This morning all of the Brazil 14 team (19 of us) were scheduled to spend the morning providing some direct contribution through labour to an NGO, Estação Vida.
This is an NGO of similar function to Politriz and ONG CASA, in that it takes in disadvantaged children through the day and provides activities and learning opportunities for them that they wouldn't otherwise receive.
Estação Vida, or Station Life, is in a new part of town to us, where they are building relatively high density, low cost blocks of apartments which the less well-off can afford to buy through a federal sponsored loan scheme. As a result there are lots of children with nothing to do out of school (which you may remember is either morning or afternoon). You can find out more about it here
http://projetoestacaovida.wordpress.com/.
 |
| The entrance |
 |
| Arrived and waiting for directions |
The Director started us off with a good tour of the facilities - it is fortunate in having a lot of land and a good central block to work from. The Director lamented that although the children who come here pay nothing to attend when they asked for parent volunteers to help with some building project only 3 turned up. Not too dissimilar to NZ school projects these days...
 |
| Somersault class |
 |
| The vege plot (and banana plants) |
Once we'd done the tour it was down to work. We were split into two teams - the white team who started on the block wall outside, and the blue team, which I was in, painting the walls on the main building. First we had to remove all the notices, pictures and signs on the wall, then mask off the windows and doors and cover all windows in plastic (I wondered about this as to whether it was necessary but afterwards saw that it was!). After that it was down to rollering on the paint. Our initial results weren't great, partly because we had to recover some of the rollers from the white team and didn't have time to wash out all traces of white paint, and partly because we weren't able to mix the paint properly (there not being anything suitable to do this). But once we'd done one wall the paint was well-mixed, the rollers true blue and we settled down to work.
 |
| A shortage of rollers didn't stop Olaf |
 |
| Painting the back wall |
 |
| Morning tea break - well, coffee and juice |
The plan was to do the lower half of the wall after morning tea in a darker blue but unfortunately the paint wasn't prepared in time (the top half was acrylic out the can but the bottom half was oil-based and needed to be mixed first) so we did the best we could in tidying up the first wall with the remains of the paint we had and then tidied up before leaving around mid-day.
 |
| Final results on the outside wall - not by our team! |
Once back in the hotel we went off to shower and change and met again at 1pm when Karen came to take us to the office. Laerte arrived shortly after us and we spent a good couple of hours going through the materials we had prepared. He seemed pretty happy with most of it but we cleared up a few misunderstandings and agreed to add some pieces in where needed.
After he left Karen took us to the mall for a late lunch - as a couple of us noted it was the first time we had felt hungry since arriving! Then back to the office to work on the materials until around 7 pm when the SEDE team arrived. We'd agreed to give them a run through of what we had done to bring them up to the same level of understanding as Laerte. As Laerte was delayed we started off without him and covered the background to the work and how we had gone about it. Laerte arrived in time to join in discussion on the cooperation model we had prepared and the other main elements of our work - sustainability (covering financial and organisational elements), marketing and communications, and a transition plan. We then took the team briefly through a presentation we had developed for some of the stakeholders - the NGOs and potential donors of resources (R$, people, things). It was a good session and I think the SEDE team found it valuable. We were also fortunate to have Bruno and Larissa with us as well so they could see what we had done and be able to provide some local support in the future to the SEDE team if necessary.
 |
| Team SEDE with Larissa and Bruno |
Once we had finished (around 9:30 or so) we agreed to head for the Serra Malte bar downtown, one of the first we'd been in when we came - it has a great range of beer!! We had a few celebratory drinks and a good selection of food and then called it a night.
#ibmcsc brazil
No comments:
Post a Comment