{"id":22912,"date":"2015-07-06T10:04:37","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T13:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=22912"},"modified":"2015-08-15T14:43:47","modified_gmt":"2015-08-15T17:43:47","slug":"81-year-old-dona-dalva-resists-olympic-eviction-in-vila-autodromo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=22912","title":{"rendered":"81-Year-Old Dona Dalva Resists Olympic Eviction in Vila Aut\u00f3dromo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas\"PT\"<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Vila Aut\u00f3dromo<\/a>, in Rio\u2019s West Zone<\/a>, is\u00a0under\u00a0extreme pressure of\u00a0evictions from the City in preparation for the 2016 Olympics<\/a>.\u00a0Most residents have left, selling their houses to the City or exchanging them for public housing<\/a>. On Wednesday June 3, the situation worsened as\u00a0violent clashes with the police resulted in six injured residents<\/a>. 81-year-old resident Dona Dalva is among those that remain\u00a0adamantly resisting eviction. \u201cWe are going to carry on living here–I came [to Vila Aut\u00f3dromo] because I needed to and I still need to,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five\u00a0years ago, Dona Dalva was forced to find a new house and settled in Vila Aut\u00f3dromo because she could not afford to live elsewhere. \u201cMy children already lived here and I could not pay rent,” she said. “I did not have a job and I was how old? I am 81 now, so 50 and a bit. I couldn\u2019t get a job, as I was already older. So I came here. My children got together the money from their holidays. They built this room here, thank God, and I stayed here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, due to the community\u2019s location next to the future Olympic park<\/a>, Dona Dalva faces the prospect of another relocation, something which she fears will have serious consequences for her family: \u201cMy grandson, he has a baby with difficulties.\u201d Dona Dalva\u2019s great-grandson was born prematurely and, at two-and-a-half months\u00a0old, requires intensive care at the local hospital; he is fed via a tube in his stomach and “cannot walk, cannot sit, the baby is not even there.\u201d As a result, the baby needs to be supervised by his parents 24×7. \u201cThe dad looks after him during the day and his\u00a0mother\u00a0at night. So they cannot have a full-time job now until he finishes his treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of this, Vila Aut\u00f3dromo\u2019s location–near the hospital treating her grandson–is key for Dona Dalva\u2019s family. They fear that if relocated to public housing or if they have to buy a new house, it will put further strain on the family, and even jeopardize the baby\u2019s well-being.<\/p>\n

\"Delto<\/a><\/p>\n

Dona Dalva’s son, Delto, 29, is a massage therapist in Barra da Tijuca<\/a> and has similar fears that relocation would damage his livelihood and his children’s education. Until now the City has only offered him public housing far away from Vila Aut\u00f3dromo, which he turned down. “Who will pay for the cost of my car to go from there to here every day for work? Who will pay for the hours I spend coming from there to here and from here to there? Who will pay for the expenses for my children to go to the schools here? They are good schools and soon they will have to leave and go to schools that are not as good.”<\/p>\n

In\u00a0the meantime both Dona Dalva and Delto intend to carry on as usual. She says she has yet to receive an offer from the City. \u201cThey already know that I go to every [community] meeting there is,” she said. “So they must already know that my idea is to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Destroyed<\/a><\/p>\n

But despite her determination to stay in the community and make good on the Mayor’s repeated promises<\/a> that some residents<\/a> would be allowed to stay, she laments that what once \u201cwas a beautiful community\u201d has now been destroyed by bulldozers. \u201cBecause now everyone is leaving. There were 500 and something houses here, but now I do not even know how many there are left.\u201d Delto adds: “It is sad to see this, to see the kids without their friends to play with.”<\/p>\n

Dona Dalva remembers the feeling of community that is now gone. \u201cMy boss lived in Ipanema.\u00a0I ironed clothes there to make a living. She [my employer] used to say, ‘Dona Dalva, you are lucky because I only see a neighbor when I get in the elevator.’ Well, where we live is not like that. We live in a big family. This was a big family.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is adamant that if she has to leave, public housing is not an option she will consider because \u201ceveryone loses each other, they lose relatives and children. It happened as soon as this rush to go to the housing began. And now the majority of people don’t like living there<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Delto is also scathing of the public housing projects offered by the City: “People wait in line for a space in the Minha Casa Minha Vida<\/a>\u00a0(MCMV)\u00a0program, while people here were removed to apartments in the MCMV\u00a0project. People [here] were not even enrolled, nor were they in an area of risk, nor were they without a house.”\u00a0The MCMV program was designed to remedy Brazil’s huge housing deficit, providing housing for those in need. In Rio, more than half MCMV housing has been used to rehouse those evicted<\/a> from functional\u00a0favela homes.<\/p>\n

He laments what has happened to his community is emblematic of the “lack of justice, lack of planning, and negligence [by the City]. They do not govern anything, they just take advantage.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas Vila Aut\u00f3dromo, in Rio\u2019s West Zone, is\u00a0under\u00a0extreme pressure of\u00a0evictions from the City in preparation for the 2016 Olympics.\u00a0Most residents have left, selling their houses to the City or exchanging them for […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":22914,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1293,1736,1288,1284,336,1329],"tags":[9,179,11,282,26,262,869,1259,157,5,210,10,270,4,21],"writer":[1564],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-evictionswatch","8":"category-1736","9":"category-highlight","10":"category-interviews-profiles","11":"category-violations","12":"category-by-international-observers","13":"tag-9","14":"tag-evictee-profile","15":"tag-forced-evictions","16":"tag-housing","17":"tag-housing-rights","18":"tag-interview","19":"tag-lives-cannot-be-replaced-in-public-housing","20":"tag-mega-events","21":"tag-minha-casa-minha-vida","22":"tag-olympics","23":"tag-public-housing","24":"tag-real-estate-speculation","25":"tag-resistance","26":"tag-vila-autodromo","27":"tag-west-zone","28":"writer-brooke-parkin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22912"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=22912"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=22912"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=22912"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=22912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}