The Smell of Fresh Brewed Coffee

Today I write about a very common topic among my colleagues at the Superintendence and Management of Urban Cleaning, SLU. The other day, one of our colleagues, very dedicated to the sorting of organic matter for compost, told us a story from one of his worker training courses at a grocery market where leftovers from fruits, vegetables, and green leaves are collected and taken to the Solid Waste Treatment Center grounds to be processed into fertilizer.

While there, she sensed a pleasant smell of freshly brewed coffee coming from inside of the establishment. She remarked in her usual cheerful manner, “What’s that yummy coffee smell?!”

After hearing this, one the grocery market employees immediately went over to the tightly enclosed area where another member of her team “prepared” the coffee and brought her a paper cup full. The cup was visibly coated with an entire layer of filth. And so?

So subsequently I was reminded of a few past episodes from my work experience in the field of social mobilization around the peripheral areas of Belo Horizonte. One time, we took a newly recruited communications intern for SLU with us and take photos on the job. We went into the municipal periphery, into the West End which has always been landmarked –whether it still is or not is unknown to me –by a cascading garbage heap where local residents carelessly dump all their trash. After photographing it from the topside, I noticed a house under construction further down on the opposite side of the illegal garbage dump.

The watchman of the building site granted us entrance, but then, in a mixture of delicacy and stark weirdness, he imposed one condition: he wanted each of us have a cup of the coffee he had just finished filtering. He then brought us an ancient paper cup incrusted with a layer of smut true to old containers that one normally leaves lying around here and there. Ze Luiz, the photographer, with his linen shirt and pants and cleanly cropped beard, made it apparent that he was having trouble fitting in to the situation. I decided that I would drink the coffee for him. When the watchman, Senhor Vicente, took notice, he walked over to the huge hound dog that assisted him in guarding the house and picked up off the ground, an arm’s reach from the animal, another cup identical to the first. On our return to headquarters, Ze Luiz asked to be dismissed from his internship with less than a month’s experience.

The day before yesterday afternoon at a Social Assistance Reference Centre (CRAS) meeting in the Venda Nova area during a coffee break, I had the unfortunate idea of telling these two stories. Ah, what for?! Each and every person in that circle had similar experiences to tell.

Ashamed to have started up on the subject, I carried on in such a nervous state of mind that I amended (the cure is worse than the disease) to pay a visit with my colleague to a self-entitled community leader in the Casabranca Borough. Upon our arrival, my colleague, Ana Paula, who is also a manager of a CRAS in the East End, decided to ask for a glass of water.

The community leader, Madam Sandra, tip-toed over where her drunken husband was stretched out asleep on the floor and grabbed the only existing glass in her home which was a little dirtied from milk. She then scooped up some water from a clay pot and offered it to my colleague. Ana Paula owes me one for this: I asked to drink first in an apparent lack of chivalry in order to rinse away the milk taste for the second time around.

Those who work with people need have a strong stomach. You need to have backbone to face up to what may come. And know that there is also a good side to things. We’ll come back to talk another day about the beautiful and exciting things that we go through, especially on the peripheries of Belo Horizonte.