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December
2007 e-Newsletter |
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I’d
like to wish everyone a warm, holiday greetings!
We’re as busy as Santa’s elves
here at CEN, and have some exciting news to announce. In
this edition … In
many parts of the developing world, education is a key to economic and
social progress. This
is evident in the communities we serve in the Brazilian Amazon.
Education is necessary to ensure that the communities become
self-reliant and yet the quality of education available there is
abysmal. Although illiteracy rates have fallen in recent years, few
residents have more than four years of formal education, and the
education they do receive does little to prepare them for
today’s information-based economy. Telma
Bentes Farias is trying to rectify this situation.
She not only makes many sacrifices in her life so
she can build her career and skills, but she is also working hard to
improve the quality of education in Suruacá,
where she teaches and lives. Please read what CEN is doing to support
her efforts. In
our last newsletter I told everyone about our successful fundraiser,
which made it possible for our Vice President, Angela
Viehmayer, to hold a series of workshops with teachers in the
communities. Last August, our Board Secretary Jessie
Brown, who has been our longest serving volunteer, paid her
own way to Brazil so she could accompany Angela on the first portion of
her visit. We are pleased to share with you an excerpt from her
insightful journal, which will provide you with a first-hand account of
what life is like in the region. Now
for the news that I alluded to earlier: Our Vice President, Angela
Viehmeyer, who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro, has agreed
to move to Santarém, Brazil early next year. Her move will
allow CEN to finally have a regular presence in the Amazon, and will
allow us to formally launch our Creating
a Culture of Learning and Empowerment in the Amazon Region (cCLEAR).
This is an important step for CEN. Please read the article for more
details. Although
we’re making progress, we continue to face obstacles. Angela
and Jessie reported that the electricity situation with
Suruacá’s telecenter is worsening. As mentioned in
an earlier newsletter, several of their 12 batteries have failed
prematurely. The center is now unable to operate for more than a few
hours each day, which has severely interfered with our ability to
advise and mentor members of the community, as well as the ability of
the school children to use the center for their school work. What
you can do to help:
In this season of giving please consider sponsoring
a share in one of the replacement batteries so those who have
worked so hard in the community can continue to make progress. Also, as you make your
holiday purchases from Amazon.com
this holiday, don’t forget to use the link
on our web site, so CEN can earn a percentage of the purchase you
already planning! I’d
like to wish everyone a wonderful holiday season. As always, we thank
you for your continued support and encourage you to make a difference
in fighting global poverty! Robert
Bortner Teaching
Teachers: Telma Bentes Farias' Quest to Improve Education in
Suruacá Profile
of community activist, teacher and long-time resident by
Elizabeth Thelen
Teachers
in Suruacá
face many challenges, yet Telma Bentes Farias believes that, with time
and faith, she will find what she needs to build her career and life.
Determined to help her community, Telma has devoted herself to
teaching. During school breaks she is completing a mathematics degree
at the university in Santarém, a city about five hours away.
Telma is well aware of the challenges for teachers brought about by the
differences between current teaching models and Suruacá's
reality. For this reason, she is excited to partner with CEN and Teachers
Without Borders
to develop innovative solutions for Suruacá’s
schools. Suruacá’s
six-room community school serves about 150 students in first through
eighth grade. The classes taught include Portuguese, Math, Science,
Amazon Studies, and English. Twenty-one teachers serve not only this
school, but those in six other remote communities as well. Middle
school classes have recently been added in Suruacá but not
all the courses students need to graduate are yet offered. Barriers
to education in Suruacá are many. In addition to a chronic
lack of teaching supplies and sufficient electricity, there is a lack
of understanding among some parents about the importance of education
which reduces support for students. Because the nearest high school is
in Santarem, many teachers in the community have not completed high
school themselves and are teaching to the limit of their own knowledge. Telma
is hoping to overcome many of these barriers with the support of CEN and Teachers
Without Borders. She is leading and
participating in an English class using Rosetta Stone software provided
by CEN. Telma believes that knowing both English and Spanish will help
Suruaca by easing the community's ability to communicate and
collaborate with people outside of the community. She is also
participating in the pilot program for Teachers
Without Border's Certificate of Teaching
Mastery, which our partner, Link Social,
expects to expand next year. This program features a
series of online courses designed to improve teacher skills. Like CEN's
work, this program emphasizes project based learning, critical
thinking, and life-long learning skills. By participating in this
program, Telma hopes to develop teaching skills that will increase the
relevance of education for the community of Suruacá. Her
passion for teaching will help the next generation gain the skills they
need to fully utilize the telecenter and take control of their future. Read
more about Suruacá . Jessie
Brown‘s Journal from her Amazon Trip – August, 2007 by
Jessie Brown
Saturday,
August 18th (abridged) This
morning we rose at around 6 am, which seems to be a little on the late
side by local standards, as the sun pouring in the open windows
generally wakes everyone up pretty early. Also, the roosters start
getting loud around 5:30-6ish. First
thing we went to the community school for 1st – 8th graders.
All the kids (about 150 of them) came out and greeted us with a sign
welcoming us to the community and a few songs. The songs included the
national anthem of Brazil as well as the anthem for the community of
Suruacá. We ate breakfast with the teachers, which included
bread, various tapioca concoctions in pancake-like shapes, crackers,
fried plantains (mmmmmm….), coffee, and hot chocolate. I was
pleasantly surprised by how nice the school building was. It is only a
few years old. There are 6 classrooms with a lot of windows for air to
move through, a kitchen, an outdoor covered area that they use for
snack/meal time as well as group activities, bathrooms, and the office.
After
breakfast we spoke to the teachers about the school. All the teachers
grew up in Suruacá except one, a light-skinned guy who came
to the community in 1987 and never left. The school day starts at 7 am
with a group activity, and then classes start at 7:15. Kids usually go
home for lunch around 11 and then come back at 1:00 pm for a few more
hours in the afternoon. Teachers specialize in 1-2 subjects, which was
different than what I am used to at the elementary level in the US,
where students usually have one teacher for everything (at least
that’s how it was for me). The subjects taught at the school
include Portuguese, Math, Science, Amazon Studies, and English. There
are about 80 kids in 1st – 4th grade and another 80 in 5th
– 8th grade.
...... After
this we continued touring the community, passing by the variety of
houses. Some are made of clay bricks like ours, with shingles for
roofs. Others are wood with thatched roofs. The roads are all dirt
(sand) and many trees provide shade, which is definitely needed in the
middle of the day. We heard many people playing music (mostly upbeat
Brazilian singers) on what I assumed were battery-powered CD players.
We passed a dance rehearsal at the telecenter where a group was
preparing for a performance in a neighboring community. I noticed that
there are street lights down the main street, which provide some light
during a couple of hours, a couple of evenings a week. For some reason
I was surprised to also see the same brightly blue colored public
payphones that I had seen in Rio. Even by 10am it had become very hot,
bright and sunny. So I got used to the slow walking routine as we
continued our tour of the communities. There
was also a group of kids playing soccer – about 6-11 year
olds, girls and boys both together. They were having a grand old time,
so much fun that they didn’t even notice me taking pictures
of them. It has made me so happy to see kids (including boys and girls!) playing so freely. This is a
common scene here in Suruacá, whereas kids working (whether
in the fields or with domestic labor) is not, at least not excessively.
All the kids seem to go to school, at least up to 8th
grade, now that it is available in the community. This is refreshing to
me, since over the course of my travels to developing countries I have
seen all too many kids with a certain eyes-glazed-over look about them,
where they have sort of lost their curiosity about the world
– lost their childhood in a way – due to
circumstances of poverty that have resulted in child labor,
malnutrition, or other things that take away from experiencing
childhood.
And
while Suruacá is certainly poor, I would say the quality of
life is really exceptionally high. People have healthy bodies and happy
spirits. Despite the many challenges they face, people seem to have
quite a positive outlook on life. ............ Anyways,
we went back to Djalma’s house for dinner, and had some more
fish beans and rice (this is a common theme, it seems!). And then we
had yet another shower adventure. Tonight I made Angela go first. I had
just settled in my hammock with my book when I saw Angela come back to
the house… dry. Hmmmm… I thought….
this isn’t good. “Jessie,” she said,
“there are two of those huge spiders in the shower, and they
are moving!” This proved
to be just too much for both of us. We sheepishly asked Margarete if we
could have a bucket of water for a bucket shower, much to the amusement
in Djalma’s household. . Read
more.
CEN
Posts Angela Viehmayer to Santarém, Brazil by
Elizabeth Thelen
CEN
is pleased to share exciting new developments in its work in the
Brazilian Amazon. Thanks to the generous support from our donors, CEN will be partnering with
Brazilian NGO Link
Social, and US-based Teachers Without Borders to post Angela
Viehmayer to Santarém, Brazil. Angela, a Brazilian
who has also served as CEN’s Board Vice-President, will focus
on the continued deployment of our Creating
a Culture of Learning and Empowerment in the Amazon Region
(cCLEAR) Program. Santarém
is the third largest city in the Brazilian Amazon and is four to six
hours by boat from Maguari
and, Surauca, where CEN has been working since late 2004.
Until now, our contact with the communities was concentrated on
short-term visits by interns and staff. Angela’s move will
enable CEN to maintain a regular presence in these communities,
allowing us to have a greater impact and to extend our work to engage
and benefit more individuals. Over
the next 9-12 months we will develop a reusable curriculum, software
tools and methodology. These will become CEN’s core toolkit
to replicate our efforts efficiently in other communities in the region
and eventually in other countries. The curriculum will focus on
developing crucial soft skills, such as problem solving, teamwork,
critical thinking and time management, as well as building
participants’ confidence in their ability to effect change.
These sorts of skills are intangible and therefore not easily taught in
a traditional classroom setting of books and lectures. Instead, the
instructor mentors participants along a journey, progressing from
small, simple projects to increasingly complex initiatives that require
the application of a full range of skills. Another
component of the CEN toolkit that Angela and Link Social will expand is
the Rede Amazonia (Amazon Network),
where participating communities learn from each other through
peer-to-peer exchange. The network is promoted through physical
exchanges between members of the communities and workshops, and
strengthened and maintained through electronic tools such as chat and
e-mail. Maguari and Suruacá have already hosted Francineide
Pinheiro, a nurse from Xixuau, as well as members of each
others’ communities. An expansion of the network will promote
an even greater sense of community empowerment and allow for more
extensive collaborative problem solving. Because
CEN has already been working in these communities, we anticipate that
some of the participants will be ready to move on fairly quickly to
initiatives such as putting in place a community micro hydro-electric
generator, expanding Couro
Ecológica handbags, eco/social- tourism and
increasing handicraft
production. Within
the next twelve months, we intend to develop a second phase,
tentatively called the Integrated Entrepreneurship Development Program
(IEDP). The IEDP will build upon the general skills developed in the
cCLEAR program to assist with entrepreneurship development, as well as
address the market failures facing local entrepreneurs by helping them
to build value chains, gain new markets, and increase their access to
capital. In
addition to their work on cCLEAR, Link Social also expects to expand
their support of the Teachers
Without Borders' Certificate of Teaching Mastery (CTM)
project in Suruacá, which began with
a pilot of the program in Suruacá last
year. The CTM provides free teacher development courses, which feature
an e-learning and collaboration platform. This will utilize the soft
skills developed through CEN's program and will serve to sustain and
broaden our work in the communities over the long-term by
institutionalizing the teaching of the skills to future leaders. |
In this
issue
Make a difference in the lives of the people in
the Amazon this season by helping support CEN’s work there. Shopping for the person who already has
everything? Give
the gift of empowerment by sponsoring a share of a
solar battery in their name! Help Suruaca replace two defective
batteries in their telecenter's photo-voltaic (solar energy) system.
The new batteries will enable the community to use the telecenter for
English and teacher training classes after nightfall and fully
participate in CEN's programs. The residents of Suruaca are raising
funds as well, but your contribution will help them achieve their goal
much sooner. Each share ($47.50) represents 1/20th of the cost of
purchasing, transporting, and installing the battery. We’ll
even put your name on our website and on the batteries in the
Amazon!. Read
More Holiday
Shopping in Support of CEN
Over 90% of our operating budget comes from
individual donations and so your cash donation goes a long way to
helping the communities where we work because we are mostly staffed by
volunteers. Acknowledgements
Robert
Bortner Contributing
Writers Elizabeth Thelen Alan Weiss David Paul Jessie
Brown |
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