Brazilian bureaucracy, someone explained from the back seat, was a little special because of the horror of productive work of the literate Brazilian. One of the evils of the Portuguese heritage. No use fussing now about the historical causes but the fact remained that the sort of people who were brought up to become public servants had no practical knowledge of any of the processes of production. The old habit of wearing a long fingernail on the little finger had been the symbol of the educated class that had never done any physical work and never intended to do any. So the Brazilian bureaucrats’ notions of production were purely theoretical. This was true more or less of all Latin countries. In Brazil a certain social democracy did occasionally narrow the gulf between the illiterate barefoot producer and the man at the office desk, but it was wide all the same. In the States we suffered from bureaucracy too, but the man at the desk had maybe worked as a section hand on the railroad summers when he was in school, or at least he went home and stoked his own furnace and mowed his own lawn. In most of South America you came out of school belonging to a different race from the man who hoed your garden.
By that time we had arrived at the already shabby modern-style building where the Special Public Health Services, known to everybody as Sespe, had central offices for the Rio Doce region.
Going up in the elevator Dr. Penido explained sadly, in his low rather singsong tones, about the building. It had been built as a hospital. A modern hospital was very much needed in Vitória, but the money had run out and all that had come of it had been a small private clinic on the lower floor. The rest was rented out for offices. That was the sort of thing his service was determined to avoid. Sespe never entered into a project unless the funds were on hand not only to complete it but to maintain it.
Did I know the history of Sespe? I nodded.
I had spent some time in the main office in Rio where I had found the same low tones, the same frankness and modesty, talking to Dr. Candou, then its Brazilian chief, and Dr. Cambell, who represented the State Department’s Institute of Inter-American Affairs.
Although Brazil had a public health service back in the fifties of the last century, before the United States in fact, that service fell into bureaucratic lethargy, along with many other useful organizations set up by Pedro II’s imperial administration, under the republican spoils system. There was a revival under Oswaldo Cruz, the Brazilian Walter Reed; but the new generation of Brazilian public health doctors got their training during the worldwide battle of the Rockefeller Foundation against yellow fever, and in the war of extermination against the gambiae mosquito in the eastern bulge during the period of the Second World War. Before DDT they used arsenic and pyrethrum. These campaigns resulted in the only cases known to medical history of the complete eradication of a species. The Aedes mosquito which carried yellow fever was eliminated in Brazil, and the gambiae which carried pernicious malaria.
Then in 1942 in the early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, Major General George C. Dunham, the author of a famous textbook on public health, was sent down from Washington to help Latin America set up a health program. He had experience in the Philippines in inducing local governing bodies to come in on public health programs and was convinced that a health organization to be effective had to be based on the cooperation of the people themselves. That was the genesis of the Sespe idea. Most of the Brazilian staff obtained their practical education in the field under the Rockefeller organization and their theoretical training at public health centers in the States.
We were standing in the empty office looking at a map of the valley tacked up on the wall with glassheaded pins in various colors indicating the different services.
“To produce an island of public health in each place we work,” said Dr. Penido, “first we have to build privies for the people. You see we start from zero in this country. Then we give them pure water.”
Monty Montanare pricked up his ears at that. Monty was a lanky young American engineer with a long North Italian nose, a graduate of the Seabees in the Aleutians and on Guam. Building water systems was his business. “Don’t touch the water in Vitória” he admonished me gruffly. “Once we get in the valley you can drink all you want.”
Monty seemed to be executive director of the expedition. After a glance at his wrist watch he announced it was time to eat; he’d ordered the linecar for three. After a tremendous Brazilian luncheon, which started with salad and coldcuts, and proceeded through steak and rice and chicken and beans to culminate in roast pork smothered in fried eggs, Monty shepherded us into two automobiles and we were driven across the iron bridge to the railroad station on the mainland.
The linecar of course hadn’t arrived yet, though it was after three, so we roamed around looking at the old wood-burning locomotives with their funnelshaped stacks, like the locomotives in prints by Currier and Ives, that were shunting the cars in the freightyard, and at the great piles of wood along the tracks. I wondered how many manhours of work it took to cut all that wood up in the hills and to bring it down by oxcart or on the backs of burros or of men to the railroad.
At a church on the shore a ringing of bells had started. The steamboats at the docks across the harbor were blowing their whistles. Down the middle of the stream in the sparkling sunlight came a long string of launches and rowboats decorated with green and yellow streamers. From the shore came cheers and the popping of rockets. Foguetes are part of the Portuguese heritage. It was from China, probably, the early navigators brought home a taste for fireworks. Somewhere a brass band was playing. It was the procession of some saint being carried by water from one shrine to another. Before we had time to find out the name of the saint the line-car had backed in beside the platform.
It was a big green stationwagon sort of vehicle mounted on railroad trucks and driven by a diesel engine. We had to hurry to get off in order to meet the passenger train coming down the singletrack line at the proper siding. First we circled the conical mountain on the track the oretrains used. We stopped over the oredocks. Walter Runge, another American, who worked for the company that was repairing the line, stepped out and picked up a piece of heavy blue and red rock.
“Sixtyeight per cent,” he said. “Just about the richest iron ore in the world. The railroad’s still sketchy. It comes a long way, and it takes a long time, but it gets here. These ore-docks could have been better designed but the ships somehow get loaded. There were times when we wondered if they ever would.”
At the edge of the yards the bucktoothed mulatto driver had to stop the car suddenly to send his black assistant running back to the station to get his orders. The railroad was operated on the old English block system; only one piece of equipment allowed at a time in a block. At last the boy arrived panting with a green slip in his hand and we went off rattling and lurching over the newlaid rails, past bamboo fences and small thatched huts with mud floors and yards planted with scrawny papayas where a few skinny chickens pecked about and dirty children black and brown and grayish white, naked or dressed in rags that barely covered them, rolled and played in the thick dust.
One set of houses, freshly built for railroad workers, stood out along the track neat and white with scrubbed tiled floors.