Along the Highway (4)

It’s being difficult to find nice subjects to photograph. Here along the margins of the BR-101 our town reveals its ugliest side. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, I know, but it’s impossible to not see the neglect, poverty, and destruction concentrated on this stretch of 4 kilometers. Everything looks as if it was thrown out of the windows of passing cars and trucks.
The people who settled here some 60 or 70 years ago were not native Baianos (people from the state of Bahia), but “immigrants” from Espírito Santo to the South and Minas Gerais to the West. Teixeira de Freitas was not their home. They were here to make money. And even today it is quite difficult to find “real” Baianos in our region. Businessmen, farmers, and even doctors and teachers don’t see this town as their home. This might explain why nobody really seems to care about this city. They come to get their paychecks and get the hell out of here as soon as they’re retired or are offered a better job somewhere else. When the city was established, no one sat down to plan and determine how it should grow and develop. It is only now that some politicians are trying to put order into things, but obviously it is much more expensive to correct things than it would have been to do them the right way from the beginning. And money is short in times of economic and political crisis.



I’m not sure for how long I will continue this series. I might have to take a break and go back to the places where beauty can be found.