Brazil on the Move Read Online Free PDF

wheels of solid planking drawn by a majestic pair of humped zebu oxen.
    We walked down the cobbled street toward the Health Center. On the way Dr. Penido and Dr. Lavigne, the local chief of public health operations, proudly showed off the market. No rotting piles of garbage as in Rio. The stalls were clean. The vegetables looked freshwashed. The butchershop was screened and the marble tables had just been scrubbed. To be sure somebody had left open the little window in the screen through which the sales were made. Dr. Penido noted the fact philosophically. The next time it would be closed. “Education,” he said in a tone of infinite patience.
    The Health Center had an air of quiet gaiety about it. It was an airy little building of gray stone and white stucco, designed I was told by Peter Pfister in the States, with a cool covered patio between the two rows of offices and consulting rooms, where people could wait out of the sun and in the breeze. At one end there was a playground for children. You could see that people enjoyed coming here. Varicolored children were scrambling around on swings and seesaws. People had brought their dogs.
    In back was a sample vegetable garden with vigorous rows of lettuce, beets, dill, chicory, carrots, turnips, magnificent tomatoes. Dr. Penido explained that the people of the Rio Doce Valley had forgotten about growing vegetables. Beans and rice and occasionally a small gourd named
chu-chú
cooked with a strip of sundried beef constituted the daily diet, sprinkledplentifully with dry manioc flour so that you could make the mess into a ball with your fingers and shove it into your mouth. Now, in the town at least, the Public Health Service was cultivating a taste for vegetables among the people. If somebody proved that he could raise a garden he was given free seeds. Education.
    The doctors tried to get the schoolchildren into health clubs so that they would interest their parents in sanitation and a wellbalanced diet. If they educated the children, the children would educate their parents. The trouble was that not all the children went to school and, of those who did, the great majority dropped out after the first three years.
    In the offices they showed me their filing system. A simple and usable filing system was the crux of the problem. To produce an island of public health where there had been not the faintest notion of it before, you had to keep a record. That was the best thing the Americans had taught them, the Brazilian doctors agreed; a method of keeping a simple and adequate record without bureaucratic clogging. There were cards for every family in town showing its health record and the results of the visits of the district nurse. There were cards for individual patients. There were cards for every butchershop, bakery, bar, restaurant, hotel and boarding house, showing its sanitary record, recommendations made, improvements if any.
    “Always,” said Dr. Penido in his quiet drawling voice, “we try to use persuasion … We try to get people to feel they want to improve things themselves. Then when they feel the benefit they become interested.”
    As we walked out we passed a row of humble beatenlooking women waiting in line to get free boiled milk or made up formulas for their babies. Some of them had shoes but many of them hadn’t. Their skimpy dresses were none too clean.
    “Five years ago,” said Dr. Penido in his low voice, smiling his sad disdainful smile, “they were drinking polluted waterout of the river and depositing their excrement in the bushes … We can isolate the lepers. We can cure yaws with about ninety cruzeiros’ worth of penicillin, we can cure hookworm … DDT has malaria on the run. We can vaccinate for diphtheria and smallpox but to have really universal public health in this country we have to produce models that people will copy … sanitary islands.”
    As he went out into the street a dark look came over his face, as if somebody had said