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the favelas are even producing a culture of their own. Their religion is one of the many forms of West African voodoo that have taken root in American soil, known there as
macumba
. The artistic and social center is the samba school. The favelas are the spawning ground for Brazil’s abundant popular music. I was told of a wealthy songwriter who refused to move out of his favela. How could he? That’s where his music came from. If a foreigner turns up on a visit the inhabitants tend to cluster around to show off their favela’s best points. Some of the shacks are well built and prettily painted. The views are magnificent. Their owners take pride in their dwellings and fight like tigers to retain possession of them. The main trouble is the lack of water and light. There is no garbage disposal, no sewerage. The police don’t dare penetrate; but at that you are probably safer in a Rio favela than in Central park in New York or on a side street in Washington, D.C.
    Remembering the smell of dried excrement that haunted the favelas of Rio I could understand the real enthusiasm underDr. Penido’s kidding manner when he stood looking down with the air of a conqueror from the hill at Aimorés, and spoke of islands of public health. I got the feeling that there was more than sanitation at stake, there was the budding of a civilization.
    The Rio Doce Valley was no health resort, at least not yet, but I was beginning to feel the excitement of combat, taking part, if only for a few days, in this battle for public health. The diseases had become as personal as people to these doctors. Tagging around with them in the humorous give and take of rough frontier travel, I had begun to feel as they felt, the hostility that lurked in forest pools and in the garbage thrown out back of the hut by a careless housewife, and to exult with them in every puff of vaporized DDT into a damp corner, or in every quinine injection or atabrin pill that was helping drive back the enemy beyond the blue hills that hemmed the valley.
    While we wrangled over the sociology of the favelas, Monty was waiting with some impatience to show us his waterstation. The water was pumped up from the river by diesel pumps so that they wouldn’t depend on the light and power system which so often broke down. It passed through filters and chemical purifiers. Better water than many towns had in the States, Monty insisted proudly. Inside, the walls were fresh painted and the machinery looked well tended and the tiled floors were sparkling clean. “There’s capacity for twice the size of the town,” Monty insisted, “up to fifteen thousand people.”
    A man was on his hands and knees mopping the tiles as we walked through. I looked at him twice because he was white-skinned and had tow hair. His face was lined and haggard and dirty. It’s a shock to a northerner in this Rio Doce Valley to find the blond offspring of German or Polish settlers livingin the same ragged barefoot dirt as the darkerskinned inhabitants.
    “You see,” Monty was explaining enthusiastically as he ushered us out on the terrace, “we’re all set except for pouring a little more concrete. Then only the cleaning up and landscaping left to do.”
    I asked who the blond man was. He was not interested. “I dunno. He must be a German. I guess they just hire him for odd jobs.”
    We stood a while on the terrace to look down into the valley. The sun was setting red into the murk behind a scraggly line of ravaged forest on the crest of a cutover hill. Touched with sultry copper glints the Rio Doce meandered with a distant hiss of broken water among rocks and scrubby islands. It looked a little like the Susquehanna below Harrisburg. An oddlooking black bird with brown markings like a butterfly was fluttering about a clump of cactus.
    Down the path from the waterstation to the favela, naked except for a ragged pair of shorts, with a beaten droop to his shoulders, the blond man went stumbling wearily. He never