There is a place in a poverty-stricken rural area of Northeastern Brazil where some dreams do come true. These dreams do not materialize out of the thin air. They are not the result of luck or wishful thinking. These dreams are for an education, and when they do come true they are the result of hard work, study, and a sense of self-responsibility.
Known originally as The Cipo Project (now the Cells of Cooperative Learning Project or PRECE), this is the place where young men and women, and adults, who have been neglected by the public school system in Brazil may work toward their first and second level certificates, and prepare to take the examinations to enter the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza.
The university is basically free, but few public school students in Brazil are able to pass the entrance examination. Most of the university students are from families who can afford private schools. This has prolonged the socio-economic division between the rich and the poor. About five to ten percent of the people in Brazil are wealthy. They virtually own the country. There is a small middle class. The rest of the people are poor, very poor or extremely poor.
Cipo is a small rural community where this project was started as an alternative school in the municipal district of Pentecoste, approximately 65 miles from the capital city of Fortaleza. These are students from an extremely poor area of Brazil. Their families are farm workers and fisherman, or often they are unemployed. More than 40 percent of the residents of the Pentecoste district are illiterate. They have dropped out of school to try to earn a living, or they have been passed over by the poorly funded and inadequate public schools.
My name is Gil Dietz. I am a citizen of the United States of America, living in Muscatine, Iowa. I am a retired newspaper editor. I have witnessed, photographed and interviewed people in many walks of life.
It was my privilege in the summer of 2002 to spend two days and a night visiting with the students at Cipo. I returned for a similar visit in 2003, and spent the month of July 2004 teaching conversational English to a group of young adults who were on a break while studying for the university examinations. My wife and I were there in 2006 when a new “estudantorio” building was dedicated at Cipo.
I was a guest of Dr. Manoel Andrade Neto, a professor of chemistry at the federal university in Fortaleza, and founder of the educational project that is located on the property where he was born and where his parents still live. Manoel knows and understand the plight of these people. Some of them live in mud-and-stick structures with dirt floors and no electricity. Some have better cement buildings with cement floors and electricity, although the stove may be a wood fire in a raised corner of the kitchen room.
I met Manoel Andrade in 2000 when he stayed in our home in Muscatine as part of a Presbyterian church exchange. It had been a desire of mine to visit Manoel and the students of Cipo since our original meeting. That wish was first fulfilled when a delegation from East Iowa visited Fortaleza and Cipo during the summer of 2002.
The educational project at Cipo was started in 1994 with seven students. It has spread to 11 sites. There are now more than 2,000 men and women of all ages working toward the common goal of going forward with their education. The numbers keep growing because of the success of this program. Now, in 2009, more than 350 students have passed the difficult exams to be admitted to higher education. Fifty four have already graduated from the university. The goal is for many of these students to return to their home communities as teachers, health workers, agronomists, or in other occupations to help improve the lives of their people.
PRECE extends the hand of opportunity to people of all ages. Many of these persons have been denied an education by an unjust social system and inadequate public schools. They are held back in lives of poverty, and cannot fully participate in their rightful heritage as citizens of a democracy.
Manoel Andrade says it best in these words: “I can not accept this (economic) situation and these students do not accept the way they have been ignored or held back. The students must gain knowledge to change their lives, beginning with our situation and out state. I believe only education can liberate our people.”
PRECE can and does liberate people who have the dream of changing their lives through education.
By Gil Dietz
Muscatine, Iowa, USA
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