Cultivating Peace

We finished the computer room in a single week. As none of us have spent much time doing physical labor, we were all eager to try our hand at construction. Jimmie and Betto began the renovation of the shabby, grafitti-covered room by knocking a door-sized hole in the wall and filling in the hole where the previous door had been—Dirson and Angelica had decided that it would be beneficial to have the door to the computer room facing the door to the office. Jimmie and Betto helped a hired worker to install the new door while Casey and I sanded the concrete-and-plaster walls.

There was much confusion about whether or not the walls needed to be re-plastered before we began painting, but when it was decided that the walls ought to, in fact, be re-plastered, the four of us enthusiastically reached for a tool with which to spread the plaster. We discovered, however, that there were only two such tools. Thus began several days of awkwardly sharing two tools between the four of us in order to feel as though we were each earning our keep.

At a loss for what to do while Jimmie and Betto were taking their turn, Casey and I spent several hours clearing the concrete soccer field and playground of the garbage that littered the area and had collected in the corners. We had noticed that the young children, many of whom are too young to understand the danger in eating plastic bags and used Q-Tips, use the field and playground from 4:00-5:00 every day. There are too many children to allow the “social moms” to keep an eye on every one of them, and Casey and I had witnessed more than one child begin to chew a wad of gum that he or she had peeled off of the crumbling cement. We thought, when we cleaned the field and playground, that we were helping the “social moms” do a job that needed to be done but that they themselves were too busy to do. We soon discovered that they, in fact, were responsible for the build-up of refuse, the field and playground being a convenient dumping ground that, unlike a garbage can, does not need to be emptied.

Disappointed that the benefits of a soccer field and playground free of broken toys and rusty nails would not be felt for long, we returned to the computer room to continue plastering. Dirson and Angelica had warned us that the children may feel left out if we did not include them in our plans and may find creative ways to get our attention. So we were pleased to find that many of the young boys were eager to help in the construction of the room. Casey and I returned to a cloud of dust billowing out of the newly constructed door and had to step over several young boys, each sweeping vigorously with his own, too-large broom, to enter the room. We suspect that their help may have slowed us down a little, as we had to share the small number of tools among an even larger number of people, but we cannot be sure! It was easy to see that they enjoyed very much feeling as though they were truly helping with the construction of the new computer room.

With the room finally plastered, we began painting. Once again, we were faced with too many hands and too few paintbrushes. However, we painted the entire room in a single afternoon. The young boys were equally as enthusiastic about painting as they were about sweeping and there were numerous blobs of pale green paint all over the tile floor by the time we were finished. We were then faced with the problem of procuring desks on which to put the computers. We had the three laptops that Jimmie, Casey, and I carried into the country and two desktops that appeared quite unexpectedly in the storeroom at Criamar while we were searching for paint. The three additional laptops that Casey shipped from Austin are, as of now, still stuck at Brasilia International Airport. We had originally intended to build desks for the computers but as we talked with Dirson and Angelica, we discovered that we did not need to, as there were several desks not in use already at Criamar.

With the room finished and the desks and computers in place, we began the process of acquiring educational software for the children to use. We had decided, when we first discussed the possiblity of a computer room, that teaching the children how to type ought to be one of our first priorities. Thus, Jimmie, our computer guru, spent hours sifting through various typing programs available on the internet in order to find one that works, is virus-free, and would be effective in teaching the children how to type. We settled on one and sat down to plan our first class. Half of the children attend school in the morning and half in the afternoon. Thus, we decided to have two sections in the morning and two in the afternoon. There would be a section for the younger children and a section for the older children in both the morning and the afternoon.

Thinking we were prepared for our first class, we expected to meet with rambunctious children that were eager to play on computers for what was, for some of them, the first time. What we did not expect to encounter, however, were children who do not know their last names, children with severe behavioral problems that would only become evident in a classroom setting, and children who could not recognize letters, let alone read or write. We needed to sit down and reassess our approach to what we had hoped would be a “computer class.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 9:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.