Courtney McGrailLimerick student Sean Keane shares his experience of a school immersion programme in Brazil
Sean Keane
Our expectations before travelling were about how we would survive with just rice and beans as our main diet. We had been told during the training that this was what we would be getting to eat.
The reality was quite different and the food was excellent. Most of us were worried too about the accommodation but those fears weren’t anything to be bothered about. The 12 students shared a large room and we got used to sleeping in hammocks.
Most of us expected to see poverty in Brazil and we did see many images of poverty, but we also saw great wealth alongside poverty and the favelas. One of the extraordinary things was that, despite people being poor, their outlook on life was positive. Everywhere we went, we were warmly welcomed by the people.
Before we travelled, the group had been told some of the things that we might get a chance to experience, Brazilian forró dancing, capoeira martial arts, a day at the beach and the opportunity to play a football match against a local team from the area where we were building the houses.
We visited churches and parish centres in the Bella Vista neighbourhood of São Paulo. This is an area with a lot of crime, drugs and violence. The neighbourhood is divided into two groups and they are very suspicious of each other.
We were told that, most weekends, people are shot and often killed in these areas because of the violence and drugs. It’s hard to imagine how someone could survive living in a place like this without being drawn into a cycle of violence and crime, but for some the work that’s being done within the Redemptorist parish has given them an opportunity to move away from the gangs and the crime, to try to do something positive with their lives.
We visited two Irish Redemptorist priests living in a small shack just like everyone else in the community in Praia De Futuro. Fr Martin Murray and Fr Ned Gowing have lived in the same small favela for the last 19 years. People in the community have great respect for them. They have everything they need in their house, but we were still shocked at how little they had.
They gave us a tour of the area and brought us through the small narrow streets of the favela to their community centre. Fr Ned and Fr Martin are both in their 80s and they have spent almost all their lives in Brazil.
They do a lot of travelling to different communities each month. They could visit up to 20 or 30 different areas in a month and say Mass in each one. They gave us a great welcome and were delighted to show us around where they lived and worked.
We were welcomed to Parnaiba by Fr Gerry O’Connor and Marcos Terto, Serve’s main contact person, where we were to build houses.
When we first arrived, we were taken to see some of the houses that have been built by Serve volunteers over the last 10 years. We then took a bus journey of about 25 minutes to Parque Estevao (St Stephen’s Park) where the house building project is taking place. The almost €16,000 raised by our school is helping to fund 16 of the houses – 14 of them are already under construction and, over a number of days, we worked on almost all of the sites.
The process involves demolishing the old house which was made of dried mud. The disadvantage of the mud house was that children living in them were prone to illness, particularly chest infections. This meant that they missed days at school. Not having a toilet inside the house also meant that people got sick having to bathe outside.
Serve has a policy of ensuring that the toilet and shower facilities are inside new houses. One way they can measure the success of the house building project is by monitoring the school attendance of the children who have benefitted from a new house.
The work was tough, especially with the intense heat and humidity, but every one of the group put in a great effort.
At the end of our visit, we had a special key-giving ceremony when we symbolically presented keys to those families who had a new house built for them.
*Twelve fifth year students, four teachers and two Redemptorists from St Clement’s Redemptorist College, Limerick, travelled to Brazil to build houses in partnership with the Redemptorists’ overseas charity Serve. Fr GerryO’Connor CSsR and Fr Brian Nolan CSsR led the trip. See www.serve.ie