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> Editorial
> What's the Story?
> Mrs. Fixit
> Desperately Seeking Ingredients...
> Passionate about Mill Road
> Caribbean Masterchef
> Everything is Possible!
> A Sanctuary on Mill Road
> Boat People
> Going Green with Al-Amin
> The Akashi Project
> Open All Hours
> Mesmerised by Meze
> Come Together
> The Girl from Arapau
> Still Sweet and Spicy
> A Real Neighourhood
> Lei Si Fan Mei?
> Flight from Baghdad
> Streets of Revolution
> Stepping up the Ladder
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The Girl from Arapau
Neide CarvAlho runs Mill Road’s Café Brasil. She tells Cambridge Untold her remarkable tale of childhood hardship in the tiny village of Arapau, and her determination to get out.
Lunchtime. Café Brasil. A Brazilian saudade melody floats into the air, heavy with longing. (I’m missing you Brazil, I yearn for your golden sands.) On the blue sofas, two students are comparing notes over mocha. Three young mothers have parked their prams beside their table and are catching up over herb tea and pear and almond tart. A small queue has formed at the counter to order from the waitress. In the kitchen a microwave dings. Neide Carvalho emerges slightly flustered, carrying before her an order. She is a diminutive young woman, her dark hair pulled back in a pony tail, and she is clearly expecting. ‘Which table is the Chicken Brazil?’ she asks the waitress. She is surprised to see me. ‘Ah!
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Our interview…it’s today!’ She glances at her line of customers. ‘Give me ten minutes’, she tells me. ‘Sit down. Have a coffee.’ And she bustles over to serve the couple at table 8.
Once the midday rush has died down, we sit upstairs in a surprisingly spacious internet café in a bay window filled with yuccas and geraniums overlooking Mill Road. When I ask her to paint me a picture of where she was born, Neide lets out a long sigh. ‘I was born in a place so different from here..,’ she begins, and then shakes her head, as if words fail her. It is as though the task of evoking this other world is beyond her practical, workaday English, not a word of which she spoke six years ago, and which she now uses to run her thriving business. ‘It was a tiny village called Arapau…’ she begins hesitantly. ‘No, I don’t think there is a place I can compare it to here…’
I have heard of the Brazilian propensity for nostalgia, their tendency, when they reminisce about their vast country, to grow misty eyed and melancholy. It is seeping up the stairs from the CD player in the words of a hummable saudade playing. (Oh, Brazil, when ever will I see your green jungles, feel the breeze of your velvet nights? Nothing compares etc.) Did the village have a church? I prompt gently.
| "Life is a test. But you always, always have choice. I always say ‘Si acredita, voce pode’. In English it’s something like ‘If you believe, you can’." |
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‘It was too small for a church!’ she laughs at the idea. She sighs, and then makes an effort to summon the words that might conjure Arapau for me. ‘The houses were made with, what is the stuff you make baskets with... and earth and water? My father built ours himself. We had no electricity in Arapau, just lamps with petrol so at night it was black and scary for us kids when we went outside to the loo, and we had no beds, we slept in hammocks hanging between posts...It was awful!’
I can suddenly imagine the village Neide grew up in: Arapau, a tiny cluster of wattle and daub houses lost in the sertao, the semi-arid hills of north-eastern Brazil. The suffocating heat, teeming mosquitowhining nights, the broad swathe of the Milky Way above, and the narrow mentalities of the villagers asleep in their beds.
‘We were very poor. There were 8 of us kids. Our family wasn’t unusual, all my friends had 7 or 8 brothers and sisters. Even now, my sisters all have big families, lots of children. I once asked my mother why she had so many of us and she said it was because there was no television!’ Memory gradually makes the words come tumbling out as Neide recalls her early life in the village. ‘I went back two years ago and it was completely changed after 30 years. There’s TV in the houses, cars, people live like millionaires compared to back then. We didn’t have an oven; we cooked on an estufa, a wood stove, on the floor. I started to cook for my older brothers when I was eight while they went out to work. Life was very, very hard.’
Neide went to the village school until she was nine. She remembers unimaginative lessons in the stultifying heat, and a strict teacher meting out punishment with a piece of wood. The government provided a meagre school diner: a glass of tepid milk, some rice or couscous with vegetables, and if they were lucky, some dried mince meat.
At home, there wasn’t enough money coming in for the family to afford the basics. Her father went away in the week to work in the salt mines. Her mother was a maths teacher in a government secondary school, but it paid so little that she left and got work sewing dresses at home for a factory, until an allergy to the synthetic material brought her hands out in a scarlet rash. ‘My two older brothers got work in the fields planting onions. But it couldn’t feed us all. So I left school aged 9 to work picking cotton. My older and younger sister did, too. We had to stand in direct sun at 35 degrees. Can you imagine wearing thick jeans in that heat to avoid getting scratched, a big hat on our head to avoid sunstroke. When you pick cotton, it pricks your fingers, all day long.’ Neide winces at the memory, and rubs the tips of her smooth fingers. ‘It was really painful.’
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Neide worked in the cotton fields from 5:30am to 5:30pm with an hour’s break for water and a meagre packed lunch. At the end of the day, she’d queue with hundreds of other child labourers as well as elderly men and women to weigh their day’s pickings in massive sacks. Their tally for the day would be noted by the gang master on each labourer’s individual tab. Only at the end of the month would the workers be paid. ‘It was a few reales, now it would probably not even buy you some sweets. But it helped us pay off the monthly account we had at the grocery store.’
After four years hard labour, Neide was developing into an attractive young girl of 13. Her emerging beauty was not lost on one of the bosses of the cotton plantation who asked her father if he could marry her. |
| "As the bus set off, I told my shocked aunt my plan was never to return. I was leaving the village for good!" |
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‘Of course I was surprised, he was 22 and I looked on him as my boss, not a husband! I was afraid my father would make me marry him, because that happens in Brazil. In those days in the village everything was possible. People are very Catholic. My father always told us that sleeping with a man before your wedding is the worst possible thing that can happen to a girl. My younger sister was a bit naughty, you know, she disobeyed my dad when she was 13. My dad told her 27-year-old boyfriend he better marry her or he’d tell the police he’d slept with an underage girl. The marriage lasted 28 days. She ran away.’
Neide’s brush with life as a child bride was a wake up call. An astute, determined girl, she looked at the women in the village, and her own sisters, each one into her next pregnancy and still labouring for a pittance under the scorching sun, and saw with a shudder the future that awaited her in Arapau. She resolved to get out. One escape route from grinding poverty and early motherhood was to go into the church.
‘One woman started a little house church in the village and I loved the dressing up and praying and the singing and clapping. It was lovely. At one point I really wanted to become a nun.’
The other way out was education. So Neide enrolled in the village school where the huge gaps in her basic schooling were immediately apparent. At 13, her writing was still that of a nine year old.
But after one term, Neide was restless. She imagined a better life beyond the hills of the sertao and begged her parents to let her travel to her grandmother’s house in the coastal city of Natal. But she had never been on a bus or travelled outside the region, she was too young, there was no one to take her on the four hour journey. In the summer break, an aged aunt from the city came to the village and agreed to take Neide back to visit her grandmother in the city. ‘As the bus set off, I told my shocked aunt my plan was never to return. I was leaving the village for good!’
Once Neide got to her grandmother’s, the 13 year old surprised the old lady with the news that she was never going back. As the weeks went by, the grandmother realised her bright determined granddaughter would suffocate back in Arapau, and in long distance telephone conversations tried to convince Neide’s outraged parents to let her stay. It wasn’t long before a case worker from the juvenile courts was knocking at the door, enquiring about a runaway minor. Just in time, Neide got a job as a nanny to a wealthy family, the Cavalcantis, who lived in the upmarket district of Pontanegra. Neide fled there, not giving her grandmother her new address.
‘It was the best thing I ever did. I looked after the family’s two and a half year old daughter, Tassia. She was lovely. The family gave me days off to go back to school and even paid me overtime, I couldn’t believe it. I started sending money back every month to my parents. I’d give an envelope to the driver who knew my family, so I could trust him to take it to them. It was like five times more money than any of us had earned! After 18 months I was really missing my parents but I was afraid if I went back my dad would keep me there. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped in the village again! A letter arrived in my mum’s handwriting (my dad was illiterate) promising the Cavalcantis that they would not try to keep me in Arapau. In the end, I went. When I got there, I couldn’t believe what they’d done to the house: they’d rebuilt the mud walls in cement and hooked it up to the electricity. They’d even bought a TV with the money I’d been sending back.’
Drama came to the household as Neide’s week with her parents came to and end. Hearing the rattly old bus waiting with its engine running outside the new village shop, Neide said her goodbyes and carried her suitcase down the garden path to the new iron gate. Locked. ‘After all he’d promised, my dad had locked the gate and had the key in his pocket! He started saying that I was only 15 and too young to go back. I was going to miss my bus! In the end my mum found another key and opened the gate!’ Looking back, Neide can understand her father’s desperate bid to keep her there. ‘Basically, he was afraid for me, all alone in the city.’
Neide went back to Natal, where she continued to work as a nanny to little Tassia, moving out for greater independence, worked in a bakery, got engaged to a local football star, found out her fiancé had ‘a past’ (he was married with a child, and was a serial adulterer). |
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| "I went back two years ago and it was completely changed after 30 years. There’s TV in the houses, cars, people live like millionaires compared to back then." |
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She left Natal, rode the bus three days and two nights south through half the continent of South America to the teeming metropolis of Sao Paolo and a new job as nanny to the two teenaged daughters of a single mother whose toy-boy, live-in lover turned out to turn tricks as a gigolo, and had his eye on both Neide and her young wards (when Neide brought this fact to the attention of her boss, she was asked to leave the next day). She also managed to complete six years elementary education in two. She was just 22.
Buses play a big part in Neide’s story. In a country occupying virtually half the land mass of the South American continent, these huffing diesel monsters provided the only means of escape to a better life. It was on a long distance bus while she was travelling the 2000 kilometres from Sao Paolo back to her village that she met a young British back packer traveling in Amazonia for six months, John. ‘I fell in love on that bus’, smiles Neide.
Neide eventually joined John in Britain. She met her first cool English summer with characteristic determination: ‘Yes, I want to live here.’ They married in Cambridge and have a four and a half year old year old daughter, Juliana, with a little brother or sister expected in September. ‘John is actually of Portuguese parents so he can speak some Portuguese. We try to for Juliana’s sake. And you remember Tassia? You know, the little girl I used to babysit in Natal. She’s here staying with me’, says Neide. She’s 18 and learning English at the Embassy school. And my mother is coming from Arapau this summer…’
At only 31, Neide’s story is one of trials and hardships ultimately crowned with success. Could she ever have foreseen back in the village, that one day she would own a nice café in Cambridge?
‘Life is a test. But you always, always have choice. I always say “Si acredita, voce pode.” In English it’s something like “If you believe, you can” ’.
Has she been back to the village recently? ‘Two years ago. My sisters are still there, they all married very young to illiterate men and can only get jobs which pay nothing. It’s hard to relate to that, they think I’m made of money and can help them. It gets in the way. I see my young nieces who are beautiful girls of 14 or 15 growing up in that place, and I worry it’s all happening again. I tell them, don’t do what your mothers did. Get an education, get out of here! “Si acredita, voce pode.” ’
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