Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [95]
About the girls themselves: we now have eight girls in the program, including two new young ones—Aninha and Jessica, and three older ones, Dazá, Aqualuxe, and Luedge.
Paula (Lidia), Christina, and Juliana are all doing great. Paula and Juliana are going through some general teenager problems but are continuing to work hard at their studies. Ana, Christina’s mother lost her maid’s job when the family she was working for moved to São Paulo. She, Christina, and Christina’s brother were on the street for a bit, but she has now found another job, and they are staying in the one-room shack of a friend and her son. She now works six days a week from seven in the morning to seven at night for about $40 a month. This means the children are alone much of the time, and Christina often comes to school crying from hunger. We are still giving about $30 a month to Christina’s mother and periodically feeding Christina when she comes to school. We have become increasingly aware that we must work with the families of the girls to help them improve their situations in order for the girls to have a chance to study and concentrate. Amazingly enough, despite all the difficulties, Christina is maintaining passing grades and almost never misses either the tutoring or school.
Paula is going through a hard time right now. The family’s three-room house is now shared by her father, her father’s girlfriend, two brothers, an aunt, and a grandmother. She is having difficulties communicating with her father (not unusual for a teenager), and she has some health problems. Her mother (who lives away from the family) will not take her to the doctor, probably because she would have to take a day off to wait in the enormous lines for the free medical clinics for the poor. Rita is taking care of this problem at this time. Paula burst into tears when she was telling me about her fears and her worries; on top of everything else (and not surprisingly) her Portuguese marks are not high. She is terrified that because of this she will be kicked out of the program.
Juliana is still doing well in her classes, continues to be very directed in her studies, and her home life is stable with her older sister still able to (marginally) support the family through making and selling pizza on the street. We did learn something that has given us conflicting reactions. At the end of last school year in November, all of the girls failed at least one exam on the first try and had to take them again, at which time they all passed. Or so we thought. We now know that Juliana actually passed all her exams the first time around, but lied to us, saying that she had failed. This meant she had to study for another month and take a make-up exam. She did this because she did not want Paula to study and take the make-up exam alone. Of course she shouldn’t have lied, yet it is hard to feel anything but compassion for such support for a friend. And we will never know how much this support helped Paula to pass.
Also, some news on Patricia. One of her brothers recently got shot five times. Amazingly, he was not killed, but is now a quadriplegic and will be confined to bed for life. I am not quite sure what will happen when he returns from hospital. The sociologist who originally introduced Patricia to Bahia Street is currently working with an Italian aid group to try and have them fund the construction of a small room for him on the side of the family’s small home (which houses fourteen people). Patricia is still trying to attend public school.
I don’t know the new girls very well yet, but they are both adorable. Aninha lives with her father and grandmother, who accompanies the younger girls to school and back everyday (we need to be very careful of the younger girls, as people might kidnap them and sell them for the