Projeto Sossego do Melo Ambiente

The Vancouver Spirit of Nature Garden and its school and community education programs were a fifteen-minute bike ride from my home in Canada. That project’s success, which won multiple awards made possible the next step back to my birth country, seven-thousand miles away, to create healthy learning environments with Brazilian children.

I am a Brazilian by birth but grew up in the US, primarily in Colorado. When I was fifteen, I returned with my mother and sister for the first time to visit family. I was appalled at the abject poverty I witnessed; millions of children in my homeland were malnourished and lived in shacks on unstable hillsides with no running water or sanitation. In 1963 there was no federal requirement of public schools to provide universal education. Children with their mothers, all in rags, begged on the steps of baroque churches whose interiors were covered in gold. The shock of such extreme degrees of injustice made me determined to return one day to work on an educational project for children in Brazil.

In 2000 a Susila Dharma International newsletter published a letter from a Subud couple in southern Brazil that owned and ran a private school and wanted to do a project to serve the children of little means who lived very near their school. I tested with Rosanna Hille who was then the executive director of Susila Dharma International, if this was the opportunity that would make work in Brazil possible for me. We received a resounding yes.  The Canadian International Development Agency echoed that yes with a Mid-Career Professional’s grant to cover transportation and project costs. The Luft family offered free housing and meals for my partnership with them. I was then fifty-two years old. My goal that arose at fifteen was coming to reality.

Planting flowers with the kids in Rocinha at the daycare.
My two youngest children, Hamilton, eighteen and Zuleika, twenty, paid their own airfare and came with me to help. The Tufts had a small A-Frame in front of their house for us with three beds, a kitchen and bath. They had contacts in the neighboring Central Sul Community and were extremely generous and welcoming of us. The community’s elected president, Adão Vieira, sent his daughter, Denise, with me to go door-to-door to every house in that neighborhood to invite people to a planning meeting at the Community Center (the Nucleo) regarding a community garden and children’s education program. Our meetings attracted a handful of adults and many children as it was vacation time. The neighborhood tour showed me there was trash everywhere. To have a garden anywhere we needed to clean up all the trash first.

Adão Vieira helps Carla plant collard greens, the most widely consumed greens in the community garden. Adão is the community president.
I asked the town for trash trucks, but they don’t work on weekends. I asked the commander at the local army base for a truck, but all the soldiers go home on the weekend. Much to my astonishment it was the soft drink distributor that offered us a truck. This company that delivered plastic pop bottles all over town that became a large portion of the trash on the ground. They had recently started a recycling program with a local high school teacher who was training unemployed people gather up recyclables and sell them to various markets. Everyone joined in, especially all the kids, recyclers, the community health worker, and the community president. One of the oldest, poorest women in the neighborhood donated a ten-pound bag of flour so a local baker could make hot dog buns to feed all these trash picker-uppers.

Hamilton filmed that whole first summer of activity with local children by his side.
It was the children who were interested in gardening, not the adults, we started a children’s garden where each child or two had their own plot in the ground behind the community center. We also started a garden at the elementary school next door once classes began. The children were clearly very hungry. With the help of Ignês Luft and the kids we served a healthy snack of fresh fruit, fresh fruit drinks and whole grain bread each morning and afternoon at the garden. We got lots of newspaper coverage because no one had ever come from Canada to do something in the deep south of Brazil, gaucho country with economically deprived children. (Gaucho culture is much like cowboy culture in the US and Canada with lots of singing around campfires.)

We served a healthy snack of fresh fruit, fresh fruit drinks and whole grain bread each morning and afternoon at the garden.
We worked with the departments of Health, Education, Environment and Agriculture to spread the word as far as possible as to the benefits of community and school garden endeavors. We bought worm compost from a local pig farmer who composted all his pigs’ manure to make worm compost which prevented contamination of the stream on his property. He invited us to visit his farm so the kids could learn about worm composting. We were already composting the fruit and vegetables scraps from our daily snack and acquiring some worms made that more effective.  Red wiggler (Eisenia foetida) worms do an amazing job of turning garbage into rich compost.

That first summer the department of tourism loaned us a bus and driver to take the children to San Miguel das Missões, one of the early Jesuit missions in that area founded in 1735-1750. There is a dramatic Sound and Light show there recounting the colorful local history. It included the war between the Spanish and Portuguese that destroyed the mission in 1775. Without this trip funded by the local government these kids would not have seen this place. No parents had a car or the money for entry to this UNESCO heritage site. (If you saw the movie The Mission San Miguel Arcangel and São Borja were all founded at that time by the Jesuits to evangelize indigenous people and claim land.

Misión de San Miguel Arcángel is a World heritage Site.
After two and a half months I returned to Canada with my children and continued my work at Grandview. The next year I got funding from the Lutheran church in Canada and a private family foundation in the US allowing me to return to Brazil. It was the Brazilian summer, and the children were out of school full-time. We combined the garden work for a half day and with sports and art for the second half. The Luft family had a swimming pool and athletic pavilion at their school that they allowed us to use. Myra Margolin accompanied me again. She was the art and English teacher. We formed a Green Team of the teens who had been involved in the first year to be camp counsellors for the younger children and paid them. For all of them it was their first fairly paid work.)

The Children planted seeds in plastic bottles, now ready.
We took thirty-five of the children by bus to Iguaçu Falls on the Brazil Argentine border. We explored that rich tropical forest environment including a day at the Environmental Education school the government runs. We stayed at the lovely International Youth Hostel. The kids all behaved beautifully. We treated them to a lunch in the restaurant on the Argentina side of the falls. We had practiced restaurant manners before we left on the trip.

Myra Margolin added footage that summer to the film Hamilton had shot and edited previously titled “A Child’s Garden of Peace” a few years later.  The film was in multiple film festivals in 2005-2007 and part of a National US tv series called Natural Heroes. There is a link at the bottom of this article to the movie in two parts or you can find it through Natural Heroes.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=a+childs+garden+of+peace%2C+you+tube#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:399bb38b,vid:zzw2RZlLf9U,st:0

For eleven years I went for annual (once it was bi-annual) stays to work with these children and their families. Myra came a second year and taught photography and video production. (The kids films were also in several festivals internationally, links below.) In 2008 I developed micro-enterprise training for women as well and continued the gardening and after school education programs in science, writing and art for the children.

Kindergarteners bring out the marigolds they planted to put in the school garden.
The mothers and other neighborhood and women made purses from aluminum can pull-tags. I sold these in the US to fund a college scholarship for a young woman who ran the children’s gardening and after-school education activities when I was not in country. Her pay was her scholarship. Brazilian employment laws are very complicated. By sending the money to a local non-profit serving girls, that group could pay for her college tuition and her books.)

Planting an orange tree at the community center.
My work converged with the first and second presidential elections of Lula. I witnessed the improvement in children’s access to food that his programs to eliminate hunger created. The children were no longer starving when we made our healthy daily snacks of fruits, vegetables, and whole grain breads for them. They weren’t as hungry as they had been the first few years.

ACGP has developed gardens in three Brazilian cities, Santo Ângelo, São Borja on the southern border across the river from Argentina and Rocinha, the largest slum in Rio. I worked in collaboration with local education groups, public and private. In São Borja I worked with nuns and their secular teaching staff who ran a half-day education program for children. Brazilian public school is only half a day, so children need activities in the other half. That program won a national prize for gardening and environmental education programs. They used the money to buy a school bus and visit the children’s neighborhoods where the kids taught adults how to make home gardens. The children also helped plant native plants in local parks.

The children’s garden in Sao Borja that provides food for their lunch.
In Rocinha I worked with a parent participation preschool to put a garden on the school roof and provide sewing machines for a mother’s education and micro-enterprise program. Why the roof? Buildings are built so tightly together on the steep hillsides that the only flat space is a roof. The roofs are safer from the bullets that fly during drug raids.  A woman in Vancouver who had lived in Brazil donated money to purchase sewing machines to be used for women’s entrepreneurial training in both Rocinha and São Borja.

The Vieira family volunteered in the garden program from beginning, including many more kids and grandkids.
Thanks to all the public and private groups and individuals who collaborated with me. In all these places I was able to fulfill my youthful dream of working with Brazilian children in need and with their mothers to make them more able to earn a living. Alfonso and Ignêz Luft reached out from Santo Ângelo, Brazil, we clasped hands for the work and the community welcomed us with open arms. Alfonso has since passed away, Ignêz is retired but we remain in touch as she continues latihan as an isolated member. The children in Centro Sul (also called Bairro Sossego because the river runs through it. Sossego means peaceful) are now adults and some have gone to college, the first in their families to do so. Some have married and have children. Lula’s program to reserve 30% of federal university places for people in lower economic classes is creating more equity of opportunity in Brazil. Federal universities have always had free tuition but usually the people who got those places came from wealthy families who send their children to private schools. Now the playing field is a bit better. Things are improving.

Below are the videos made by the youth ages twelve to twenty with editing and support by Myra. They explain the local culture in their own stories. Story telling with videos and photographs is sometimes used as a community development tool and Myra and I were able to do presentations at academic conferences on the process we used and the value we perceived!

Three short films made by the Bairro Centro Sul children.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc1ZCR-6W8k  Bairro Centro Sul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45i42Ga0ddQ   Tatiane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg1PY18lfmU  Maiquel

If you would like to learn more about A Child’s Garden of Peace go to the SDIA website:

https://susiladharmausa.org/a-childs-garden-of-peace/

Donations are welcome.

Illène Pevec

January, 2024