Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [109]
We also have a part-time, volunteer Spanish teacher, Margarita, a student from Spain who has been studying at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) on an exchange program through the University of Essex. She studied at UFBA for six months and is now volunteering with us for six months as a part of her international development studies course. I would like to share with you a letter she wrote to me where she described her background, which influenced her interest in Bahia Street.
“…my mother took me out of school when I was eleven years old…My parents never read a book in their lives. I do not blame them for anything because their situation was a consequence of the Spanish Civil War. They did not have an opportunity to receive an education because Spain was so destroyed after the war that children from the working classes, like my parents, could not go to school, they just worried about surviving.
For many years I was semi-illiterate…When I was much older and went out with other young people who were studying at university, I saw the intellectual difference between us. This made me feel bad and inferior to them. This is why, when I was twenty-one, I returned to education…I believe that education makes people free, and knowledge makes people feel and be equal…For me, it was difficult to get where I am now, into higher education, but it was not impossible, like it is for many poor and street children in Latin America…. I would not have managed to break the cycle of illiteracy in which I was living when I was a child if my circumstances were the same as poor children in Brazil. The only hope for these…children…are the non-governmental organizations…{Because of this} I would like to work with Latin American children and help to break the cycle of illiteracy, which is one of the consequences of poverty.”
Things are going well at Bahia Street, but we have two programs that we desperately need to start but do not have the money for. The first is the Nutrition Project. The girls are coming to school hungry. We have been feeding them snacks of fruit, but this is not enough. In order for them to study, they need to have at least one decent meal a day, something they are not getting at home.
Rita has set up a wonderful way to feed the girls for minimal cost and help another local nonprofit as well. A few doors down the street from the Bahia Street Center, a woman has started a project to feed children who sell on the streets. These are not street children; they have homes and parents, but their families are so poor that the parents send the children out into the streets every day to sell whatever they can—candy, pencils, pens, telephone cards—to contribute to the family income. These children are sometimes as young as six, and they spend ten to twelve hours a day on the streets and generally do not eat anything. This woman is getting donations of food from local restaurants and offering a hot lunch that includes rice, beans, meat or fish, salad, juice and coffee. She is charging the children only a few pennies per meal. An excellent program, but she is having a difficult time making ends meet.
Rita has agreed to pay this woman about US$0.45 per girl in the Bahia Street program if she will include them in her lunch program. This is considerably more than the