A minimum-wage worker in Brazil takes home some $55 a week. Ticket prices for the opening ceremony ranged from about $63 to $1,400. #RIO ON WATCH FREE#When a song they all knew was performed inside the stadium, the women gathered at Prado's sang along: "All I want is to be happy/ to roam free in the favela where I was born/ and to be proud/ and feel like us poor people have our own place."įor the poor, the celebration that launched the coming competition was far out of reach financially. At one point during the show, dancers jumped over colorful shacks - meant to represent the city's slums - and Araujo shouted: "It's favela time! Now, we have to duck when there's a shooting." They drank beer and shared fried snacks while their children stayed glued to a television screen, awed by the special effects and the acrobatics of the performers. Prado and her family invited Araujo and others to gather to watch the ceremony from a distance. "But those prices are impossible for us." Of course, it would be a lot better to be right there," Sandra Prado, a teacher, said as she pointed toward the Maracana. "We still have fun, but this party is for foreigners, for the rich."Īraujo watched the gala from the rooftop of a lime green house high on a hill in Mangueira, occasionally staring in silence at the stadium where, inside, athletes and fans cheered a supermodel strolling across a stage and Grammy-winning musicians performing samba.Įven from afar, the party was a momentary distraction for many of Mangueira's 40,000 or so souls, offering a brief respite from the country's persistent economic and political woes.īut they warned: Don't confuse temporary joy with lasting satisfaction. We are close in distance, but far away," said Luiz Alberto Araujo, a 30-year-old doorman who works in the posh Ipanema beach but lives in the slums. "The poor, we don't really get to experience the Olympics. In this neighborhood of tattered homes, the next two weeks are a visceral reminder of the lines dividing the city's haves and have-nots, and the opening gala just down the road punctuated those differences with every crackle and pop. Mangueira is but one of the thousand favelas in Rio de Janeiro, a slum marred by gang violence and poverty that sits squarely in the shadow of the pageantry of South America's first Olympic Games. RIO DE JANEIRO - In the hills that hug Maracana Stadium, many Brazilians saw the flash and glitz of the opening ceremony for the Olympics from rooftops with exposed wiring and water pipes, amid trash-filled streets separated from the spectacle by a highway and train tracks.
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