Ciranda de Pais
- Chloe Marie Loader
- Aug 7, 2017
- 3 min read
Ciranda de Pais is a project aimed at maternity support through education and encouraging the children to interact and play. The coordinator is Cris Arns, whose family is known for their social work. Her aunt, Zilda Arns founded Pastoral da Criança in 1983 to reduce child mortality, and promote peace in families and communities. This has about 260,000 volunteers and has reduced infant mortality by more than half in over 31,000 urban and rural communities of intense poverty. She continued her amazing work with children in poverty until her death in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where she was carrying out humanitarian activities.
The project addresses the following topics:
- The child and the environment in which he/she lives - Phases of child development - The child and his/her colleagues - The child at school - Sexuality in Childhood
When I arrived in Curitiba, I was very excited to find out that there was an event organised for the next day, with Ciranda de Pais. I was fortunate enough to be invited, and I spent the morning with the group and those that they were helping. It began with a talk about how to interact with the children and explaining to be careful with how you speak to them. We then waited tentatively for the children to arrive, which took much longer than I had anticipated. There were a range of donated toys, as the organisation cannot afford to provide them, they must rely on the community.
The idea is for professionally trained people to work with the mothers, educating them about mother care and how to interact with and teach their children. This is a difficult prospect for even the most privileged of people, but especially difficult for mothers living in extreme poverty, with a lack of education or facilities. While this is happening, the children go along with the volunteers to areas set out for playing.
Unfortunately, as it was the first time this was running in this area, not many of the invited mothers actually came to the meeting. The children that were there were initially very timid and worried about leaving their mothers' sides to play with us, but we managed to coax three children with offers of food, juice and a sandbox! As they learnt to trust us, they began to open up and speak to the volunteers. We encouraged them to play with the various toys available in the school, and showed them how to make a sandcastle - something they were extremely fascinated by and had probably never seen before. Although it is a shame that it was a low attendance, it is still heart warming to see the commitment of so many volunteers, willing to give up their time to help those in need.
Although Curitiba is a very interesting city, with lots of development schemes, projects like this are still needed to help the very poor people of the city. Approximately 14.5% of the South Eastern population did not have a steady source of food in 2015, which is much lower than 38.1% in the North East (Poverty Report, 2015). In Brazil, the poverty line in those living on R$77 per month per person, the equivalent to about £19 GBP. Starting in 1950, Curitiba’s population doubled every 10 years for 30 years, expanding at a rate that was unprecedented in the area and unexpected, leading to many urban problems not considered in the initial design plans (Urban Design). This has led to a significant decrease in the standard of living for the residents, and Curitiba now faces problems such as traffic, crime and unemployment.
https://www.ivoluntarios.org.br/aggregators/1434-ciranda-de-pais
https://translate.google.com.br/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&u=http://www.nouseducare.com.br/atividades/-/30&prev=search
http://curitibainenglish.com.br/government/social-initiatives/poverty-report/
http://curitibacityplanning.weebly.com/urban-design.html
https://www.pastoraldacrianca.org.br/biografia-dra-zilda
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