Rua Aurora or "street of the dawn," could not be
more inappropriately named. More an area
than a street, Rua Aurora is a place of ill-repute. It is a place where prostitutes,
transvestites and drug dealers ply their various illicit trades. For my teams through 1995, it was the place
to break whatever starry-eyed impressions or expectations people had about
Brazil.
Working in Brazil was never as bad for our groups as Rua Aurora must have
appeared, but a lot of our kids came from a completely different way of
life. Privileged. Sheltered.
Academic. Their experience was
not this raw or this real. Rua Aurora
had an edge. It was a little frightening
to walk down streets populated by people in such desperate straits.
Our guide was Pastor Nivaldo N---. He was like the "Mother Theresa"
of Rua Aurora, distributing care and compassion as equally as the physical
provisions of health and child care that he provided especially for the children which were the unwanted and often abandoned
consequences of these lifestyles.
A
walking tour with Pastor Nivaldo opened up the dark places of an already dark
place. He stopped a moment to point out
a ten-story hotel that must have been marvelous in its day. It stood abandoned and darkened except for a
few rooms on various floors from which lights peeked out.
"Luz roubada," he said to me.
The electricity is stolen. Then I
saw it. Along the side of the building
were wires and lines like a crazy waterfall of extension cords. The "tenants" were squatters. The
old abandoned hotel was a victim of "invasão" or forced occupancy by
the homeless, the destitute. It was a
drug house, a brothel, a place of unimaginable hurt, degradation and
despair. The lines out of the windows
had somehow been illegally connected to the city's power lines. That's what he meant when he said that
electricity was being stolen.
With Pastor Nivaldo leading the way, we continued our tour of the area. A drunk or drug addict sat huddled, half
asleep on the stoop of a building. Pastor Nivaldo stopped to lay his hand on the head of this man and said a quiet
blessing. Or maybe it was a prayer. I recall being moved by the gesture.
I think of an incident in Jesus' life where a leprous man, an untouchable, came
to Jesus and cried, "If you are willing, you can make me clean!" And the text says that Jesus stretched out
his hand and touched the man, this untouchable, and said, "I am willing.
Be clean."
The sacred reaches out to the profane.
What we as evangelicals often forget is that this is the heart of the
gospel. The good news is not that we are
to live sanitized and isolated lives. We
are called to reach out to those who are hurt and broken wherever they may be.
I'm not sure we've got this part of the message in our culture. On that São Paulo street the message was not
only clear, but expressed beautifully.
After a few more quiet words of blessing over this man, Pastor Nivaldo and the
team moved on.
 |
Prostíbulo da Rua Aurora (São Paulo)
1940 - Óleo sobre tela - 43 x 68 cm
Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand |
There were sectors, Pastor Nivaldo told us, where the prostitutes stood and another
where the transgender people stood. This
was to avoid any confusion or violence when the johns came to look for their
hour or so of pleasure. There is a
market for both, but the two did not evidently cross over. I couldn't tell the difference between the
area where the prostitutes and the transgenders worked the streets.
Pastor Nivaldo briefly told the team that the distinguishing difference between the
prostitutes and the tranvestites was that the transvestites were more
physically attractive.
It was difficult to ride home on the metro that night. It was a dark and hard
place to work. I recall walking on
another night with JEMS worker, Dave, when we decided that we would go to visit Pastor Nivaldo. We found our way to the
ministry headquarters and upon arrival were told that he had left for the
night. It was about 10pm.
When we returned to our host family and they found out where
we had been, we got scolded. We were
told that it was "abunai" or dangerous to be in that area.
More than that though, I think that Rua Aurora was to most people the human
garbage dump. It was perceived by some in the more traditional Christian
community to be a place where no one of good reputation should find himself.
And yet, Pastor Nivaldo and his team of nurses, social workers, child care providers
and pastors were clearly a group that was taking the light of the gospel into
the dark corners of the city. The street of the dawn was seeing a tiny glimmer
of light through the work of these special men and women.
I’d like to imagine (and hope my evangelical brethren will not find me
sacrilegious for saying this) that if this were two-thousand years ago, you
might have found Jesus working there too.
