Altina is 76, and she lives at the end of a steep and filthy track into the rain forest. Her nearest neighbours in one direction are monkeys and snakes. Back down the track, her favela (slum) provides a profusion of human neighbours.
She wants to be re-housed among them, because her asthma makes it almost impossible for her to get up and down the hill.
The walls of her tiny house are made of an ingenious and apparently effective combination of rugs, mud and corrugated iron. Her little garden is a brave gesture against the squalor which encroaches from below.
A faded sign on her door asks: "If God is for us, who can be against us?"
Altina is relatively lucky. If God is on her side, she also has the more visible support of the formidable deputy governor of Rio de Janeiro, Ms Benedita da Silva, the first black woman to be elected to the Brazilian senate. Ms Da Silva led a group of foreign journalists, in Rio in advance of a summit of EU and Latin American leaders, all the way up through the favela to Altina's house.
There is something rather disarming about an official tour which takes you into the heart of a slum. Ms da Silva was born in the this favela and still lives there, though considerably more comfortably than Altina. And Altina's living conditions are almost luxurious compared with the misery and violence typical of most "informal housing" in Rio. Favelas are home to three million people here, almost a third of the city's population.
The most shocking thing about Altina's situation, however, is its proximity to enormous wealth. Her house is less than 20 minutes' walk from Copacabana beach, where some of the world's richest people indulge every imaginable pleasure. After meeting Altina, Ms da Silva took us to Mariu's restaurant on the beach, which specialises in churasqueria, a particularly lavish kind of barbecue. We were offered a cornucopia of salads, vegetables and fruit, to accompany the fish, fowl and best red meat which formed the core of the meal.
The most striking of countless images of plenty was a skewer on which dozens of chicken hearts had been lovingly pierced and tenderly grilled. Ms da Silva, a leader of the radical and innovative Brazilian Workers' Party, enjoyed the meal with the same extravagant energy that she brings to politics.
Brazil, it seems, is not just another country, it is many other countries, and they do things differently in all of them.
After just four days here it also seems that Brazil has many time zones, ranging from the 21st century to the distant past. Marcella lives in the same state as Altina, but she inhabits a different universe.
High in the Sierras which rise almost vertically behind Rio de Janeiro, Volkswagen has built a factory which turns out up to 30,000 state-of-the-art trucks and buses a year.
Marcella is in her early 20s, learned English in Florida, dresses with discreet elegance and is an impeccably professional public relations officer. The factory she guides us through bears no resemblance to the grime and noise of the traditional auto assembly plant.
Picture windows offer dramatic panoramas of one of Brazil's biggest national parks. The air, conditioned to be permanently cool, smells pristine.
The highly-trained workers are all hired from the local agricultural community - no previous experience means no previous vices, we are told. That they accept wages 30 per cent lower than those paid to the militant VW workforce in Sao Paolo no doubt makes this industrial virginity all the more attractive to the company.
Their working conditions, however, are undoubtedly superb. They operate a "modular" construction process which has nothing in common with the tedium of the traditional assembly line.
The plant currently exports to Latin America, China, the Middle East and Africa. If all goes well, this Volkswagen plant will soon export to Germany itself.
Is Marcella's Brazil the future, and Altina's Brazil the past? It would be good to think so, but the reality is much more complex.
The challenge facing this enormous, and enormously rich, country is to ensure that the teeming millions in the favelas have some real stake in the shiny, happy factories which could make Brazil one of the most powerful players in the world economy in the next decade. It is that sense of imminent greatness which is attracting the presidents and prime ministers of the EU to Rio next week.