In “Flavio’s Home” the home life is beyond awful. The lives of everyone in the slums is just poor and miserable, they have no money and no clean supplies to live on. In this essay I will tell you about the living and health situations, water and food supply, and how the slums have changed. It is a shame because these people live like this day in and day out for their whole lives and it never changes. “I’ve never lost my fierce grudge against poverty. It is the most savage of all human afflictions, claiming victims who can’t mobilize their efforts against it, who often lack strength to digest what little food they scrounge up to survive.
It keeps growing, multiplying, spreading like a cancer. ” (Parks 1) Even in today’s world, there are so many people living in poverty. It has not changed at all, in fact it has moved all the country. The health and living situations in Catacumba are disturbing when you realize how people live everyday. For one, they live in shacks that are falling apart. They have holes in the floors for their bathroom. Then their waste just goes down the mountainside. They have floors and ceilings that are rotted and caving in.
They do not have nearly enough furniture for the family sizes. For Flavio’s family of ten all they have is a box, a sagging bed, and broken crib. The family does not have access to the doctor because of the father’s business. They can not afford to go to the doctor and their atmosphere is very unsanitary for adults much less children to live in. The children often get sick and will stay sick and at times the sickness and how much the children have to work, kills them. “Death was all over him, in his sunken eyes, cheeks and jaundiced coloring. (Parks 1) Parks says this about Flavio himself the first time they see him.
Later on in the passage they take him to the doctor and according to the doctor, there was nothing he could do and that he would maybe only make it another year. He was only twelve. These reasons are just a few of the many of why we need to help these people because they will not have long lives based on their living and health situations. The water and food supply in Catacumba is not abundant, the children have to walk everyday to get a bucket of water and they only have one pot of food.
That Flavio has to cook everyday instead of one of his parents. Flavio has to climb the mountain everyday to get a tin of water, that assuming is heavy, while he is only twelve years old. The mountain is not safe to walk on and is all uphill or all downhill. They have to reuse the same bucket of water all day long. For things such as cooking dinner and then to bathe, then he gets on his hands and knees and scrubs the floors afterwards. They have very few pots to cook with and they eat the same food everyday, rice and beans.
Because they only have two plates and forks, for the parents to use, the children have to eat off of coffee can tops or anything they can find and they eat with their fingers. They need more water sources and a larger amount and variety of food available to them. The slums in Rio De Janeiro have changed slightly, but I do not think it has by much. The slums I think have become more violent than they used to be in the story of “Flavio’s Home”. There are more riots and fights between officers and citizens.
When the World Cup was coming up, the Police Force had used tear gas and rubber bullets to remove residents from their homes to try to make the place looks cleaner. They just left all those people homeless. But some residents did not take this lightly, they put a fight and they fought hard. The drug trafficking has increased incredibly over the years. It has caused many gun fights between civilians and the police. Murder rates have also increased. Rio De Janeiro has always been down hill because of so many slums but it now being taken over by drugs and violence.
As I talked about Living and Health conditions, water and food supply, and how it is now, you can see how some has changed. I hope that some of these residents have more available food, water, living and health sources to give them a chance to live a longer life. I think the people of Brazil should really try and help to clean up Rio and make it a better and safer place to live. Over the time, Rio I think will always be a dirty place and an unhealthy place for people to live but just maybe it will someday change.
