School shimmies from Carnival to COVID-19
RIO DE JANEIRO — The sultry heat of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer will soon be rolling into Rio de Janeiro. In a normal year, the air would whisper into Dr. Wille Baracho’s ear: Carnival is coming. In a normal year, Baracho’s organization — the Unidos de Padre Miguel samba school — would already be a hive of preparation for the coming Carnival. Busy-fingered seamstresses churning out costumes for more than 1,500 paraders. Hundreds of welders, carpenters, electricians, foam sculptors and painters fashioning floats. And each Friday night, the school’s members dancing through the Vila Vintem favela, belting out the year’s anthem.
But this is not a normal year. For the first time in more than a century, the upcoming season’s Carnival has been canceled.
In the country with the second-highest COVID-19 death toll, there was fear that one of the world’s biggest parties would become the superspreader event to top them all.
Still, Unidos de Padre Miguel didn’t shut down.
Instead, led by a doctor who watched COVID-19 wreak havoc in a hospital ward, the school marshaled its considerable energy to fight the pandemic in one of Rio’s most populous slums — sewing medical gowns and masks for public hospitals, distributing food kits to the needy, doing coronavirus screenings.
The virus was coursing through Rio, threatening its 6.7 million residents, almost one quarter of whom live in favelas like Vila Vintem. Experts worried that the dense neighborhoods would become hotbeds for contagion, pushing the public health system’s capacity past its breaking point.
Once again, one of Rio’s underserved communities pulled together rather than waiting for help from authorities that arrives late, if at all.
“Carnival is a different kind of happiness, it’s playful and pleasurable. This is a mission,” said Baracho, Unidos’ vice president. “We’re talking about saving lives, and our own lives.”
Baracho, 49, grew up just outside the favela, playing pick-up soccer on its dirt fields. After medical school, he got a job at a nearby hospital, then moved away after a shootout erupted as he picked up his toddler from daycare, right next to Vila Vintem.
Nearly all samba schools are linked to working-class neighborhoods around the Rio’s metropolitan region and compete against each other in the glitzy Carnival parade.
“It’s part of Rio’s people, especially in our region and community, to look forward to that day we can meet, sing our samba, remember other sambas, remember friends and parades, and catch up,” Baracho said. “It’s a passion, samba and Carnival.”
As in other favelas, Vila Vintem has little in the way of social services or health facilities. Baracho revived Unidos’ expansive court and transformed it into a coronavirus health station. He took residents’ temperatures and listened to their lungs with a stethoscope. Those with critical diagnoses were directed to a waiting ambulance.
Luzilene Viana, 44, a bakery employee, was coughing and weak when Baracho dispatched her to the hospital on May 24. An X-ray showed COVID-19 had claimed a quarter of her lung, she said months later. Still, the hospital sent her home to isolate.
“One day, there was so much lack of air, I thought I’d be gone,” she said. “Luckily, I recovered.”
During Unidos’ competition to choose its 2021 Carnival anthem, Baracho pleaded with participants to minimize avoidable risks.
“This is far from over,” Baracho, standing in the near-empty court, warned the thousands watching the contest on social media.
“We’re going to follow the guidance, use hand sanitizer, avoid social contact — that’s important. We’re seeing relaxation out there, we see on TV that bars are super full, and that will have a price. Everyone wants to go out, yes — that’s part of being from Rio, part of our people, our country — but we’re going to hold on a little longer.”
Baracho also used the ambulance to check on Vila Vintem’s residents, hoping to keep them from leaving home. One day, he deployed it to fetch 80 donated sacks of oranges. He brought bread from the bakery next to his house. Food kits from UNICEF were deposited at the school’s court, and people helped distribute them to homebound residents.
In the same way Unidos solicits contributions for its Carnival parade from local businesses, Baracho asked for help paying for food kits. Shops without cash to spare offered staples like cooking oil and rice.
As a front-line worker, he knew he was a potential vector, even after contracting and recovering from COVID-19. Whenever he visited his mom, who is 81 and has high blood pressure, he remained at her gate as she stood by the house’s front door. They were separated by 10 feet and the shadow of a cashew tree.
Lives aren’t the only things lost in the pandemic: “Life and time don’t come back. That gives you anguish, fear, malaise. You can’t recover time.”
it continued to prepare for next year’s Carnival. The samba school’s seamstresses, who had sewn medical gowns, finished the costume prototypes for each of the parade’s 27 sections.
But in early September, with no decision on Carnival 2021, they switched off their machines.
With the extra money scraped together sewing costumes, Vania Pereira da Silva had hoped to put in proper floors on her house’s second story, which is held up by exposed rebar. She also wanted a thick concrete wall for her home; the brick one is pocked with bullet holes from a shootout a few years back.
Still, she agreed with the decision to put Carnival preparations on hold.
“We need to stay home, safeguarding,” said da Silva, 62.
A few days later, the long-awaited verdict: Rio’s Carnival parade would not be held in February. The league said it would be impossible to host the event safely.
Baracho was ambivalent; the loss of Carnival leaves a cultural void. But coronavirus cases were rebounding as the weather warmed up, authorities eased restrictions and people overwhelmed Rio’s bars and restaurants. The number of patients in his ward was rising, too, and he had lost a few of them. Infections have since dipped again.
“Carnival is important for the economy, for happiness, for our regional culture,” he said, “but more important than that is health and life.”