Some AIDS Patients in Brazil Find Comfort, Hope in ‘Promised Land’ : Latin America: The country’s first such colony opened in September to shelter a few of the nation’s 21,000 people with the disease.

SAO PAULO, Brazil —  Terezinha Rodrigues and her baby daughter were sleeping in a downtown square. Lourival Pereira dos Santos was making do in a shack in the slums. Lazaro Bozolan was camping under a viaduct.

Rodrigues, Dos Santos and Bozolan didn’t know one another, but they had serious problems in common. They were down and out in Sao Paulo, and they had AIDS.

Since September, the three have been living in a newly built house in the countryside. Their spacious home has solid walls, big windows and shining tile floors. Their food is free, along with medical care and counseling.

They are in Terra da Promessa, the Promised Land, the first AIDS colony in Brazil and perhaps in the world.

The new community is being built on the slope of a small valley surrounded by wooded hills, several miles north of Sao Paulo. Three houses are occupied by 24 AIDS patients, a fourth house is finished and ready to occupy, and seven others are in various stages of construction.

“I love it,” said Rodrigues, an extrovert whose cheerful smile reveals the gap from a missing front tooth. “It’s nice here, a quiet place where you don’t have anyone looking crooked at anyone.” Brazil has had about 21,000 recorded cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the fourth-highest number in the world after the United States, Tanzania and Uganda. Sao Paulo has more cases than any other Brazilian city.

Brazil’s public health services for AIDS patients are, by all accounts, insufficient. Some private organizations help, but in a city where poverty is widespread, many poor and homeless people with AIDS have nowhere to go.

The Promised Land, operated by a foundation linked to the Roman Catholic Church with donations from Germany and Brazil, is an unusual and so-far-successful effort to provide for such people. It takes them out of a difficult urban environment where they lived in smog and stigma; it houses them comfortably in natural surroundings, and it fosters feelings of personal well-being and group solidarity.

Birds twittered in the trees outside, and cloud-filtered sunlight shone weakly through the windows as Rodrigues, 26, welcomed visitors on a recent Saturday. One-year-old Vanessa was grabbing her mother’s faded jeans, trying to stand up.

Rodrigues said tests done six months ago showed that Vanessa’s blood contained antibodies to the AIDS virus, a bad sign. But recent tests came out “almost negative,” she announced hopefully.

“I was infected by the baby’s father,” Rodrigues said. “He used a lot of drugs.”

She said she didn’t know if the father was still alive. She has not felt sick yet, but she knows that sooner or later she will.

“The important thing is for the baby to be healthy,” she said. “It isn’t her fault she came into the world like this.”

On the other side of the house’s living-dining area, wearing a baseball hat backward, Dos Santos quietly washed windows. A tall man of 27, he is less outgoing than Rodrigues, but he also voiced approval of the Promised Land.

“It’s good here, more peaceful and quiet than Sao Paulo,” he said. The residents help keep one another’s spirits up. “You can’t get discouraged. You don’t sit around thinking you are sick.”

Like many of the residents, Dos Santos does handicraft work to pass the time and earn some spending money. He went to his room and brought out a bag of women’s “tiaras,” plastic bows covered with decorative cloth.

Dos Santos also works in the colony’s vegetable garden, on a flat space below the houses. He and Rodrigues listed some of the crops: lettuce, beets, broccoli and a squash called abobora.

Bozolan, 32 and pencil-thin, was resting on a chair at the moment, but he said he likes to do household chores and work on the colony’s chicken-raising project, up the hill at the edge of the woods. Unfortunately, he added, a large lizard called a tiu had killed 16 of the project’s 20 chicks.

Bozolan was married and drove his own taxi when he found out that a hypodermic needle, used to inject cocaine, had given him AIDS. He said his wife began separating the dishes from which he ate and wouldn’t sleep with him. He wrecked his taxi and had to sell it. Finally his wife told him to leave.

“She said she didn’t want someone with AIDS in the house,” he said. “I lived under the Anhembi Viaduct for a year.”

Now in the Promised Land, he at least has a home, sympathetic company and some temporary sunshine. It was a drizzly Saturday, but Bozolan smiled and gestured toward a window.

“When the weather is good, the sun comes in strong, and it’s pretty here,” he said.

Four young volunteer workers from Germany are staying at the colony, helping with organization and counseling. Uschi Genegel, 19, said she and other volunteers introduced handicraft activities such as sewing dishcloths and stringing rosary beads.

Speaking in fluent Portuguese, Genegel said small squabbles sometimes break out among the residents, but “they aren’t sad. Many people help each other. In general, it works well.”

In one house, where a new resident was due to arrive, the residents had decorated a wall with hand-lettered signs. “Evaldo, Together We Will Overcome,” said one sign. Another: “Evaldo, You Are Not Alone.”

Certainly, Genegel said, homeless AIDS patients are better off here than in the city. “They are with people who have the same problem they have,” she said. “They can talk about the problem without shame, without fear.

“Outside, it is a secret. Brazilian society is very prejudiced against them.”

The idea for the AIDS colony came from Lisete Eicher, a German woman who met homeless people with AIDS in the slums of San Paulo while she was in Brazil three years ago as a volunteer social worker. Eicher helped form a foundation called Alliance for Life that established an AIDS hospice in the city.

The local director of the foundation is Friar Alecio A. Broering, 55, a friendly Franciscan monk of German descent who chain-smokes Brazilian Hilton cigarettes.

In 1990, the Alliance bought 16 acres of rural property in the township of Mairipora and began building the Promised Land. The Franciscan order in Germany donated 70% of the land’s cost, and religious orders in Sao Paulo gave the rest, Broering said.

Misereor, the German Catholic Church charity, is paying 70% of the $400,000 construction cost. Broering said he isn’t sure where the rest will come from. “The 70% from Misereor has been spent,” he said.

The town of Mairipora is more than 10 miles from the Promised Land, but when the local mayor found out that the project was for AIDS patients, he and others protested and tried to stop construction. They charged that the project violates zoning regulations, but Broering denied it and went ahead with construction and occupation of the colony.

If the mayor expels the AIDS patients, the friar has warned, “we are going to leave them on the plaza outside the mayor’s office.”

The protests have subsided, Broering said. “It is a project that is going well so far, and God is not going to leave us aside.”

Since the Alliance for Life began working with AIDS patients, 135 of them have died, but so far none of the Promised Land’s residents has. A doctor comes to see them three times a week, and patients needing special treatment are taken to the hospital.

Residents can leave the colony whenever they wish, but if they are gone more than three nights, “they lose their place,” Broering said. As a precaution against spreading AIDS, they are given condoms when they go out.

Broering said the philosophy of the Promised Land is to create “a family atmosphere as much as possible” in each house and a community environment “where they feel they are in the middle of nature, where they can feel good in the little time remaining for them to live.”