Jaime Conceição Silva, 54, has lived in Prazeres, the favela on the upper hillside of the central bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa, for the last 31 years. Sitting on a bench outside his son's house, on a small strait that is one of a maze of tight alleyways linking the vertically sprawling community, I ask Jaime his profession. "I'm an electrician. I work with energy. When people's electricity cuts out, they call me to fix it. I took a course to be able to do it." The city's energy company has installed some meters in the favela, but most of the electricity is distributed by a mass of illegal wires that often cut out.
When I ask him about pay he says, "Sometimes people can't pay. Or they give me R$7 [about $4] to climb that post there and reconnect them. What's R$7? It's nothing. Sometimes I do it for R$5 [$3] or sometimes they give me food or coffee, it doesn't bother me. It's about everyone helping each other out."
Jaime is also a builder by trade. He learned on the job as a builder’s assistant and acquired the skills that mean he can work renovating the often poorly constructed houses in the favela. "Here it's more about renovating houses, not building from scratch," he explains, looking at the dense patchwork of haphazardly built houses around us. "Someone buys or rents a house and wants to do it up. There's always a market for this type of work, it never stops. Time passes and the houses need maintenance."
"I work outside the community too," he adds. "The difference is the price. There people pay more, here it’s always less."
While construction is his professional area, his current paid jobs are actually outside the sector working in two shops down in the centre of Santa Teresa and as a parking attendant looking out for people’s cars as they lunch in one of the neighborhood’s restaurants.
Yet Jaime, who has a cheeky smile and a direct way of speaking, doesn’t identify himself, who he is, with this work. It's just how he makes money right now. In fact, his passion is music, playing percussion in a pagode (a popular variation of samba) band. "My whole family's musical," he enthuses proudly. "It's always been my dream to build a music studio."
The eldest of his five sons, Jaime Junior, 30, brings a jug of cold water and joins the conversation. Talking about the way of life for people in the favela, he says, "There's the community and the society. The community is the environment in which you reside and live, the environment where you are. The society is the environment in which you" -- he pauses -- "have to get along."
Jaime Junior is thoughtful and passionate as he talks about rights to education and basic levels of comfort ("luxury, now that's another matter"), recent world events and his evangelical faith. In terms of work, he has had various jobs starting as a shoe shiner at the age of 12 to his most recent position as a waiter. He’s currently unemployed, but positive about the availability of work: "Finding work isn't difficult. You just have to go, look for it and wait for doors to open." Of the type of work he'd like, he says, "I'd actually like to work in an office. At the moment that's what seems interesting."
In their different ways, both father and son express a proud spirit not uncommon in the favelas of simply getting on with finding a way to get by. Or as Jaime Junior puts it, "We are all of us businesses, it just a question of how you administrate yourself."
