All images © Kevin Moloney


Maria José da Silva, a recent convert to the Assembly of God church in Brazil, is blessed by the pastor and missionaries of her church as she holds her daughter Mêcia, 2, in the living room of her home in Vigário Geral, one of Rio de Janeiro’s worst slums.



Maria José da Silva marches through the dirt streets of Rio’s Vigário Geral slum armed with a Bible, a granddaughter, and a bag of clothes she sells door-to-door to make her living. Da Silva was abandoned by her husband years earlier and sank into depression and alcoholism before she found hope in an evangelical church.



Maria José watches two daughters and a granddaughter play in the streets of Vigário Geral. Her children will be faced — as she was — with rampant alcoholism, teen pregnancy and the attractions of the drug trade of Rio's notorious slums. The regimented life found in local evangelical churches presents one of few real alternatives.



Maria José nurses one daughter as her eldest carries her own child through the tiny house's one bedroom. Single motherhood is common among Latin America's poor and its difficulties draw women to church communities in ever-growing numbers.



Mêcia da Silva, 2, and sister Diane, 8, lean against a refrigerator painted with the words "Jesus Loves You," as their mother Maria José washes her hands in the kitchen of the family's home.



"There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling," says a weather-beaten Psalm 91, posted on the gate to Da Silva's tiny house in one of Rio's most violent and difficult slums.


All images © Kevin Moloney

Bolivia || Padre Marcelo