This isn’t what I thought it’d be. Daniel Burke traversed the spindly dirt pathways of Favela Chácara do Céu. Three shoeless ebony girls hugged their ragged Caucasian baby dolls in unmitigated joy. Shirtless boys were playing a high-level of futbol on a crumbling concrete alleyway, finessing the frayed ball as if they were playing on Boston College’s superbly groomed soccer fields. A young couple cooked a freshly killed chicken over a makeshift garbage can rotisserie. Daniel made his way to what was apparently the village square, a concrete plaza surrounded by minute storefronts, many sealed shut by roll-down security doors in observance of the Sabbath.
Paint bucket drummers, seated on a doorway stoop, tapped out their Brazilian funk beats in hopes of earning tips from the day’s adventurous tourists. Denizens gyrated viscerally to the beat as if it was imbedded into their DNA. Daniel shut off his iPod in order to tune-in a Sunday celebration. Elderly women swayed in samba, while their kids practiced their Passinho break dance moves on corrugated sheets laid down on the street. One toddler furiously chewed on his pacifier, shuffling his feet amid pebbles intermixed with a few spent shell casings. His gaunt mother, still in her street-walking fishnet dress, propped herself on a chain-link fence as she took an introspective puff off her spent cigarette. The writer in Daniel saw each colloquial vignette as its own novella.
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