Brazilian Cafe

Grey Hospital and a Brazilian Café. The hotel where I stayed served lousy coffee, insipid and milky. I knew there was a Brazilian café nearby, on my way there walked past the closed down city hospital. Grey walls dripping of uncured diseases, graffiti and dead windows. Convert it into an office block, but who wants to work there, a place haunted by cynical doctors and indifferent nurses who stalk the halls at night waiting for their shift to end so they can get out from this place of horror, and patients they have lost interest in and can do nothing for. Tear it down and throw the debris down a gully. At the Brazilian café the coffee was strong and healthy; the staff, young, moved as dancers to the music in the background. There is much of Africa in the Brazilian soul, passionate, courageous; yet, sometimes, viciously moody. The girl who served me coffee, smiled with lips and eyes, her skin dark, glowing… fit. And the sad hospital faded into oblivion.