December 1974

My class, the sixth grade, and I decided to organize a Christmas party for poor children. We rehearsed a simple manger play in Portuguese. We worked for weeks making hand-made presents, in the school as well as at home: Some knitted dolls and animals, others made necklaces, some drew holy pictures. All baked Christmas cookies and put them in hand-painted cans. They went to so much trouble, as though they were making presents for their best friends.The Dutch family Ens put their sitio at our disposal and we spent the whole day there with the children: my pupils, their parents and the favela children, a total of about seventy. What luck that we have the Ens family! The festival was very nice. At eleven o'clock we met at the sitio, decorated the real, planted evergreen trees and played. My pupils had prepared some games such as sack-hopping, etc, with prizes. The ice was soon broken. The parents admired how Zéca and Cido played with the children.

Then came food, very important. We placed the meal on a huge table under a tree. But - a tropical rainstorm poured down and we all crowded into the house with our plates. At about five o'clock we got the theatre ready. The parents sat on chairs and tree-stumps as Cido emerged with the children from the dark. You could see their faces lit up by candles and torches. The crib scene also had a beautiful effect in this natural setting under the stars.

Just before the festival the class outing had taken place: a week in the Itatiai mountains. I trained the children in my travel style: a lot of walking and simple fare. They accepted it all with good grace and are of the opinion that our outings are the best in the school. When the other classes rode up behind us and had caviar for lunch, they found it out of place and unworthy of a class outing.

24 March 1975

I would like to disappear, be free, wander in nature, sun, wind as in student days - the beach, waves, water, music, dancing, have a person who listens when I try to bear the problems of others. Where has my enthusiasm gone? I have the feeling that I am not giving the children in the school and at home what they need. My classes seem dry, without fire.

I have tied myself down too much, contrary to my need to be independent. But if you're always only independent, "free", at the end you become a tramp. Somehow everything has its time: the time for unattached wandering in the world and the time for commitment in order to accomplish something, and that involves restrictions and sacrificing certain things. But all that doesn't help: you have to commit yourself totally to the children as though they were your own, never only halfway.

May 1975

The family is growing: another child, Elizete, eleven years old. Her father disappeared years ago and left huge debts that her mother must pay off with great difficulty, so she couldn't afford to send her children to school any more. The solution? Dona Ute. I somehow managed to get a place for her in the Waldorf School, where the class is very full. Then Ruben's sister, Marcia, came. She's six years old and goes to the kindergarten.

We are quite conspicuous. Recently seven of us went to the dentist, and we filled up the waiting room. Five of us to the photographers and there was no room left for anyone else in the little shop. ("Are they all yours?"). Last week six of us at the doctor's ("Are you in charge of an orphanage?") We all took out our knitting and sewing needles in the waiting room and went to work (we had calculated a three-hour wait). Delighted cries ensued: "Que bonitinho!" "Que maravilha!"

Finally we were able to see the doctor. Basically they are all healthy, only Elizete has anemia. At the end the doctor said he had never seen such well behaved children. They really are very nice among themselves and some families even compete to invite them as playmates for their own children.

The two older children, Maristela and Elizete, and very independent by Brazilian standards, travel alone by bus, go shopping, etc., which is a sensation here. They are also very solicitous and take good care of the smaller ones. Elizete and Marcia are the cleverest, Maristela and Rubens have hearts of gold, so respectful and participative, as is seldom seen in children. Recently I came home tired from the teachers' meeting; they all had a peeled orange in their hands. Rubens said: "Now we will all give a piece of our orange to Ute". We share everything. If one of them has a piece of cake from school he saves it in order to share it with the others. This is more important to me than any cleverness.

Once I came home from a rehearsal at the school. Smoke told me that the children had been cooking. They were all in theatre costumes, Rubens as a servant took my shoes off and put my tired feet into comfortable slippers. Then I was led into the living-room where a throne had been prepared; I sat on it and pillows were placed behind my back. The performance began: dancing, flute-playing, mime. Then they gave me a menu and finally the food. How nice!

October 1975

Outside someone was clapping. In Brazil, especially in the country, this is the way you announce yourself. I went to the gate. They were children from the favela. "Do you have something for us, dry bread or anything else?"

They go clapping from house to house and beg for something to eat. I gave them something, talked with them a while and asked where they lived. "Come visit us, we don't live far from here, in the favela Monte Azul."

One day I went with them to their huts. What miserable lives they lead in these drafty wooden huts perched on muddy slopes. Children, children and more children, but all friendly. They hang around, not knowing how to play. The girls are tied to the household -- washing clothes, fetching water, caring for the younger ones, etc. The boys are much freer, they play football or ride around in busses or go to the super-market to beg or guard cars. In reality these children have no childhood; they are miniature adults.

What to do?

I was reminded of an idea I had two years ago as I wrote my pupils' report cards. I saw Helmut before me, Gisela, Carla and many others. I considered: What could help Gisela to become self-aware? She would need the feeling that she also had something to give by using her handicraft abilities. To write reports on Carla became boring with the years because she was perfect in everything. What was she lacking? To open out to her fellow-human beings. And Helmut? He was too occupied with himself, thinking that only he had suffered in life. And so the idea developed in me that it would be beneficial for many pupils if they could teach something to other children who had not had the same opportunities that they had had.

But at that time the pupils were in the fifth grade, still too young. And I didn't know any favela children. But now I might risk trying to interest them in the idea. One morning, somewhat timidly, I proposed to them my idea for an escolinha (little school) for favela children. A rush of enthusiasm. They all had ideas: I can teach the children gymnastics, I knitting, I handicrafts, I can play with them. We'll collect clothing, crayons, old cloth, drawing paper. Yes, and where will all this take place?

In my house, we can use the old shed in the yard. So it began.

Advent 1975

Christmas is almost upon us. I just finished wrapping the thirty presents for Christmas Eve. Marcia wished for a sleeping bag for her dwarf, which I crocheted for her. Then a hammock for the smallest doll and various things for the crib, which "disappeared" a couple of weeks ago and will re-appear embellished on Christmas Eve.

Yesterday was the last day of school. I will be happy if I see two good reports. Next year there will be four, as Maricela will go into first grade, Rubens in the second, Elizete and Maristela in the fifth. Therefore Maristela is the academically farthest advanced in their family, after Zéca. The fourth grade was the highest for the others, while some didn't go to school at all. She is as simple as always though, and doesn't try to lord it over her sisters and brothers.

Rubens goes to school with an enthusiasm that delights his teachers. He is continually collecting stones or flowers, wrapping them as though they were the greatest treasures in the world, and giving them to the teachers. This regard for things and people, which is in him, is something very special.

December 1975

Here life goes on as usual - fun, anger, celebrations, fighting the cockroaches, overflowing wash-baskets and ever more people who live, learn and work here.

You wanted a list of them. Here it is.

Williams, from Bolivia, 29, learning to be a waiter Renato, from Chile, 26, learning to be a cook Mario, from the Ukraine, 23, learning to be a waiter Cido, from Paraná, 23, learning to be a cook Odair, from Paraná, 20, learning to be a cook Maria jose, from Paraná, 19, learning to be a nurse Joao, from Paraná, 19, learning to be a waiter Eliza, from Paraná, 14, learning to be a seamstress Maristela. from Paraná, 12, Waldorf School Elizete, from Paraná, 12, Waldorf School Rubens, from Paraná, 7, Waldorf School Marcia, from Paraná, 6, Waldorf Kindergarten

So we are fourteen altogether.

Zéca and Williams have just returned from Bolivia where Zéca traveled around for three months with our Bolivian and could satisfy to some extent his permanent thirst for travel. At dawn I heard voices outside my window. First Zéca marched in dressed in a poncho, then Williams and behind him a third one -- a Chilean, Renato. They met during the days-long train ride from Bolivia and, as they had only ten cruzeiros between them, they decided never to part. Thus he became the fourteenth inhabitant of the house and sleeps, in want of a better place, on a borrowed ping-pong table in the so-called palacio, the lumber-room that we had cleared for Williams, painted and put in an electric light. After only a week in Brazil this lucky chap already had a place to sleep, study and work. Zéca was able to get him admitted to the hotel school. When Renato gets up in the morning he must role his mattress up on a ball and cover it with a cloth, because in the afternoon twelve favela children stream into the same room. Twice a week pupils from the Waldorf School come and teach five to twelve year old children from the favela. They paint, sew, knit, play theatre, work with clay, garden, etc.

The pupils are thrilled. I went with a pupil to the favela recently. She brought baby clothes, milk and diapers with her and put on the diapers like an experienced mother. The children act much more naturally when they are in contact with the favela people.

Link to:

The Development of a Development Worker (with same image)

I would like to describe how my idea of development aid, which led me to work for the German Development Service, was transformed through practice and finally gave rise to the following questions:

Is development aid meaningful in its present form?

Do we have any right to engage in the third world development process and these people's lives?

During the GDS training cycle, we were faced with the question: Why did you join the GDS? First there were the personal reasons: to get to know people from different social origins and with different cultural backgrounds; to master difficult situations with simple means and, well, desire for adventure. Alongside these personal motives are the more altruistic ones, which, however, are also egoistic in that they influence one's own personal development through the positive effect on others: to alleviate misery through the simple desire to help and from a certain shame at being well-fed whereas others go hungry. Behind this is a more or less clear picture of a world divided between rich and poor. Expressions like population explosion, hunger, educational deficiency, arise and finally culminate in the idea that only the industrially developed countries can bring about an improvement in the lives of two-thirds of humanity through capital investment (building up the infrastructure, industrialization), personal aid (sending experts etc.) and improving commercial relations (higher prices for raw material).

Armed with this knowledge, I enlisted in the GDS and was sent to Brazil a few months later where, aside from kindergarten work in a favela, I occupied myself trying to get boys and girls away from the deadening effects of hanging about the streets by giving them worthwhile tasks. Handicrafts, theater, sports, folk-dancing, sales of their work in the wealthy part of the city, were able to give many children the feeling that they could accomplish something through their own efforts.

When you see someone who needs help, you jump in and help him without considering whether the help will have a lasting effect. This is what I did in the first months of my development aid work. But after a while you lift your head up from the daily details, look around and then adjust your contribution to development aid and the social conditions that made this help seem necessary, according to a broader view of the economic, social and cultural conditions of the country. You feel out of place in the presence of rich coffee plantations, modern skyscrapers and fully stocked, elegant shops. Is it really necessary that we come from Germany as volunteer development workers to a country that has so many people living in abundance? This caused the first crack in my faith in the value of development aid.

Nevertheless, I still saw the value of working in a favela and directly helping the poor as far as possible - working with children, collecting old clothes, obtaining American powdered milk for mothers with small children, etc.

But I gradually realized that development aid, even when it actually reaches the poor, can be dangerous. The poor accustom themselves to receiving without contributing anything: when they're sick, and if they're lucky, they are given medicine; when they're cold they are given, God willing, clothing; if a child is under-nourished the mother is given powdered milk, if she's lucky.

These two criteria - first: you get something without doing anything; second: only when chance wills it to be so, strengthen the passive "as God wills" attitude of the poor, which doesn't allow them to become active in determining their own destiny. It is the receptive, waiting attitude of a person who expects the good as well as the negative influences on his life to come from without, and not from inside himself. The wealthy corrupt the poor with their gifts and purely material help. Characteristics which are, in themselves, positive, such as cheerfulness despite poverty and little envy of the wealthy, are fatal in their effects. They coincide with the generosity of some of the wealthy, awake feelings of thankfulness in the poor and assuage the consciences of the rich, despite their privileges, which are obstacles to a just social order.

Through observing my social environment and the effect of development aid on the character of its recipients, I came to plant the question: Is it right to aspire to an evolutionary model for under-developed countries based on western standards, which, in the best of cases, can result in an improvement of living standards, but leaves the political and social structures unchanged? Or is it preferable to dispense with the immediate improvement of living conditions and substitute a revolution from below which would eliminate the present social forms and replace them with a new democratic social order?

What role can a development worker play under these conditions? Probably only in the field of education; all other forms of development aid are harmful to the recipients if they don't stimulate them to act on their own. Education in the sense of imparting information on a wide basis: get the children off the streets and into primary and trade schools. It must be kept in mind, however, that mechanical learning through memorizing can suffocate the natural desire to learn which is innate in every child, and that thinking and the critical observation of the environment should be promoted. Education also in the sense of consciousness-building: make clear to the oppressed how their favela existence is the inevitable result of the overall structure of the country. Education, furthermore, in the general human sense: restores a spiritual center to their lives.

The problem of a rich upper-class and poor land and slum dwellers is not only a problem of well-being. Material misery and nutritional deficiency are merely the most extreme forms of a gulf which goes much deeper. When Che Guevara said, "It's not a matter of how much meat one eats or how often one can go to the beach. It's a matter of the individual feeling richer and much more responsible within."

I think he analyzed the problem on a much higher level than most official representatives of development aid. They take the position that poverty can only be eliminated if you give the poor something to eat. But the problem is also to change the fact that the lower classes are objects to those who govern and to allow them to participate in the decisions and the life of the country. Furthermore, their traditional world-conception, which corresponded to their way of life and supported them spiritually, having been torn away, it must be made possible for them to create an inner world which corresponds to an industrialized, technical society. All this will not be accomplished by giving the poor more to eat. Their need is not only physical, but also spiritual.

Poverty has always existed. But hunger, poverty and misery in a jungle village, where the people are supported by a spiritual background, is different from hunger, poverty and misery in a favela. The stomachs growl in both cases. But the spiritual situation of a black in a jungle village is different from that of a black in a favela. Together with civilization, cinema, TV, assembly-lines, the crowds and hectic activity of big cities -- this technical world into which they have been thrown without being able to enjoy its amenities -- their spiritual world has been taken from them, the myths and fairy tales, the beliefs, the instinct for correct nutrition, appropriate ways of raising children, medicinal plants. Substitutes have hardly been provided; efforts to eliminate illiteracy have a practical value, but do not create a new world of ideas. The devastating effects of the stolid learning of the ABCs, the memorizing of historical dates and Geography concepts in school can be best seen in the favela people. They are complete materialists. Their efforts, as soon as they have overcome the most basic misery, are directed towards obtaining civilization's material goods such as radio, TV, etc. For me development aid is real help only when it is oriented towards the human being. Here is an example from our favela.

It makes no sense to build playgrounds or public laundries if there is no group of people to teach the children, the mothers and, when possible, the fathers, to actively adapt themselves to life, to consciously absorb the phenomena of the environment together with all its injustice, and implant in them a new spiritual hunger. This can be done through practical work, for example, the building of a youth center with the children in which handicrafts, theater and stories in which the world outside the favela is brought into view are undertaken; and always done in a way that enables the children to be introspectively active and carry responsibility themselves, and are confident that in every case one is responsive to them, even if it means running the risk of failure. Alongside the external arrangements (for example handicrafts which could be sold to help finance the youth center) the feeling must exist that something has been done through their own efforts. Will-power must be cultivated and a seed planted which can grow into the attitude that one's life can be changed through personal efforts and is not dependent on a destiny uninfluenced by personal acts.

There could be regular meeting with the adults about how to make the favela more worthy of its human inhabitants. Specific problems must be addressed which are tackled by knowledgeable work-groups. There are enough problems and questions to be dealt with: obtaining water, garbage disposal, additional earnings through work at home, regular school attendance for children, etc. The desire for improvement must come from within -- it makes no sense, for example, to build a laundry when the favela people never desired one. During regular meetings, however, the wish for one could arise from within and then be realized. In approaching common problems in this way, the awareness would gradually arise that one is not alone with his problems, but that thousands are in the same situation. Democracy in miniature could be practiced. The favelados would be treated a human beings, as acting, feeling, thinking human beings -- and not as objects.

A social worker can act as a catalyst. Not as leader, for that would be tutelage under another name, but as a person who gives impulses but doesn't do what the other can do: partly stimulating, partly meeting them half-way.

To be continued