Death and Computer Classes: Old People in South America.

“Everything to do with old age is improper: killing, laughing, sex, and going on living more than anything else. Apart from dying, everything in old age is improper. Old age is unworthy, indecent, repulsive, infamous, disgusting and old people have no rights other than the right to die.”

Fernando Vallejo in “Our Lady of the Assassins”

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“There are elderly people who are younger than us. They want to travel, take pictures, put them on Facebook, share.” The girl sitting across from me laughs lightly and shakes her heavy curls. Fernanda Rodrigues is 25 years old and a coordinator, former teacher, at the Brazilian organization CDI, the Center for Digital Inclusion, that provides (the potential for) technological literacy to disadvantaged groups.

Fernanda started working with old people in 2005. She is endearingly excited as she tells me about a 85-year old student of hers who, after finishing the course, had bought a computer and proceeded to use it until the last day of her life (at 92).

“It was an amazing experience!”

Just like any of us, old people have their set of problems, Fernanda explains. One 80-year old student said she wanted to destroy the computer because her husband was always sitting in front of it instead of speaking to her. That lady wanted to learn how to use a computer in order to eliminate it from the inside. Fernanda was surprised at the degree of menace, but her job was to teach, and so she did. At the end of the course, when Fernanda asked her whether she was actually going to destroy her husband’s home PC, the lady answered: “No, because when my husband comes home now, I am already on the computer!”

Many, too many, of the old people Fernanda taught did not even know how to type when they started the course. They might not have learned to write at all, and their children simply don’t teach them.

“The children just leave the parents alone when they move away,” Fernanda says. Not only do those old people not have any family or friends around anymore, but they no longer make any new friends either. Fernanda’s computer course is a source for both.

One of Fernanda’s students explained that her daughter was studying in London, but that they never spoke. One day, Fernanda taught her elderly class how to use MSN Messenger. The next day, the woman brought her daughter’s email. The entire class went through the process of going online, typing in the address, setting up a new account, and finally, adding people.

Suddenly, the elderly woman was online. So was her daughter. The words “Hi, mom” appeared on the screen. The mother did not answer. In fact, she did not move at all. She just sat there, staring at the screen, and quietly, she began to cry. Fernanda did not understand. The elderly woman was not answering her daughter’s message; she just cried: a total mystery. The daughter continued writing “Hey, mom? Are you there?” but the mother just cried and cried. Finally, Fernanda typed something in response (“your mother is weird.”) and asked the elderly lady why she was crying. “Finally, I can speak to my daughter,” the woman whispered through her teary mouth.

Fernanda dreams of being a “big teacher,” as she calls it, because she loves seeing people learn.

“I don’t have the words to describe it,” she says, raising her hands and eyes to the ceiling. It is incredible to observe the progress, she says, especially in elderly people of poor communities without too many opportunities.

“They are like this (Fernanda uses her hands to imitate horse blinders) all their lives and I make them like this (she opens up the blinders).”

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 “Meanwhile, Lady Death goes on

tirelessly ascending and descending those steep streets.”

The Place I’m From

Warning: What follows is pure diatribe, but it is the truth.

They say to love is to let go. You, tough, you truly must despise me, the way you follow my every step like a vicious shadow follows a rape victim into the darkest alley of them all. You won’t stop until you have suffocated me too.

Even when I’m far away from you, and I try with all my might ever since I’ve decided to leave you behind, to replace you with others — farther, stronger, way more foreign. But you succeed in finding your way right back into my conscience, into those little, malleable hours of my creativity, when I’m supposed to be alone and writing, serving myself, doing my job. And even now, remembering your skyline on a sunny day, under heavy snow but most often embraced in a wicked blizzard-embroidered sky, your bank tops and hideous wealth intrude my mind.

To many, you are a blessing, a fortune, a chance. To me, you are a parasite with my lone protection strategy being to numb myself completely, not spend a wake minute without company, without a familiar face, real of not.

You take the flavor from my food, the fun from the party, the freedom that comes from the time that passes. You mock me. I can hear your unnerving voice when I slump onto the couch where I laid back years ago, then when my world stopped. I amuse you and my suffering means nothing to you but insatiable pleasure.

You are a place of unfortunate accidents, of a unique kind of despair, of undetected diseases that kill those who are too young, while keeping its safe hand over those who might have/should have left long ago.

Oh, how you bore me with your evergreen fields, reaching into the distance, only interrupted by a couple of dogs dragging their owners out of their warm holes of ignorance, of fluffy apathy. Interrupted also by identical family houses or apartments, assorted along color, income, heritage, respectively.

The worst of it all though is still the realization that I no longer fit in this home of mine. And in fact, nowhere else. Did I disappear from all of my fragile worlds, did I really, would they know?

What we have, dear Ffm, is a love-hate relationship as the most tragic and meaningful ones often are. How I yearn for those rare moments when I approach you from above and lovingly observe your gray, wet streets through the little airplane window, and how much would I give only hours later for seeing those same streets shrink in the window below once more.

You wounded me just enough, with paper cuts-likeness everywhere, cut deeper and deeper, back and forth in the same place. The open wounds throb. But you are wrong, my home, because I will leave one day, eventually and for good, and you will stay behind with your menace and your envy, alone and useless.

I’ve never understood why places seem more real to me than people, why they are the ones I fall in love with, why they are the ones that hurt me the most, but you are the one I will never forgive.