Visiting a shelter
In the beginning of the year CEDUC started a new program for children/teenagers living in shelters to support and educate them better.
The Brazilian system is very weak when it comes to shelters in my opinion. Many kids are less educated, mainly because of their emotional instability, which makes it even harder for them to get a job. Once they are 18 they have to leave the shelters and many of them can’t afford a regular living, because they can’t find a job. So two scenarios are the outcome — either they end up on the street and die eventually or they end up in prison. This is true for about 90- 95% as of what we have been told.
Even worse — 7 to 10 million kids even do not have the “luxury” to live in a shelter, but actually live on the streets even as kids, which as you can imagine lowers the chances even more.
CEDUC already hosts 20 out of their 560 students from shelters and supports them in getting a job. The issue is nevertheless, that a lot of these kids are missing out on many of the basics like math, Portuguese etc. Missing these basics makes it very hard for them to follow the regular curriculum of CEDUC. Therefore, CEDUC is currently thinking of building up a new program with a special focus on kids from shelters.
Because we were really interested in this kind of work, we received the invitation to visit one of the shelters CEDUC works with, which we were very happy to take.
So on Monday we took 2 hours off our work to visit a boys shelter that hosts 14 guys in the age of 13 to 18. And it was both at the same time better and worse than expected. We did not get to hear any personal stories of the boys, which was what I thought might happen. But at the same time the circumstances in the shelter in terms of the quality of furniture, computers, the general living conditions and governance support were worse than expected. The furniture was either broken or very old, because the shelter lives from donations only.
The guys share rooms of each I would say 10 m² with 4 people in a room. They barely have any personal belongings. The owner of the shelter really tries to make the best out of the place, but they can only do so much.
Additionally the social workers and owner of the shelter have to cope with very unnecessary things as well, which feel like a waste of time. Like in many other countries kids here in Brazil have the right to go to school, but schools are limited in space. So when the social workers call up on a school to ask if they have a space available, many will answer with yes, but once they introduce the kid and explain it is from a shelter the spots keep on being already settled with someone else. Also the neighborhood they are living in right now, just signed a petition for the shelter to move out of the neighborhood, because they didn’t want them there. So the kids do not only feel abandoned from their families, but also from their potential schools and apparently also the neighborhood they live in.
What I also felt very heavy on the heart is that the kids really want to learn on one hand, but they are also so emotionally fragile, that if they face a situation in school, where they are bad at something, they simply can’t cope with it and don’t want to go to school anymore. Being abandoned and failing in doing something is just too much to cope for them.
It just feels very unfair that someone feels like he/she is being punished and abandoned all over the place if it wasn’t even their fault in the first place.
Also the social workers are required to keep a very strict line between them and the kids- they are not allowed to bond or take in a mother or father position in the sake of the kids, but also their families. Which I assume is a very hard thing to do for both sides.
The kitchen is usually locked, because they have knives and things like that and with the emotional instability of kids they just don’t want to risk anything. And at the same time it is just crazy. We walked in and some kids were watching cartoons on TV- they are just kids.
I asked the owner of the shelter if there was one thing she could wish for the kids, what it would be? The answer was — a family, that is what they themselves wish for the most as well — and if it is not their own, then a different one. They just want to belong and be part of a family somewhere.
