Illene Pevec on the continuing work of A CHILD'S GARDEN OF PEACE in Brazil

Santo Angelo, Nov. 14, 2007

I went to the photo store that I have always used for developing my photos. Edegar, the man who runs it, impresses me because he gives free art classes to economically challenged children. He showed me a series of photos that came out of one of his classes. A teacher took a picture of a nine-year-old girl who has failed first-grade four times. The first photo shows her with one eye rolled up in her head. The second photo shows the girl with the other eye rolled up. No one had ever noticed that both her eyes wandered. They had thought only one did. The fact that a child can be in school for four years with an obvious defect in her vision and that no one did anything, gives you an idea of how things are in Brazil.

The teacher's husband saw the photos and called a private insurance company, UNIMED, which has a hospital here. He asked them to help. They operated on the little girl's eyes and she can now see and play. Her life has been transformed and, probably, she will now get to second grade. The after-photos show a beautiful girl, a total transformation.

(Later, the man who persuaded UNIMED to do the operation was driving in the countryside. A tree fell on his car and killed him instantly. All I can imagine is that his mission on the planet was to save this child from a life of misery and, mission accomplished, he left. Maybe there is no explanation.)

Zelina School: I met with all the teachers yesterday at the Zelina School where I always work and we laid out our plan of action for flowers and vegetables, as well as herbs for tea. Naturally, there is a federal holiday (the third since my arrival in Brazil a month ago), which closes the schools for the next two days; so I will start on Monday at the school. In the meantime, I will be setting up a preschool program for the moms to get together and learn to make pop-top purses--so they can all make some money and so I have enough to bring back to sell.

I shall attach a photo of the huge pine tree that grows in Curitiba and has seeds the size of a pecan, totally delicious and one of the cheapest forms of protein I have found in Brazil.

It's good to be back, but hard to see so many of my young ones with babies already. The girls get some identity by attaching themselves to boys very early. They have babies because they do not see alternatives. All the babies are so beautiful, I should not worry, but I know how poor everyone is, that it is so hard to make ends meet, hard even to buy food! It is so hard to continue one's education here and I understand this. I just keep looking for ways to support on-going education that provides some way to earn a living beyond being a maid. I shall keep after all these kids and hope to find ways to help them find the technical courses and education they need to find decent work or start little home enterprises--like making the pop-top purses.

Santo Angelo, Nov. 19, 2007:

From the newspaper, Sao Paulo Globo , Nov. 19

  " An elite group of 74 thousand federal employees receive benefits such as a housing supplement of $1800 US, a luxury car, LCD TV, cell phone with unlimited use, an apartment with Jacuzzi, and a new set of bath and bed linens for their home every two years. Today, the elite earn 24.5 times the average Brazilian income."

Reading this enrages me and helps me to understand the general tendency to robbery in this country. They even stole three of the flowers the children planted in front of the church this week to celebrate their first communion. How does one teach honesty and working for what one needs if the federal government behaves this way? The example presented by those with power to those who have none has created an untenable situation. Five hundred years of pillaging that started with the robbing natural resources and continues with the robbing of tax money, money that could go to health and education, but go instead to paying absurd benefits to those who already earn a lot, and this from the working class president.

And so the struggle for social justice goes on each day, with children in the field by the river cleaning up the trash left by adults too lazy to put it out for the trash truck that passes six days a week. But there will be a park for the children to play in by the time I leave...

A hot summer evening offers cool refuge on a porch that faces east. Generations gather to drink mate from a common gourd, crochet purses from the pop-tops off of soda cans and thread, and watch a baby play. Up at the church one of our many purse-making classes goes on; but I am avoiding groups of people to let my voice heal I slept with a fan blowing on me all night to ward off mosquitoes. The fan took my voice. I have realized now that there is mould all over the lower wall of my room. I guess the fan blew the spores right into my poor throat and lungs. When it is hot, it is next to impossible to sleep without a fan, but I am going to have to or I will get really sick from all this mould. Thank heavens last night it rained and the weather cooled off a bit.

THE NUCLEO

This picture is from last Sunday when I rounded up help to free the Nucleo, a community center, of trash so we could begin our programs for the young children there on Monday. I tried to get some boys--they owe me 40 hours of community and school garden help in return for a course last year in permaculture--but no way could I complete with their Sunday soccer game. The girls came and a couple of little boys too small for the soccer match.

The Nucleo has been totally abandoned in recent years. It is run by volunteers, and the last team didn't do anything to maintain it and they let people throw parties. The result was the destruction of much of the floor and a whole lot of trash in the back yard. The new president is enthusiastic about our work; but he works so much he hasn't been able to help us. The kids picked up trash wearing the gloves that I brought for gardening. In one and a half hours we declared it clean.

The next day, my host arrived with an axe to clear out the weed trees. It hurts me to cut a tree, but the overgrowth was sheltering drug users at night and these trees were keeping the sun from our new orchard. Now the open visibility of the site may discourage drug activity and our gardens will have a chance to grow--if all goes well on the organizing the next phase of the community garden. The fruit trees we planted last time have grown a lot. The peach tree is covered in tiny peaches.

Monday morning Tante, one of the first counsellors in our summer camp of 2002, came and helped clean. We began our 2007 program with a morning group of thirteen and an afternoon group of fifteen, aged five to thirteen. Since there is only a half-day of school, kids need activities in the half-day they are home.

Each morning and each afternoon we have one and a half hours of environmentally related activities followed by a healthy snack. I have two women preparing daily snacks for 40 to 45 kids and eight to fifteen moms. The snacks are a variety of fruit and vegetable pieces, and cakes from recipes from a special Brazilian recipe book. We use recipes with things like banana peel, papaya and pineapple peel, beets, etc. The moms get a copy of every recipe to take home. The most popular juice so far is collard greens with lemon juice. We put it in a blender, including the lemon peel and serve it really cold. It is about the most refreshing drink one can wish for on a hot- day. At our film night, the mayor drank three glasses and asked for the recipe.

In the afternoons and evenings the moms have crochet classes and we have two baby sitters for the toddlers and babies there at the church basement so that babies are happy near their moms and everyone can learn in a cool, friendly environment. Getting the moms to value their time at a good rate has been hard because they have only experienced exploitation in the job market of being maids here.

Lourdes and Eve teach. They are members of the family with whom I stay. In the evenings, Pedrina, the mother of the woman who made my purse teaches. She and her daughter, Mara, have some great new designs they are introducing. Our goal is to have a cooperative of women who make pop-top purses with me (and anyone who wants to help me) selling them in the US. The purses look great. We had a full-page newspaper article this week of me, one of my young instructors who also goes to the night purse class, and a purse.  

The   new president of the city council, Edson, is a man who has helped us over the years with tree saplings and a workshop on restoring the river. He is very keen on the purses and invited me to a big meeting yesterday of the trash pickers. The coke company here, along with some other companies and associations, help out the trash pickers. They get big carts to haul their trash, uniforms, gloves, etc. There are only 10 in this program, but the city has many trash pickers--I don't know why the discrepancy.

At the program I saw all the people who have been helping me over the years, including the president of the recycling co-op, Ecos do Verde, and the very nice local man who makes t-shirts for me when I need them. These people helped us with our first community clean-up day and many of them appear in our first documentary film. Ecos was thrilled to learn that the group had appeared all over the world in film festivals and on The Natural Heroes, an Emmy winning series (The Public Broadcasting Service [PBS] in the USA).

I finally met the environmental director of the pop distributing company yesterday. This is the most environmentally active company here. They even gave us a truck for the community clean-up. The irony is that I refuse to serve pop ever at my community events--we only serve fresh juice or milk--and now we are making purses from the pop-tops off of soft drink cans.

Edson, the local politician, is going to arrange with this group of trash pickers to leave the pop-tops in the same place were the meeting was held. He'll pay for them there, directly. Then we will he will resell them to us without marking them up. Some of the women have been gathering pop-tops for months; but those are all now in purses; so, now we need to buy more. Our main competition in the pop-top market is orthodontists, who buy them to make braces.

Five years ago Edson had promised us he would get us the wood to build a playground when the city provided the space by the river. That day has come, so I took four kids who had been at the original meeting when he had made the promise. They were twelve-years-old then and now they are eighteen. They'll have a park for their own children eventually. I took them so they could learn about following up on promises in politics. It has taken a change of political power to get this land approved. The current director of public works, (also the directors of education, environment and social services) have promised they will start while I am here. I invited Edson to our film night to announce his gift and he came with the mayor. He promised about half the wood we need. That is a good start.

The Friday Film Awards Night: The Secretary of Culture had promised us equipment on which to show our film. He arrived with the promised projector and we showed the four films the kids had made in 2002 with our video instructor and editor, Myra Margolin. We all missed Myra's presence at this really lovely event. The films have been touring festivals and academic conferences. One won a prize at the Aspen Film Festival; but it hadn't been shown here where it was made. Every chair was filled so there was standing room only. I paid for Maiquel's bus fare from Porto Alegre, so the whole team (nine kids) were present to receive their cash award--two hundred dollars. Half of this money went to the girl who wrote the script and did the interviews; the other half was divided amongst the eight others. The press came and the kids dressed up. We had popcorn and collard/lemonade, beet cake, and carrot cake. After all the excitement, we followed up with a birthday party for Cristiano with fun, dancing, and me in bed before anyone else. But the kids partied all night, just like at film festivals.

I have to deal with the constant political issues that occur when money enters a poor community--jealousy on the part of people not hired to teach, etc. I have two young teachers for the kids, and two young assistants--three kids teaching each group of younger kids daily, and two babysitters for the babies.   All of these young people except for one assistant have worked with me or been my students for years. I am thrilled to see that the two young teachers, Tante, who was one of the first counsellors in our summer camp of 2002, and now a mom with a cute two year old, and Jaqueline solve problems, come up with their own lesson plan ideas, manage the kids, and pass on what they have learned with me. We all work together but I often have to go to meetings to move the park forward, etc, and I leave them to their work. And they do a great job. Tante, who is now 24, has promised me she is going back to school in February to become a teacher. Jacqueline, who is 18, is taking the exam for law school.

I am working on a way to keep this going when I leave and this depends on help from an order of nuns here in town. Sonia, the abbess, is the daughter of the family I live with here. They have won an award with UNICEF for their work, and have an order that works in many parts of the world. Last year Larissa, Myra, and I did activities in the program the nuns run in Sao Borja. Sonia knew of my challenge to figure out a way for things to continue for the children when I am not here and this morning she was inspired to ask the woman who runs the education program at the convent here in town if she could help. If you pray, please say a prayer that this plan we are hatching   will work out so we can continue environmental activities for the kids.

Next in my list of several challenges is getting the community president to call a meeting of adults to resolve how to run the garden cooperatively when I am not around. If I am not here, people do pretty much nothing. (Except when I paid Seu Adao to run a children's program.) I want this to shift   so that people garden because they want to and   manage themselves and the tools. If my plan works out, the kids will have one part of the garden for their activities; but there is plenty of space for other gardeners. If we have adult gardeners there on weekends it will cut down perhaps on the drug use, etc.

Aside from these activities, I teach at the grade school each morning and some afternoons when I still have the energy at four PM. So, you now know what my week with the kids, moms, and local politicians looks like. My relationship with the grade school remains strong, and we all support each other. The kids, my two young teachers and I wrote a song that the children performed before the films called Our Friend, the River. The kids sang with gusto.

We still need to build a park, have a purse fashion show at the weekend craft fair, and start the gardens during the next week. I am going to buy the purses directly from the mothers starting Friday, and will bring them back to North America with me to sell. An Internet marketer of third-world crafts suggested that I employ the party method of selling these really stunning, hand-made, one-of-a-kind items. So, my idea is, a friend holds a party and gets a free purse for her efforts. All the money will go back into the project and at least half of that will go into the kids' scholarship fund. That way I have money to continue the project and the scholarship fund grows and helps these kids, now eighteen, to go on to college or technical training.

A non-profit could resell the purses in any way it wishes. It could mark them up and make a profit. Everyone wins: the trash gets picked up to collect the pop-tops the moms earn much more money that they would be able to doing anything else here and can stay with their young children, they will learn how well they can make money with their own talents and perseverance, A Child's Garden of Peace can continue, and the scholarship fund can grow.

Abraços from Santo Angelo from me and from all the kids,

Illène

You can contact Illene Pevec and A Child's Garden of Peace at achildsgardenofpeace@gmail.com