The Beu Machado Kindergarten is a philanthropic organization founded by Beu Machado, a journalist from Salvador. Boca do Rio is one of the lower class neighborhoods of the city, where many children are from single parent families. To help them and their mothers survive, Beu Machado and his wife first transformed their own residence into a kindergarten and took care of many of the favela’s children so that their mothers could work outside of the home. The number of assisted children grew constantly, and on April 8th, 1986 they inaugurated the new kindergarten building. Today, the Beu Machado Kindergarten in the Rua Cazundé attends 215 children and is directed by Maria José Machado, the widow of Beu Machado.
The institution cares especially for children in misery and looks to provide them with education, health (food), and recreation (games, sports, and excursions). The mothers are very grateful for being able to go to work while they know their children are in good hands. While the journalist Beu Machado was still alive, the Kindergarten received many donations from artists, who knew about and appreciated his social work and sense. Today Beu Machado Kindergarten is an organization with many expenses. The people of the Crèche depend on help from friends and authorities to be able to continue their work.
At present there are four different projects that are organized by the Crèche and need private financial support. The project “Don’t Cry, Granny” attends 60 female seniors and supplies them with basic nutrition, medical assistance, and activities. In the project “Away from the Street” the neighborhood’s youth receives courses and physical education as well as sport activities. In addition to the kindergarten, a literacy project, Projeto Ponte (“Project Bridge”) was founded in 1995, to intensively prepare the five to seven year olds for entry into the public schools.
The Beu Machado Kindergarten’s philosophy is to create a way out of poverty for the children and their families providing them with values and ambition to lead a worthy life without hunger and violence, to help them find proper education, work and self-esteem to live as full citizens within society. (p. 88)
We walked into the school and visited some classrooms. The children were busy doing work and didn’t really warm up to us as much until we brought out stickers. It was quite an uneventful trip and I felt that the school did a good job at soliciting donations because it didn’t look like they were doing badly at all.
After the visit we went back to the ship where I met up with Ari and Linda and we headed to the Mercado and then up to the Pelourinho. Ari separated from us to get some errands done and then in the evening on the way back to the ship he met up with me again along with Amanda and we all headed up to the Pelourinho to a Pizzeria for dinner.
We then made it back to the ship just before it started to downpour.
No comments:
Post a Comment