic athletes who are better than I was?” Everyone applaud him as much as they did with Elton Aparecido da Silva. “For over ten years, I was a hairdresser to the famous people. I used to work for Hebe Camargo, I did hairdos for SBT and Globo’s casts, but then, the crack appeared. I fell”. Tears come to his eyes as he says that, wishing to recover so he can reopen his beauty salon.

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164 “Now I dream of being a funk singer. The guys here know that I can write funk lyrics, but the manager doesn’t care about good lyrics. They just want catchy tunes”, says Laureano (f.n.) looking cool and getting a round of applause. He has lived on the street for 20 years and has been in Crackland for three. “I went to my hometown in the countryside several times to see my mother. She comes after me, but I don’t want her help.

When I was little, she used to drink a lot and beat me up. I would wake up very early in the morning to hide her cigarettes so she wouldn’t find them.

Because when she smoked, she burned my hand. I was subject to great disdain”.

Family in disturbance Disturbances in family bonds unite most of the crack users who participate in the program. “I have always enjoyed living, having fun, that’s why I never cared to follow my parents’ footsteps. I was a really stubborn kid”, says Wellington (f.n.), labeling himself. “So I moved in to the streets downtown, had a wife outside the DBA. Well, my dream is to be able to fulfill my mother’s dreams. Whatever she wants, I will fight for it”. His eyes are full of tears then.

Eduardo Luís (f.n.), a 42-year-old man from Minas Gerais, has not contacted his family since he was 14, “I ran away from home, I wanted an adventure”. In his thirties, he had already been sniffing glue, smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol when he decided to go into crack. “I saw the DBA on TV. Through the program, I have already been able to cut in half what I used to take every day”. The same drop in consumption was revealed by Mathias (f.n.), as he talked about his life. “I am 26 and got in touch with crack at 13. A while later, I left home because of the drugs. My brothers had a fight and I ended up living in a slum. But I smoked so much that the cops warned me to get a life. Before the program, I was working at traffic lights, selling craftwork I did myself. What I really want is to cut the crack for good”.

There is still Ermelino (f.n.), a beneficiary orphan of both parents.

“I have nobody in my family. It is only God and me”. About memories and dialogues with family, some even claimed they called from payphones or that the counselors lent their cellphones so they could reactivate contact.

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165 From the beginning of the project, at least a dozen cases resulted in the members unregistering from the program because they had managed to return to their old homes.

That is far from being the truth lived by Silva, a character widely present in other chapters. During the experiences, he would talk about the grudges he holds against his mother, about the social activism while he was away from home, and about his life as a beggar. When he talks about temples and therapeutic houses, there is not enough criticism in the world.

“I can’t stand priests or preachers. For me, these foster homes only work for those that have the financial condition to support themselves. It is not my case. Ignorance is a bliss, and the truth is upsetting”.

His line of thought does not end there. “Not giving good education is the best way to generate income, isn’t it? Because then they keep jobs in health, assistance, not to mention the possibility to explore the extremely poor ones. The poor people are too alienated in this country”, he ranted and raved. Being addicted to crack would only bring the sadness of the past to him, “because youth is our most precious gift”, and the need to reconnect with the transcendent as a priority. It is for that reason that he would hang a seashell in a red bracelet. Among the religions, he declared himself as being more prone to nominating a creational being such as Allah.

Mothers from Campos Elíseos Although each story is unique, Silva’s misfortune was no exception compared to other member of the DBA. From São Paulo, 43year-old Noemi (f.n.) has been on the street for five years, living downtown. “I dropped out of school in the fifth grade. I learned how to enjoy being a scavenger, I have my contacts. But what I really dream of is to find my father and my mother. They are here in the capital”.

At 31, Benedita (f.n.) fights a different fight. “The best moment of my life was my daughter’s birth. Don’t do her any wrong, don’t stop her life, because I will never leaver in hot water”. Benedita is married to another beneficiary of the program. Her 10-year-old daughter is fruit of another marriage and is now living with her father. Her current husband

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166 explains: “She came from the countryside and she is here on the street because she came fighting to give her daughter a better future”.

Another mother living in the territory is Amanda, a 28-year-old woman from São Paulo. “Thank God that, with the program, I have cut down on crack. It isn’t easy, I can tell you this. I get sick because of the abstinence, I just lay at home. Stopping using it is not a bed of roses. My diabetes went up, I’m looking for a doctor to help me. My husband has infinite patience with me”. That is how she explains her absences at the sweeping work front.

“I cry every day, I get fever because of the abstinence. The crisis is strong. But I also need to get well, because I don’t want to see only my husband with a certificate and away from crack. I want to be well myself and in good health so I can go looking for my daughter, because she was kidnapped when I came to the Crackland”. Her colleagues gave her a round of applause and hugged the sobbing young mother. Brandão uses the break to highlight: “Stay strong. I come here every day with the conviction that the human being can change. And we all need to be convict of that every day”.

Then there is Maria, a 35-year-old woman from Bahia who, in turn, has other needs. “When my son got shot at the Crackland, my life was ruined. I started using crack and lost everything. I want to reconquer my other kids, all the houses I lost for nothing, I want to get out of here. And if there are people who can get out, who am I not to be able to? I don’t want to keep getting beat, to keep drinking with a rock and a pipe in my pockets. People call me a crackhead. To the others, we are worthless”. In the next sentences, the tone of voice went louder.

She breathes in. “I’ll bet that, if we don’t step forward, we’re gonna want to go back”. Pause. “I took this step forward. Do you know how many rocks I smoked today?” Silence. “None!” Applause.

“Yesterday?” A breath. “None. And the day before yesterday?” Some of them shout, “None”. Maria would stare at everyone with flaming eyes, as if she were inciting the greatest of the revolutions inside everyone. “If I had the strength to go three days without smoking a rock, everyone has a chance. Because what we dream of is to leave the Crackland”.

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167

Epilogue

La Rentrée22 São Paulo, September 5th, 2016 The stunning round of applause at the Energy Museum’s lounge overcame the interview with Fernanda Gouveia at the room next door. The Adesaf’s President quick sentences tried to compete with a loud North American funk playing to catch the spectator’s attention. “As you can see, we are going to exhibit the artistic pieces made by the beneficiaries, as well as some practical activities that have already happened at the program’s headquarters and that we are transferring to this space”.

The volume of the background music is gradually turned down as Fernanda raises her tone to talk about these actions’ goals. “It is so that everyone has the opportunity to follow the program, to talk to the beneficiary and understand their daily routine. (…) And so that they be able to know what the program looks like from the inside a little. Inside the Embrace”. The latter sentence mentions the name of the initiative that uses the opportunity also to celebrate Adesaf’s second anniversary at the DBA. Two minutes of this interview with Fernanda were broadcast on TV. The reporter conducted the interview as the cameraman caught images of the lounge. There was furniture made out of tires, banners about the laundry, paintings and sculptures of varied styles. All these pieces shown on camera were a small percentage of the exhibition that had already received a hundred people that first morning.

On the 12 days it was being displayed, the exhibition Inside the Embrace gathered up at different times green life (gardening) workshops, 22

La Rentrée is the name of a painting by the modernist Anita Malfatti. The term in French means the reopening or the return. In this case, the restart of a life with dignity for beneficiaries of the DBA. CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

168 sewing and second hand items, plastic arts, tire-made furniture, besides debates, citizenship actions and bicycle-repair services provided to the population. The event had two talk circles to stress Adesaf’s perspective for the success of the DBA: How work can contribute with the recovery from chemical dependence and The importance of family bonds in damage reduction.

One of the chronogram’s highlights happened on the 14th, when they had a musicale that united the DBA beneficiaries – which counted in literary and musical rhymes, as well as percussion instruments. On the 16th, the end-of-exhibition ceremony was the moment for everyone who had taken part of the program to receive their certificates. And on the opening day and on the 10th, the exhibition has a fashion show made by the sewing and knitting group. The clothes were made by and the casting was composed of the members themselves.

Rave time That was precisely the reason why the ovation at the same time as the interview was for the line of men and women walking down the red carpet at the Energy Museum’s lounge. There were whistles, cellphones clicking, and standing applause coming from the audience who kept the plastic seats empty for quite a while along the 10-meter long catwalk. The background music, composed of foreign pop music and electronic tunes, dictated the rhythm of the whole parade. “I feel like I’m at a rave party”, said an employee of the museum.

At noon, the first model was coming down the stairs of the administrative mansion at the museum. The new look on nails and hair was

by Teruya School. The make-up was made by one of Adesaf’s technicians in a room where six beneficiaries were taking turns putting on jackets, strapless dresses, shirts and skirts. Whenever possible, the name of the program or even the acronym DBA would appear on the clothes. Wearing a white dress, the well-behaved beneficiary was taking a poster to open up the red carpet.

Adesaf’s technician Marco Aurélio, AKA Mion, played the Master of Ceremonies, inviting the models one by one to walk down the aisle.

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169 There was the guy who was not economical when putting on hair gel for his five minutes of fame; the lady who smiled as she was comfortably wearing high heels again; the forty-year-old man who had rehearsed to throw the jacket over his shoulder at the moment of turning around; the young mother who would melt down every time the audience shouted her name; the man who could barely sleep prior to the so expected date; and the stunning Kátia (f.n.), wearing the green dress she adjusted herself during her working hours at the DBA. Her eyes insisted on being emotional. It was the same commotion that Fernanda Gouveia tried to hold back each time she hugged the models on the porch, a few steps above the catwalk’s starting point. In unison with Adesaf/DBA’s team and the audience, she was cheering very loudly for the beneficiaries walking on the red carpet. Adesaf’s communications advisor Bruno Nunes was across from the room, with his cellphone in hand, standing next to the driver – the same duo that had given photographer Bruna Stephanie and me a ride that morning.

Time to renegotiate Bruna was very entertained, either kneeling down or running to capture some moment of the event. We are very different. I leaned on one of the columns at the museum’s balcony, since it was the best place to try and listen to the speeches that came before the fashion show. Holding a microphone and wearing dress clothes and a pair of suspenders, DBA’s coordinator through Adesaf, Genivaldo Brandão, was kindly asking for everyone’s attention. “Throughout these two years [of partnership between Adesaf and the DBA], we have done a lot together, and we still are doing a lot. There is literally a movie going on in my mind showing everything we have done and are doing”.

Making a quick retrospective, Brandão mentioned the change of headquarters from Largo Coração de Jesus to Nothmann Avenue, the process of citizenship formation in 2015, and the increase in the variety of work fronts and workshops. To the beneficiaries, the pointed out: “Look at what you are capable of doing. We are very happy to be living this moment, to be experimenting this joy with you. This exhibition is the result of your

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170 work”. Applause would take up the hiatus between the other authorities’ speeches.

“I have to thank each one of you for being committed to the DBA. You are the ones who make the DBA work with all these artistic pieces and the services you provide to the community”, as highlighted by the special communications advisor from the Development, Work and Entrepreneurship Office, Robson Silva Thomaz. Subsequently, he talked about his office’s will to bring opportunities for income generation to the audience present. “This is the commitment I bring to you”. He got whistles as a reply.

But the spectators were even more excited with the words from the municipal officer of Urban Security and DBA’s municipal coordinator, Benedito Mariano: “We are going to keep working for this program to live a long life, so that others can participate and live this experience that has already borne infinite fruits, materialized by this significant exhibition”.

When assuring his effort to save the future of the project, Mariano took the opportunity to pay the beneficiaries, the secretaries involved, and Adesaf/DBA’s staff a compliment, mentioning each work front the audience has worked in.

He ended it by saying, “We want to look at you, shake your hands and say that we believe in your individual and collective capacity. The DBA works out because it believes that it is possible to rehabilitate people by believing in their dignity. The work contributes to reduce damages and to help people feel dignity, and you made this program happen.

Congratulations to each one of you”.

Moments earlier, Mariano had been treated as a celebrity: in pairs or individually, the beneficiaries interrupted his conversations asking for the DBA to continue. It is for that reason that he reinforced in the microphone that he would defend, along with mayor Fernando Haddad, for the program’s continuation.

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171 The moment of the reunion During the two hours prior to the fashion show, the crowd was dispersed around the other rooms at the Energy Museum. A ludic atmosphere surrounded that morning. With songs being played by a DJ, beneficiaries of the DBA and Adesaf’s employees were dancing either as a group or in pairs. By the trampolines made of reused tires, there stood a line of people waiting to jump. Under a tent at the parking lot, a group was showing off their skills to fix bicycles. I tried to meet Mr. Silva (f.n.), one of the beneficiaries. I was hoping that fraternal moment would be what he had been expecting for so long. I thought I had seen him, but it was only mirage.

One who bumped into me was Adesaf’s social operator José André Aniceto. He insisted on introducing me to Elton Aparecido, whom I had not seen for exactly a year. Having put on some weight during the DBA and with a hand over the belly, the hairdresser who had fallen in the world of drugs after losing his partner was standing right there. Recovered. “I got my self-esteem back”. The old dream of having his own beauty salon became concrete during that period: He opened the doors to his own business with a friend in downtown São Paulo, inspiring news on TV. “People in general didn’t look me in the eye, and I used to feel offended by that. Nowadays, I am treated with dignity”. Now, the new work routine transformed not only the present, but also the future. “If you really want to, man, the DBA can change people. I am changing because I want to”, he was joyfully making plans of going back to college.

Further ahead, with a shoulder bag, Rodolfo Pereira de Almeida waived at me. Our talk lasted long enough to get both glasses blurred. “I returned to my job as a public server. Next week, I am meeting my daughter again. We speak a lot over the internet”. The bicycle and the hairdresser’s course bridged the gap into his current daily life. Still as a beneficiary, the DBA mediated his return to his previous job, after a few months in abstinence in 2016. In-between meals at Bom Prato and the shelter assured by the program, Rodolfo, the new man, was shining with hope as he was telling me all about being involved and welcome at work. More in sync with the media than ever, he updates his social networks through his phone and reports his daily routine. Kind and grateful words, video clips, scenes CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

172 of TV series and comic strips – they are all old passions of the artist who reveals himself when he draws in his spare time.

Time to rebuild In fact, his idea of creating a fanzine about Campos Elíseos’s surroundings and the fight against crack echoed around. In April 2016, the Human Rights Office started a project of a monthly issued graphic arts and poem magazine with users from around Luz neighborhood. “Streets have life” is the sentence that ends the first issue of Pra mim não passar em branco (For “I” not to go unnoticed). Rodolfo’s trajectory would be the face of another action by the office in March this year.

At the time, the Town Hall had released a photography exhibition with posters about the story of 16 DBA beneficiaries, at Centro Cultural São Paulo. It was an intervention that explained very well what the social reinsertion promoted by the program looked like. For instance, there was Iuri (f.n.), whom I had met at Teruya School during the program. He started teaching the others about hair cutting. “I didn’t know I had this gift. If the DBA hand’t given me this opportunity, I would never have known that I’m a good hairdresser… A shout out to you, mate. Do you want to be part of the society, bro? Do you want to be someone? Then forget about crack, man. I put crack aside and now I’m a cool hairdresser. I’m a professional”.

Besides this exhibition, a series of congresses, conferences and seminars were intensified in the Municipal Administration’s agenda to present DBA’s good results. Public managers participated in events throughout Brazil and abroad to reiterate the basic requirement damage reduction policy applied in Luz neighborhood as a viable alternative to recover homeless or chemical dependent people. Magazines, free media and social network pages of left-winged political ideology profiles echoed the success achieved by the Town Hall this year.

As he was checking the news via social networks on his cellphone, beneficiary Anderson (f.n.) interrupted me with a second screen. “Look at the paintings I made at Adesaf/DBA”, he says excitedly as he swipes the images in his device. He was excited with the possibility of becoming a professional plastic artist. The week before, he had already shown his CRACKLAND: A TERRITORY OF EMBRACE – Lincoln Spada (Imaginário Coletivo) – Adesaf

173 photos to a cultural producer as we walked by the Rock Gallery. It sounded like they had been friends forever with the number of compliments and opportunities mentioned to create new pieces or put up exhibitions. Well, Inside the Embrace could be considered his first collective sample.

Time to reconnect Sculptures in vibrating colors, expressionist paintings about dances and affection, and realistic canvases with an interpretation of the city landscape were some of the 305 pieces registered at the exhibition.

Lines of pieces by the artists who used to be anonymous, all DBA beneficiaries, are now shown at the Energy Museum’s terrace. “The painting is the way we manifest our reconnection with the universe”, as defined by the DBA’s studio tutor, Roberto Vivas.

Wearing his typical suit, he celebrated with me the fact that every artistic expression makes us instruments of something bigger that emanated throughout the world. With this holistic perspective, he managed to quit smoking decades ago. “Like a metaphor, think of us as antennas that capture and send out energies. If we relearn our view of the world, the change is much easier”. He smiles before he put on his sunglasses. And that environment has really been changed by the exhibition that received hundreds of visitors.

The area still had a tent that was also busy in the morning. It contained posters explaining each of the work fronts and workshops by Adesaf/DBA, from the laundry service to the map of the urban sweeping groups. There were also armchairs made of tires, curtains made of graffiti bottles, collages, paintings and recycled objects. Three pieces of electronic equipment were showing videos with statements by many of them telling about their trajectory in the program.

There was photographer Bruna watching one of the videos. And Bruno, as the good communications advisor as he is, was following every step the Adesaf’s President gave. We had a chat as I decided to go for a stroll around the museum. An old property belonging to Santos Dumont’s brother, the small palace had been owned by Henrique Dumont, one of the

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174 wealthiest man in Brazil during the 19th century, according to the institution.

The house’s history reflects the whole process that the neighborhood went through: Having been built in the 1890s, when the coffee elite designed Campos Elíseos, it became a boarding school for girls until the 50s. Then it was turned into a social service center. In the 80s, the property was transferred to the State Cultural Office. When the surroundings were renovated in 2001, they handed the building to the Sewage and Energy Foundation, who is currently responsible for keeping the place and other similar units in the countryside and in Greater São Paulo.

From the entrance, one can see, among other buildings, the Redeemer that reigns a few meters from there, at Largo Coração de Jesus, waiving back at me with his open arms. It was like a salutation, after all, if there is someone who can reconnect us to the world, this someone also knew very well that I was saying goodbye to Adesaf and the DBA. It was a long ride to the capital city given by the organization from the coast. Off the record, I had waken up so early that I could see the hope of a new dawn in plain sight on a Monday.

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176 FRANCO, Roger de Oliveira. A Política paulistana de redução de danos ao uso abusivo de substâncias psicoativas sob a ótica de um jurista.

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GOMES, Bruno Ramos. ADORNO, Rubens de Camargo Ferreira. Tornarse “noia” – trajetória e sofrimento social nos “usos de crack” no centro de São Paulo. Revista do Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, vol. 15, 2011.

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178 SCHEFFER, Morgana. PASA, Graciela Gema. ALMEIDA, Rosa Maria Martins de. Dependência de Álcool, Cocaína e Crack e Transtornos Psiquiátricos. Revista Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa, vol. 26, nº 3, 2010.

SCHOR, Silvia Maria. VIEIRA, Maria Antonieta da Costa. Principais resultados do perfil socioeconômico da população de moradores de rua da área central da cidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2010.

SILVA, Selma Lima da. Mulheres da Luz – uma etnografia dos usos e preservação no uso do “crack”. Faculdade de Saúde Pública da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2000.

SILVA, Silvia Moreira da. SPIASSI, Ana Lucia. ALVES, Decio de Castro.

GUEDES, Daniela de Jesus. LEIGO, Reinaldo de Oliveira. Redução de Danos – estratégia de cuidado com populações vulneráveis na cidade de Santo André (SP). Revista Saúde e Sociedade, vol. 18, 2009.

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VARANDA, Walter. ADORNO, Rubens de Camargo Ferreira.

Descartáveis urbanos: discutindo a complexidade da população de rua e o desafio para políticas de saúde. Revista Saúde e Sociedade, vol. 13, 2004.

VARGENS, Renata Werneck. CRUZ, Marcelo Santos, SANTOS, Manoel Antônio dos. Comparação entre usuários de crack e de outras drogas em serviço ambulatorial especializado de hospital universitário. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, ed. 19, 2011.

Media (printed, digital and magazines) Brasil de Fato, Carta Capital, Folha de S. Paulo, G1 São Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo, Rede Brasil Atual, Revista Veja, Andrea Matarazzo’s website, São Paulo State’s Government website, São Paulo’s Town Hall’s website, Roberto Freire’s website, Universo On-Line and Veja São Paulo.

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179 News Broadcasting and audiovisual programs A Liga, Bom Dia Brasil, Conexão Repórter, Estúdio Fluxo, FolhaTV, Jornal da Gazeta, Jornal da GGN, Jornal da TVT, Jornal Nacional, Mariana Godoy Entrevista, Profissão Repórter, Repórter Record Investigação, Saúde em Questão, SBT Brasil, TV Brasil, TV Estadão.

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Organização Não Governamental Adesaf - Associação de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social às Famílias Rua Guarany, 70, Parque São Vicente | 11360-000 | São Vicente | SP | Brasil 55 (13) 3568-4191 | adesaf.org.br | adesaf@adesaf.org.br

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Avenida Bartolomeu de Gusmão, 85/608, Aparecida | 11045-401 | Santos | SP | Brasil 55 (13) 3467-4387 | mb-4@ig.com.br

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