The strange importance of a taxi

Wednesday, 7 October 2009. I’m running to a meeting at Moinho da Juventude (http://redeciencia.educ.fc.ul.pt/moinho/). I’ve send them my CV, along with a statement of intentions to work there as volunteer. Ideally in theatre, working with children and youth, but definitely open to anything else they may find useful. That’s precisely what we’re supposed to discuss today.

But I’m really close to getting there late. The meeting is at 10am, it’s already 9.40am or something, and I’ve just left the Damaia train station. I’ve the address, and an idea of how to get there, from the map I saw in the internet before leaving home, but I give up after a short while. I cannot find any of the street names I was looking for, and have to confess I only have a very vague idea of where Cova da Moura is.

Damn it! I should have left home earlier…

I decide to go back to the train station and catch a taxi. Too late to think twice about it.

I talk to the first cab driver. “That street name… Isn’t that in Cova da Moura?”. “Yes, it is", I say, "I’ve an important meeting there, starting in 10 minutes”. “Sorry, I don’t go to Cova da Moura”, is the answer.

I use all persuasion tools I’ve learnt in the past. From appealing to the common good, to promising to pay three times the taximeter rate. Same answer: “No, sorry. I just don’t go in Cova da Moura. I’m not even allowed to.”

I try the other two taxis in the line. Same answer. Same reaction to my persuasion attempts. “My company tells us not to go there. No-one goes there. Sorry I can’t help”. “Sir, it’s not a question of money, I just don’t go there. No-one goes. You’ll have the same answer from any other taxi. Try to walk”.

No other option: that's what I do. I ask directions to a few nice pedestrians who are far more cooperative than the taxi drivers. I finally get to the place, and have the meeting. It goes well.

I find the neighbourhood surprisingly… normal! No slum-like landscape, like I experienced elsewhere. I might actually never have seen it on TV, but the image I had of the neighbourhood – which I constructed only from what I had seen and listen to in the media, as I had never been there! – was a network of narrow streets, dark alleys, graffiti-covered tin-made houses, danger looking at you from every corner.

But I just found normal streets, normal houses, normal cars. Yes, a graffiti here and there, a more degraded house once in a while, some trash in a few corners, an unpaved street very occasionally. But nothing you wouldn’t see in so many other urban areas of Portugal. If it wouldn’t be from the ethnicity of the people I bumped with – exclusively African – I could believe I was in any other “normal” neighbourhood of Lisbon, like the areas of Linda-a-Velha, Algueirão ou Benfica that were constructed in the 70s and 80s. Names that scare no-one. But not Cova da Moura!

I would learn in the following weeks that, in addition to not being the bogeyman place so many people (including me!) fear, Cova da Moura is actually a damn interesting community, rich in cultural diversity, where the heritage from the African countries of origin now combine with fresh new urban and hip-hop manifestations by the younger generations.

But this post is not to talk about that beautiful side of Cova da Moura. Many future posts will address that, I’m sure.

This post is about my first contact with the prejudice we all have about places like Cova da Moura. With what it means to live in a place that make others look at you, a resident, with distrust, even fear, as soon as they know where you come from. A place that can make companies turn you down as a job applicant, even before they interview you. As soon as they know your address, the position they are hiring for becomes, very, very suddenly, filled! Mistereously…

A place where no taxi gets in or out, because they simply refuse to. By personal choice of the cabdriver or by orders of the taxi company. A place where someone, late to a meeting to happen in the middle in the neighbourhood, can only walk in, half-lost in the middle of the streets. This even if you're only 5 minutes away from the train station, where life becomes normal again, and you can catch a taxi to anywhere else in town.

Are the cab drivers wrong in refusing to enter the neighbourhood? Well, I won’t argue if there were or weren’t bad episodes in the past between taxis and the local community, but I felt, right then and there, in my guts, that it's just a disproportionate decision. But, that’s not even the point…!

Is not being able to catch a cab in or out the neighbourhood the worse of the problems for this community? Surely not. That’s more of a small inconvenient for a consultant travelling from the so-normal and so-comfortable down-town Lisbon to meet someone in the neighbourhood. But, again, that’s not even the point…!

I just found the episode a paradigmatic example of this reality I’m just starting to know: a neighbourhood, with a surprising normality to it (yes, there is bad stuff going on, but is probably more like 5% of the reality, rather than the 95% the mass public is made to believe); a place with a genuinely interesting combination of cultures, of old heritages and new traditions; but also a place somehow isolated from the world (not only, but also) because taxis won’t drive you there.

I don't know about you, but I think there’s got to be something wrong in this picture…