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 History and Background |
| Goals |
| Successes on a Shoestring |
| The Plaster-of-Paris Angels |
| How You Can Help |
In 1964, Miriam Ulrych, a young faculty wife from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, spent a sabbatical year in Salvador, Bahia, in the northeast of Brazil. She fell in love with the city's natural beauty, its wonderful colonical architecture, and ten year-old Paulo Machado, a Grade Two drop-out. Paulo came over to play with the Ulrych's little boy one day and ended up staying the year. Miriam made friends with Paulo's mother, a resourceful woman struggling to raise thirteen children on her fireman-husbands salary of thirty-three dollars a month. The Ulrychs put Paulo in school and, for the next six years, sent his mother fifteen dollars a month to keep him there.
In 1984 the two families reunited. Life had been kind to them. The fathers still had secure jobs. Miriam had finished graduate school and was a social worker in private practice. Mrs. Machado had a new house with running water. The children had all grown into healthy young adults. Paulo had finished elementay school and became a proud policeman and a loving father. His mother insisted that the money from Canada had made a crucial difference to her family's well-being.
Certainly, the Machados' neighbours had not fared as well. Miriam was shocked by the spreading misery of the vast shantytowns ringing the city. She discovered that less then fifteen percent of all Brazilians were enjoying the average standard of living of Europeans or North Americans. Forty percent of the adult workforce was reportedly unemployed or underemployed--both euphemisms for the struggle to survive with no regular paycheck or social assistance.
A Few Harsh Facts
Brazil has the world's second-largest disparity in the distribution of wealth. The Brazilians joke that they have three classes: the rich, the poor, and the miserable.
In Bahia, the miserable are the majority: eighty percent of the people subsist below the offical poverty line of thirty-five dollars per month per mouth to feed. Thirty-five dollars buys five hamburgers, fries, and cokes at McDonalds.
UNICEF's Progress of Nations reports that four out of ten Brazilian children leave school before the fifth grade. An estimated two-and-a-half million have never set foot in a school. Every year thousands of children--some as young as five or six--head to the streets to work. Once there, predators, pregnancies, disease, drugs and death squads seal their fate with mind-numbing regularity.
For years, rumors circulated about the torture and murder of "street children". In the late eighties, the Catholic Church began documenting cases and arousing publish concern. In July of 1993, eight children were massacred as they slept on the steps of Rio de Janeiro's Candelaria Cathedral. Gilberto Dimenstein, the journalist who is the country's leading expert on the problem, insisted that four children a week were being murdered in the streets of Brazil--more than were dying in Bosnia--and that their killers were policemen hired by business owners to get rid of a growing nuisance.
A study done at the University of Sao Paulo established that eighty-nine percent of the victims of street execution were African-Brazilian or mixed race children. Brazil was the world's largest slave trader for almost 400 years. African-Brazilians entered the twentieth century landless, illiterate and disenfranchised; most of them still belong to the impoverished under-class. Some are still slaves.
In 1996, the Catholic Church's Commission on Modern Day Slavery documented over 25, 150 cases of slavery in Brazil. The Commission estimates that at least 100,000 people--including many children--have been lured into a lifetime of indentured labour where they toil in horrible conditions and are beaten if they try to escape.
Saddened by the spreading misery she found on her return, Miriam Ulrych made a decision to do what she could to help keep children off the streets and in school. She raised funds for her early efforts by travelling around the northeast of Brazil buying folk art which she sold out of her Vancouver home at Christmas. She hired a local cab driver, Luiz Carlos Barbosa, to help her. He rapidly became an indispensable colleage in a growing project.
In 1988 Miriam and Luiz visited a small invasao, a squatter's shantytown at the bottom of a ravine on the outskirts of Salvador. Here four hundred families were living, crowded together in political and social isolation. Part of a great, unplanned migratory wave, the landless residents of Dona Aurora had left the rural interior to seek work in the coastal city. Only a third of the men and none of the women had found regular employment. Many were visibly suffering from poor nutrition, parasites, and diseases. Their wells were polluted. They had no school, no health services, no sewage system, no paved roads, no telephone, no bus service, and no residents' association to protect their rights or to seek basic services. They lived in fear of the land owner, the police, and their ever-changing new neighbours.
Against these incredible odds, a 28 year-old domestic worker, Josefa Rosa dos Santos, had taught herself to read and write and roused her neighbours into building a little mud-and-stick school. For a few hopeful months, she and another mother ran the only school in the community. Sadly, lack of funds forced them to close their school and return to domestic labour. Impressed with Josefa's leadership ability and commitment to democratic community development, Miriam and Luiz offered to help her.
Thus, the Street Angels really began when three amateur aid workers joined hands to reinforce each other's efforts at keeping children off the streets and in school. Miriam would raise the funds; Luiz would provide local transportation and take care of the accounts; and Josefa would co-ordinate the community development. They would recruit the help of their friends, make the decisions by consensus, and learn by doing. In September of 1988, the Directors of the Weaver Institute agreed to take on the project.
Before we began to work in Dona Aurora, the residents had no clean water, no telephone, no school, no local employment, no health service, no resident's association, and no legal claim to the land. Just four hundred families living in shacks at the bottom of a ravine.
Much has changed but much remains to be done. An invasao (squatter's shantytown) is not a traditional village. Resident turnover is high. Little exists in the way of natural kinship systems. Afraid of thieves and suspicious of new neighbours, people live crowded together in political and social isolation. Lacking birth certificates and the resources to accquire them, many do not even officially exist in their own country.
Chronic poverty, widespread unemployment, illiteracy, and domestic violence are the norm. Poor nutrition, intestinal parasites, running sores, dengue fever and hepatitis are common. Raw sewage oozes through the footpaths. Garbage piles up. Dirt roads turn to mud. Children play in slime. Despite the enormous challenges still facing us, we are heartened by our amazing successes on a shoestring.
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Page maintained by Katherine. (E-mail: streetangels@angelfire.com)
