A kiss full of knowing sensuality - and she can't be more than 10 years old

Posted by admin in General

A kiss full of knowing sensuality - and she can't be more than 10 years old. Grow up on these mean streets, and you kiss goodbye to childhood. But in Salvador thousands do this. Born in the favelas - shantytowns - which occupy every unclaimed bit of urban land, they are shunted out to earn their living as soon as they can walk. They don't carry guns as their colleagues do in Rio, but they form a similar outlaw army, some drugged and desperate, some high on the kicks they get from riding the roofs of buses. They'll stick an arm into your bag with brazen impertinence, but they exert a curious fascination for well-heeled visitors. I met a Canadian academic who devotes half of every year to the self-help craft industry she has set up in a favela.

And I encountered two successful Italian designers who arrived as tourists three years ago, became enthused, and stayed. They're now social workers, supervising a business in which reformed street kids live off the profits from clothes they have designed, made, and sold.What is it about Salvador? Beauty it has in abundance, thanks to its position overlooking a broad spit of land surrounded by palm-fringed beaches. But those who fall in love with it talk of the electricity, the sheer excitement in the air, and this has to do with history. Salvador da Bahia was Brazil's first capital, and the centre of the Portuguese slave trade; most of its inhabitants are of African descent. It's a city of poor black people, in contrast to the richer, whiter south, but it has transformed the burden of its history into a cultural weapon.

Its main annual event is the carnival - Latin America's biggest - and the bands which have emerged from that are now national heroes. Groups called Timbalada and Olodum are the focus for the weekly mini-carnivals which take place every Tuesday in Salvador's Pelourinho district; Olodum's club-house is a mecca for wannabe drummers and visitors from all over the world (though white people need a local chaperon).Two annual events which take place shortly before the carnival illustrate another strength of that African heritage. The first is the washing of Bonfim church - yes, literally - by members of the candomble religious cult. The second is the feast of the African sea goddess Yemanja, in which perfume, soap, flowers and dolls are ritually cast on the waves. The city stands on what maps call the Bay of the Saints, but those saints are less Christian than Yoruba. The official religion is Roman Catholicism, but despite the Church's attempts to stamp it out - most Salvadoreans cleave to their ancestral religion, with its trances, stylised dances, and wonderfully exotic rituals.Candomble meetings are secret - apart from those designed to attract tourist cash - and you need both connections and luck to gatecrash them.

I had the former, but not the latter: one meeting was rained off (tropical storms bring everything to a halt), one was called off (all meetings in Salvador are governed by whim), and one my candomble friends simply couldn't find (many houses have no formal address). Hang loose: there's nothing else you can do.But I did make a daytime visit to the biggest terreiro - or candomble precinct - in town. This was a small town in itself, with each saint's domain painted a different primary colour, and the meeting house hung with white paper streamers, and dominated by a medley of antique European chairs. Most of the things I wanted to photograph turned out to be forbidden, including a clutch of skulls suspended by ribbons from a tree. And there was a school: the top class was preparing a concert to celebrate the mother superior's birthday, and singing, would you believe, not an African chant but a number from The Sound of Music. When I pointed my camera at them they gave me back, in a joyous communal gesture, the heavy-metal greeting. Thus does the cultural mix thicken.You couldn't wish for a happier cultural mix than that embodied in the sacred souvenir shops outside Bonfim church.

Here you buy candies and Christs alongside candomble beads and Yoruba saints: to the Salvadorean faithful, it's all one and the same thing. The church itself is the focus for pilgrimages from all over Brazil: in the side chapel where parents bring their babies to be blessed, and pilgrims leave their prayer-tokens, all the hopes, joys, and sorrows of this passionate land are laid out for inspection.From the ceiling hangs a forest of waxen arms, legs, heads, and babies, and every inch of wall is covered with photographs and drawings. Baptisms, confirmations, and weddings, of course; but also soldiers going to war, and young men photographed in hospital with their grieving mothers at their sides. There are amputations galore, and terrible stomach wounds; there are shots of happy teenagers juxtaposed with the wrecks they later became. There is a crashed car, a plane diving into the jungle and, next to a snap of a laughing girl, a pastel drawing of that same girl receiving a huge shock from a power line, while a crucified Christ watches sadly.They say Salvador has a church for every day of the year, and as you wander through Pelourinho you can well believe it. Many are gorgeous examples of Portuguese architecture at its 17th-century apogee; in the church of San Francisco, where undecorated sections by the door were originally designated for slaves, the gold leaf is applied like wallpaper But many of these buildings are strikingly uncared for.