[Below is a profile from Day 9, during the team’s study of the unique CDI partnership with Terra Mirim. To read more about Terra Mirim and the programs there, see Jane’s profile of Minuska, the coordinator of Terra Mirim and Dani’s Day 9 journal. – See Change staff]
Juliama dos Santos has got style. Leaning against the low concrete wall that serves as the school porch railing—the small tropical forest that functions as Terra Mirim’s backyard steaming in the evening heat just behind her—she is dressed in black from head to heel and somehow makes this work. Her bracelets flash in the dimming sunlight and match the silver studs on her Diesel belt. A splash of color, her sandals are bright pink.
The details of her appearance strike me as significant. They speak to her vivid personality, her unhesitating speech.
She has been waiting all day to speak with our team. We have been running around for six hours trying to strike a decent balance between getting a complete story arc on film and following the schedule that the school coordinators have prepared for us. By the time Juliama and I get around to having our chat, we are already overtime and have only minutes before the bus absolutely has to pull out, with or without our team on it. As soon as Juliama opens her mouth to share her story, I regret not meeting her earlier. She has the kind of passion that merits its own documentary.
She speaks with power and conviction. And frustration. Desperation. She is 24-years-old and has lived all her life in the rural community of Danda, where she had no exposure to informational technology before taking CDI courses at Terra Mirim. She immediately fell in love with computers, but for all the joint efforts between the school and CDI, there is a ceiling on what she can learn here because the necessary classes are not available. Nothing that will take Juliama to the advanced technical level she so badly wants to reach; nothing that can help her to land her dream job as an executive secretary in the industrial sector. She knows enough to recognize that her computer knowledge is limited, but developing a deeper knowledge is a flat impossibility given the economic constraints at Terra Mirim and within the community at-large. The partnership between Terra Mirim and CDI has opened the first door for Juliama, but these organizations need more aid from the outside world to be able to give students like Juliama the higher-level education that they so crave.
How can she improve, Juliama wants to know, when the few social projects that exist to make opportunities available to students like her lack the funds to carry out their mission? How much can she learn about information technology so long as her school lacks basic Internet access?
Initially intrigued by her commanding presence, I am bowled over by both her eloquence and quiet anger by the end of our conversation. It is anger, well-placed anger. Her anger is with the perversity of the situation, of wanting so desperately to learn and finding no channels, no outlets, no means, no way. Unlike some others I have met, who exude quiet exhaustion when describing the insufficient resources and need for government support, Juliama is all fire and energy. Her hope is not a small and silent thing—it burns hot. She is in the midst of arming herself for the uphill climb, for a series of uphill battles.
We are forced to end our one-on-one prematurely. It feels wrong to simply thank her for her time, bid her goodbye in my limited Portuguese and walk away with only her name and her abridged story on a sheet of notepad paper, but this is the sequence that I follow. Obrigada, Juliama, muito obrigada. Tchau.
I want to tell her that I will look her up when I return to Brazil, that I am confident that she will not need the luck that I would wish her directly had I a pocket dictionary on hand. But given what she has told me about the gaping hole that exists in place of educational opportunity in these rural parts of Salvador, I find myself wondering what lies ahead for her.
If there were some channel, some outlet, some means, some way, to achieve a dream in rural Salvador, then a woman as intelligent, articulate and resourceful as Juliama dos Santos could not help but uncover it.
So what would it mean for the dreamers of Simões Filho, for Juliama and others like her, to come up empty-handed?
-Jane