[Below is a profile from Day 16, during the team’s time in Bairro da Paz. To read more about their work there, see Dani’s Day 16 journal. – See Change staff]
Celina Mota dos Santos is a character: 64-years-old and well past graying, she sticks out in a computer lab of students ranging in age from
mid-teens to mid-twenties. Her story of first-time access to computers is a familiar one, but with a twist. A regular volunteer at the local school in Bairro da Paz, she had no experience with computer technology before taking CDI courses at Misericordia. Currently a chef at a nearby restaurant, she has started dreaming of attending a university and becoming an engineer. No, it’s never too late—and she doesn’t need to say it. She lives it.
Outsiders do not describe Bairro da Paz as your typical friendly neighborhood. The name (Neighborhood of Peace) belies its reputation as one of the most violent hoods in Salvador.
Before we roll tape, I have a chance to sit down and talk informally with two girls who live nearby and attend CDI courses at Misericordia. Marilia da Silva and Reime Santos de Jesus tell me that they have lied in the past when asked where they live because of the stigma attached to growing up in Paz. It is not so much that they mind the looks and whispers. The disadvantages of being associated with a violent neighborhood riddled with drugs and violence are far more serious than that. It is easy to be regarded with suspicion and difficult to secure a job when searching for employment opportunities outside the immediate community. The assumption is that someone from Paz is mixed up in trouble.
What bothers Marilia and Reime most is not this particular assumption about community members’ involvement in trafficking, but the general, intensely negative perception of the community that they know and love. Neither Marilia nor Reime wants to leave Paz for good. While drugs and crime are part of the reality here, as they are in so many other impoverished communities, they do not dominate life in Paz as the neighborhood’s reputation suggests, much less represent all that the neighborhood has to offer.
There is good happening in Paz, and the EIC school at Misericordia is just one of them. The center organizes students into three groups according to age, and involves children as young as pre-schoolers in activities that expose them to music and the arts. The computer lab that we visit is filled with students from the oldest group, whose focus is learning about information technology. Despite their desire and best efforts to learn all they can about computers, what they can do is limited by the fact that the lab completely lacks Internet access.
Our team is dumbfounded. Misericordia is one of two CDI schools without Internet service, and there is little that can be done until a major company like Telemar decides that either Paz or the next community over is worth the investment. For now and the foreseeable future, basic web access is a pipe dream.
The Internet issue strikes us as particularly heartbreaking partly because we have been so impressed by the physical infrastructure and organization at Misericordia. For all the efforts, Internet service, as crucial to the computer course as it may be, is missing, and getting it is out of the hands of either Misericordia or CDI.
A tremendous amount of love and care has gone into creating this space. We are sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned room, which the students have made their own and painted with inspirational pictures and three larger-than-life quotes by Paulo Freire, the famous Brazilian author and educator. Our attention is immediately captured by the careful calligraphic strokes spelling out this one:
“Não é no silêncio que os homens se fazem, mas na palavra, no trabalho, na ação-reflexão.” (Men are not made through silence, but through words, work and action-reflection.)
Words, work, action-reflection. Student initiative is a consistent theme at Misericordia, and the local library, Biblioteca Casulo, is just one outgrowth of the community projects that students undertake at the end of their coursework. We walk down the block to get to Biblioteca Casulo, where Leticia, the fifteen-year-old library coordinator and founder, gives us a short presentation covering the library’s inception and growth. Three little girls sit giggling but otherwise remarkably calm over a spread of books at one of the tables as we oh-so-casually snap at least a hundred pictures of them reading.
We have only spent one day at Bairro da Paz, but by its end we have seen numerous examples of students who do not believe in waiting to give back to their community. They want to see change, now, and it’s never too early—as Celina reminds us, never too late—to plant the first seed.
-Jane