The Duke team recorded daily video journals during their time in Brazil, and we are currently uploading them to the site. The video for Day 23 is above – click here or on the “Video” tab to watch more. – See Change staff

Villa da Barca, a city on stilts

A family walks down Villa da Barca’s largest street—the street that links Villa to greater Belém.

A Villa woman, purchasing produce

A man steers his mule into Villa da Barca. His mule carries bricks and cement: materials with which he’ll construct and remodel homes.

A child watches as the Duke SOW walks down the boardwalks in Villa da Barca.

Another child offers us a glimpse of his family’s home.

CDI Coordinator, Francisco (called “Chiquino” by his students), poses with a group of his students outside of their homes.

Villa boys use the deserted, dirtied land near the bay as a space to relax and fly their kites.

Villa da Barca waterscape

Laundry hanging out to dry

An onlooker, watching from up high as the Duke SOW team interviews Francisco on the street below.

Villa transit

The interview: each team member contributing his/her part

Students wait at the Escola de Informática e Cidadania (CDI School of Information Technology and Citizenship), peering into the class room before class time.

The Duke SOW team interviews Francisco on Villa da Barca’s principal street.

A longer view of the same street

From left to right: Dani, Carina, Lucas, Ádamo (head CDI coordinator, Pará), and Lilian (CDI educator, Villa da Barca)

A young Villa girl cleans outside her home

Bringing Villa power

Each afternoon, the Pará state receives refreshing rain showers

Tomorrow morning we’ll make our first trip to 501 Post, the post-production studio in which our ideas, video footage, photography, music, etc. will come together in a final cut of our 2008 See Change film. Wish us luck…

Simões Filho, Bahia. Minuska, the coordinator at Terra Mirim, perfectly sums up what the school represents for the rural communities of Simões Filho: an oasis.

With its wide-open spaces, natural and architectural, Terra Mirim easily looks the part. The school comprises an assortment of modest but beautifully well-kept buildings scattered about lush green grounds. The main building where classes are held is wall-less along two edges; the hallway wraps around with rooms on one side and a terrace on the other. Upstairs, balmy air floats through the one-room loft where students learn Capoeira and take turns enacting stories using the standing puppet showcase.

Minuska is taking us on the grand tour, and Ian, a German volunteer living at Terra Mirim for the year, is busy translating Portuguese into English for the team’s comprehension. We have just introduced ourselves to Olva Maria, the dreamer and founder of Terra Mirim, who sits in front of a little cottage where pocket-sized treats are sold. We are still standing somewhere in the expansive backyard when our suspicions are confirmed: the school’s mission is primarily an ecological one. A meter away from us, the unidentifiable fowl that roam these parts wobble past in ones and twos.

Why ecology, we want to know. Why the bee-saving and the river-maintaining, on top of the already immense challenge of educating some of Brazil’s poorest children on the outskirts of Salvador?

Or, as we more tactfully put it during my brief interview with Minuska: how does giving students access to digital technology, for example, fit in with the school’s ecological mission?

At Terra Mirim, the ecological focus promotes not just natural living but rather holistic learning. It is not about the happiness of plants but rather harmony among plants and animals, humans and machines. Holistic learning is the key to human freedom. Digital inclusion is ultimately about social inclusion and granting everyone that freedom.

My paraphrasing does Minuska’s words little justice. Even with my limited understanding of Portuguese and brief approximations from the translator, I sense immediately how eloquently Minuksa describes the nuances of Terra Mirim’s unique educational approach, and how powerfully she sketches a portrait of daily life in Simões Filho.

In the village, she says, young girls let men touch them for pocket money: 10 réis (US $6). They do not understand what sexuality really means, nor have they been taught to grasp their own self-worth.

I ask what changes she sees in the students who finish school here. She tells me that at Terra Mirim, students experience the self-empowerment that underlies true citizenship — those students who are initially too timid to talk are eventually able to take part in the circle of sharing. They graduate with a newfound belief in themselves and what they can do for their community.

From what I can observe in a single day, part of the philosophical consistency of Terra Mirim’s emphasis on citizenship and sharing lies in its practical applications. At the school, self-sustainability is a way of life. Students help raise vegetables in a small plot in the backyard to supplement the lunches that are made here. Separate sinks are set up with hot soapy water and clear water so that the children can wash their own plates right after they finish eating.

The meals are not a luxury but a necessity. The children depend on the school for their two meals a day; to go home hungry means to stay hungry. Terra Mirim’s task is great and its means too small. Terra Mirim does not receive governmental support. A small Italian group donated the money used to build up the physical infrastructure, and the school relies on private donations from NGOs like CDI and revenues from its own little bakery and trinkets shop to keep food on the table and electricity running.

As it is, the school is stretching funding for 60 students to cover the 120 currently enrolled. The children come to school in shifts, or only three days a week so that the school can afford to feed them all.

Today, it is time that is tight; Minuska and I are forced to wrap up our session early. Her eyes are trained on me, as per pre-interview instructions, but like Dona Anna at CEACA and Marion at ICP, Minuska is making her appeal to the camera, to whoever may be watching and listening in the future.

An oasis is a paradise by virtue of the fact that it offers in abundance what the desert around it lacks. Terra Mirim is poor, yet it gives the people of Simões Filho the hope that they so desperately need. The clock runs out on us before I can ask Minuska if she has any last words to share, but I can’t help but feel I hear her silent response, itself a question: Who will give Terra Mirim the aid it so desperately needs to continue being that well of hope?

-Jane

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

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

A note on the architecture of Villa De Barca: where the CDI school is located is on land, as one extends deeper into the community the city crawls out into the bay and is built on stilts in the water. Instead of sidewalks, there are planks of wood laid parallel to each other over three longer perpendicular beams. “Please remain in the center,” our guide told us. However, we appeared to be the only ones following the rule as I placed one foot directly in front of the other the entire walk. Dogs, people, children age three, girls on bikes, girls on bikes with merchandise, and many others did not have the patience to walk behind us and strayed to the edges of the path.

It appears entirely symbiotic, the water providing space for a people who could architecturally adapt, until a huge gap to our right and a drop fifteen feet down entirely covered in wood that used to be a house rocks gently with the tide and reminds us that nature ultimately has the last say. The ocean breeze moves in time with the waves and the whole of Villa De Barca seems to teeter. Or perhaps that is my stomach.

After the tour we have a chance to chat with Leilian. She used to deal drugs until a fight between her boyfriend and a rival drug dealer meant a threat to her life. After living in hiding for a while, her uncle offered to pay for her to take computer classes. She had never even been to high school. With nothing else to do and her boyfriend’s son on his way she enrolled in a private school in the middle of the city. She did not have money to take the bus one day. The next week she asked the teacher what had been gone over the week before. The teacher said that Leilian’s absence was not her problem. Leilian did not return.

Leilian heard about the CDI initiative in Villa De Barca and enrolled to continue her education. Francisco recognized her talent immediately and encouraged her to attend a computer class at the university. It was not easy. The other students were not from the slums and had years of private school experience. But Francisco encouraged her until her drug dealer boyfriend began appearing at the school and threatening the classroom. She had to go into hiding.

But she is back. Issues managed to resolve themselves and Leilian has made herself a servant of her community. She and Francisco are battling the prostitution and hopelessness-bred apathy toward the future. Her life is not only about her anymore but also about her son and her neighbors. The task is a daunting one, and not with an easy remedy, but the emphasis of the community, of the 60-year-old club role models, of CDI in Villa De Barca, provides an avenue for change, one that can be well trodden together.

-Dani