This month left me mulling over the degree to which direct benefits for families, whether in cash or in kind (food, clothes etc.) are barriers to the internal motivation that families need to truly transform their situation.

20 new families signed up to the full Saúde Criança support programme in the last six months.  This is almost double the number of families that signed up in 2009.   This is largely due to our new partnership with the local public health centre/GP surgery, which attends to people living in the five communities surrounding the children´s hospital.  Like Rio de Janeiro, these communities grow informally, clutching to the hills for survival.  They are characterized by financial poverty, drug-related violence, families continuously moving in and moving out and precarious housing and sanitation. 

In the same six months however, 9 families have either left or been asked to leave the programme.    This is almost double the drop-out rate of 2009.  When I sat down with the social worker and psychologist to understand the reasons behind this, I stumbled on a situation reminiscent of social policies and anti-poverty initiatives in Ireland and England.  

Most of those dropping out are local families from Agronomica, which is near to the centre of Florianopolis and there are a number of social programmes offered there.  These social programmes are largely focused on providing direct services to children and adolescents.  They include public and NGO crèches and homes for abandoned children, health services for children and programmes with monthly stipends for adolescents.  The main family supports are small government cash benefits for those on extremely low-incomes and a religious organization that offers monthly food baskets.  The requirement for all of these benefits both governmental and religious is simply poverty.  The government´s small cash benefit Bolsa Família (around EURO 20 year month per child) is conditional on the child attending school at least 75% of the academic year and being up-to-date with vaccines.     

Our programme has a much higher level of conditionality.  The families receive direct benefits of food, housing support, hygiene kits, clothes on the condition that they take part in a monthly support session, which includes advice and support from the social worker, the nutritionist, the psychologist, the lawyer and the dentist; professionals continually questioning their often chaotic and unconscious ways of living their lives and providing them with information and encouragement to change.  The mothers must also participate in the handicraft workshops, unless they are in another course or employment.   They must show commitment to improve their families´ situation.  They need to adhere to the treatment of their children and take care of their own health, with annual smear tests (a frequency recommended in Brazil) and show up to doctor, ophthalmologist and other health-related appointments that we make for them.  They get materials to improve their housing, but they must provide some of the work if they can. 

For some families, it would seem, it is easier to live from unconditional or low-condition payments.  They entered the programme looking for the easy benefits they are used to and found too much asked in return.   So, despite the encouragement of the social worker and psychologist, they drop out.  Perhaps it is easier for them to leave their children in full-time crèche or abandon them to live in institutions, to rotate from charitable donation to charitable donation and to receive any benefits that the government is offering rather than truly try to transform their life situation.       Getting by may be preferable to improving their lives, especially if that´s all they´ve ever known and they have neither sufficient confidence in their abilities nor motivation to break out of the rut they are in. 

Some families do try to change their situations but the benefits actively discourage it.  One mother from the programme was going to be employed by the NGO but decided against it when she learnt that she would then lose an almost equivalent benefit for her child, who has a weak heart.   My cleaner asked me to write a letter stating that her salary was half of what I pay, so she would not lose her child´s free crèche place.   Ireland and the UK are rife with examples of the counteractive incentives of benefits too: benefits that encourage couples with children not to marry or live together, benefits that are greater than the salary they are able to earn, benefits that encourage single mothers to stay out of any kind of work for over twenty years and then are thrown unprepared into the workforce once their youngest child reaches 18. 

When I think of my own actions and those of my middle-class counterparts, I remember how often the road of least effort and lazy passivity has been chosen over the braver and more exacting road of self and life-improvement.  Maybe we all only really change when there is no other real option.  When we can´t handle the situation any more.   Perhaps the unconditional or low-condition benefits provide an anesthetic to make the situation just bearable enough for the person living in poverty, to rob him of the necessary internal motivation to make changes in his live.  

So what is the alternative? 

Do we move our programme to a poorer area that has less easy government and charitable support, to make recruiting and maintaining families easier?  Do we suggest that government reduces or cuts benefits entirely to force families into improving their material living standards on their own?  This has happened to a degree with the welfare to work programmes in the US and there is lots of controversy over them. 

Or do we just accept the dependency culture and appease our own charitable urges and guilt complexes by providing people with what they seem to want: easy and generous benefits, no conditions attached?

I remember an experience I had when I was in my early twenties in Dublin with a friend of mine, after we left the pub one night.  We came across a homeless guy who was sitting wrapped in a sleeping bag, trying to escape the cold in the doorway of a shop.   I bought him a cup of tea, asking him first if he wanted milk and sugar.  My friend gave him a pound note.  As we walked up Grafton Street, I turned to my friend and questioned her actions, saying that it was clear that a hot cup of tea would do him good on a cold night but he could spend the money she gave him on drugs, which would be worse for him.  She shrugged and replied humbly, ´who I am to tell him what he needs?´ 

This experience still swirls, unresolved, in my mind. 

For the most part, efforts like the Saúde Criança programme seem to make sense.  They provide immediate support, both in-kind and cash, but focus on helping the family to be self-sufficient.  The length of the programme depends on the needs of the family, given that each situation and family is different.   I know that in Ireland and the UK there are increasing efforts to provide time-limited benefits, while providing parallel training and encouragement to promote cultural change.  But they are facing significant barriers by a prevailing dependency culture.  

And what of the families that don´t make it?  Families that can´t rise above their upbringing or their own limitations or just plain don´t want to jump through our middle-class hoops?  Do we leave them, and their children, to live in poverty without support, in the hope that they will hit rock bottom and the illusive motivation will appear? 

Or do we let the government continue to provide undemanding benefits, accepting the additional barriers it creates for families and those who support them in transforming their own situations?  

Perhaps, in our extremely limited influence, this is all we can do here at Saúde Criança.   Do the best job we can, accept our limitations and the counter-culture nature of what we are doing and celebrate the times when what we offer chimes with what the family really needs and is willing to take on.  We can also look to expanding only into areas that have less support services of any kind.   Depending on the demonstrable success of our experience, we can offer what we have learnt to government and help them to replicate it, if they are interested.   For now, that feels like a pretty full plate.

Not saving the world, but making a small contribution to what we believe is its improvement: and helping one child and receptive family at a time.   

July is winter-holiday month in Brazil.   All of the children are off school and all of the mothers are on full-time.   This has brought a new situation for us to deal with here at Saúde Criança.   All of the children, many of whom are usually at school, came to our three-times weekly sessions in our small headquarters.    The space, suitable for five or six children, had fifteen children on some days – all clamouring for toys and attention.  At the same time, most of our volunteers, who make up the bulk of the staff entertaining the children, preparing food and providing services to the families, couldn´t be present as they are mostly mothers of school-age children. They were back to full-time mothering duty for the holidays and their volunteering necessarily took a backseat.  

Our social worker and psychologist coordinator tried to consult with the parents on their needs, on how to access benefits, on courses they could attend, as children came and went incessantly between the rooms.  Our two administrative staff tried with great difficulty to do funding proposals and financial reports in the room next door.  

At times, everyone in the organization had to put aside their usual tasks and attend to the more immediate needs of the children.  Soon they were taking turns playing board games with the older children, painting and drawing with the toddlers and rocking babies to sleep.

I have been busy rocking my own baby to sleep over the last couple of months, but have continued to hold monthly management meetings at Saúde Criança and weekly email exchanges to see how everything is going.  

Two months into Eoin´s life, I am seized by a familiar internal struggle. 

On the one hand, I want to be cocooned with little Eoin - soaking in this magical time of inseparability and palpably feeling my love for him seeping through my milk and through the silent eye-to-eye moments of early morning and nappy changes.      

On the other hand, I want to be in the world, making my contribution.  Providing more guidance to Saúde Criança, researching other possible ARCH grantees, writing a blog (!) or  a book.   Discussing subjects other than baby weight; feeding my brain on seminars and courses.    Not to mention the ever-present desire to drink (lots of) coffee and red wine!

But these holidays were also a lesson to me on the transience of infancy and childhood.  Tom, aged 7, went on the plane to England from Brazil on his own for the first time.  He spent three weeks being spoilt rotten by his grandma in Farnham and by my family in London and Dublin.    He had a great time, totally independent of me and free of homesickness.  His big teeth haven´t even grown yet and already he is breaking free of the cocoon of early childhood and flying off like the most beautiful of mischievous butterflies. 

When I met Tom at the airport on his return and saw and felt the surge of love in both of our eyes, I remembered some of the moments where we built up this bond over the last seven years.  As I felt this swooning love, I didn´t regret one morning I lazed in bed cooing over him or any career opportunities that I missed out on.  At this end, it feels like being with Tom in early childhood was the most wonderful of pleasures: a pleasure that Alastair would have given his right arm (not to mention his career, his status and all earthly wealth) to have experienced more. 

So, although at times, feeding and minding a new baby feels like a never-ending banishment from the world, I know in the depths of my being, that this too will pass. 

This is a time when I need to put aside my usual tasks and attend to Eoin´s more immediate needs.  Only by being fully present to him can I transform these transient moments into eternal moments, touching my soul and Eoin´s with all the love we can bear.

June has been a month of celebration here in Brazil.  

World Cup fever is exploding, with the yellow, green and blue of the Brazilian flag flying from houses, lamp-posts, car doors and children´s schoolbags.   On the days that Brazil is playing, all work and school is cancelled.      In corners of every square and at the school gate, children huddle together showing off their albums of football cards and noisily swopping Greek goalkeepers for Brazilian strikers.  

The June parties have also been raging here in Florianopolis.  These parties are a mixture of Northeast country tradition, mixed with the hot wine and roasted pinhão (like chestnuts) of the colonists in the South.   On these cool winter nights, amidst bonfires and traditional funfair games, everyone dresses up as country bumpkins: straw hat, blacked out teeth, checked shirt, slim tie and jeans for the boys and colourful Aunt-Sally dresses, pigtails, rouged cheeks and eyeliner freckles for the girls. 

At Recontar, June has been a month of celebration also.    In the middle of this month, we celebrated the unanimous decision taken at our General Assembly to become the first social franchise of the Child Health Association.  This strengthens our relationship with the organization in Rio de Janeiro, improves our ability to support the replication of the methodology in other places and Recontar´s national sustainability.  It also means that we lose the Recontar part of our name to become part of a national organization with one unified name:  Associação Saúde Criança or Child Health Association. From now on, under threat of being fined R$1, I will refer to the NGO as Child Health Association rather than Recontar!  

We celebrated with a week of activities organized around the first visit of Dr. Vera, the doctor who started the work with children and families in the Lagoa Hospital in Rio de Janeiro twenty years ago.    Alastair was a trustee of the charity that Vera set up in Rio and they had been friends in the five years before he had died.    Now for the first time, she was coming to see the work in Florianopolis that her work in Rio had inspired.   

It was an emotional time for me.    I watched her talk to the mothers of the programme here. I  listened to her speaking to supporters and volunteers at our General Assembly and our Pasta Benefit Night.  Again and again, I happily received her positive feedback about how strongly and quickly the organization was developing here.   Her comments confirmed to me that we are achieving what we set out to achieve over two years ago.     

At our fundraising event during the visit, more than 150 people celebrated together over wine and pasta with special sauces made by local chefs.  To the sound of live piano music, we toasted the new name of the organization and the milestone of becoming a social franchise.   We also toasted the 28 families that are currently in the programme, the 63 children being supported by the organization and the impact that the programme is having in their lives.  

The social worker Marcelo (at last a man amongst women) told us of how the families were now beginning to take courage to demand their rights, with the confidence given to them by being associated with the NGO.   One mother, for example, needed a referral for an exam for her child, yet the local GP surgery would not provide the referral.   Under Marcelo´s guidance, she had asked for it several times and been refused.   `Try one more time and if they don´t give it to you, call me reverse charges from their phone,´   Marcelo encouraged her.  The mother returned to the GP surgery, asked once more and was refused.  When Marcelo spoke to the government worker on the phone and told him that he was in violation of the child´s rights and that he would have to refer the case to the office of the public defender, the government worker quickly apologized and provided the necessary referral.  In these ways, the families are learning that they have a right to ask and a further right to insist to ensure the health and wellbeing of their children.   

The preparation for the visit and the events around it were led by trustees and the workers, with volunteers providing invaluable support.   Given the birth of the beautiful Eoin, I could only be superficially involved.   The achievements of this month were due to the leadership and commitment of these three groups here in Brazil;  trustees, workers and volunteers, demonstrating the organizational strength and local ownership of the organization.   

These June celebrations brought together over 150 people, raised R$3500 locally for the NGO, mobilized strong new partnerships, enabled two high-level meetings with local government and achieved 8 TV and press appearances to raise awareness of the good work being done at the NGO.  

To top it all off, all we need now is to win the World Cup!!  

Bébhinn asked me to write this month’s blog on her behalf as we waited with baited breath for the arrival of her baby.

In the tradition of our country I am delighted to celebrate the safe arrival of Eoin Chandra O Donaill Zanoni. Céad míle fáilte Eonín. A hundred thousand welcomes….My deepest congratulations to the whole family.

May is a beautiful month for a birthday, and for re-birth. It will always be a bitter-sweet time.

This is Bébhinn’s blog, and not mine, and so I’ll begin.

This year in Ireland, we opted for a fundraising walk instead of a Ball. Thanks to the astonishing organisational skills of Niamh and Livy there was a terrific turnout on May 8th. The walk fell on an auspicious day-It was Caragh’s birthday, my birthday the previous day, and Peter, Bébhinn’s brother-in law turned 40 the following day, not to mention the christening of Úna and Peter’s youngest daughter, Maeve on Sunday. So the omens were good.

We met in the carpark of the GlenCormack Inn in glorious sun-shine and high spirits. Niamh had ensured that no-one collapsed en-route with rations of bananas and bottled water for everybody. We planned to walk the SugarLoaf mountain in Wicklow, one of three peaks very familiar to anyone living in the Dublin-Wicklow area. I remember thinking the first time I visited Rio how funny it was that one of the tourist highlights is a mountain with the same name, the Pão D’Açúcar: the Brazilian Sugar loaf.   There is a supermarket chain named after it in Rio and I shopped there with Bébhinn and Alastair to prepare for a last-minute St. Patrick’s day party…even in Brazil, it rained torrentially on the day interestingly. Bébhinn is a great hostess, and obviously planned things that way to ease the homesickness…(Rio de Janeiro at carnival…homesickness??)

Bébhinn’s parents, Liam and Nora, are experienced walkers. Liam led the way with Nora bringing up the rear of our expedition. Our intrepid group was comprised of friends and family. Most of us had met before- Bébhinn has a wonderful generosity when it comes to sharing her friends, and we have all been introduced to one another at some point along the years. Many of us now have small children of our own, and couldn’t have made the walk if it wasn’t for the wider network of friends and family prepared to child-mind, and prepare dinner. Thank you all.

The ball last May was a terrific example of how a community with a shared interest can achieve so much, and the walk echoed this.

What I find so interesting is that this network of people all came together to support Bébhinn, and to commemorate Alastair, and to share for a few hours the common bond that we enjoy, all arising from one couple. A couple who together touched all our lives. Two individuals, who still influence our actions and thoughts, and inspire us to be more generous in our own lives. With our time, with our money, with our affections, with our families.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather for the walk. The early part was a gentle, blossom-lined avenue. The air was damp and sweet. I was close to the back of the group, and it reminded me of a school outing. We were a very eclectic gathering, stretching away into the distance, chatting energetically. It was an almost cloudless day, with phenomenal visibility. The higher we climbed, the more beautiful the vista. There is little shelter on the walk, and it got considerably cooler and more blustery as we ascended. The secret chocolate rations came out from hiding. Our youngest members, Finn and Garbhán braved the elements with incredible good humour and stoicism in my opinion!!(Not to mention their fathers who carried them all the way up and back without complaint, when most of us were reaching for an inhaler, or a second slice of the delicious birthday cake…well done Sarah!)

We finished up at the Glen Cormack Inn for some refreshment, which was welcome. I should have known better than to open the Tayto however…  There was a small band revving up for the night, and we were treated to a short-lived impromptu céili from Liam and Nora, proof that they are in fact getting younger with every grandchild.

Personally, I was exhausted.

It was a wonderful day.

I believe it is no accident that ARCH´s work in Brazil is primarily focussed on family. It is the most effective, lasting way to influence the health and happiness of a child. Bébhinn comes from a large family, and yet my abiding memory of her house growing up, was that there was always room for more at the table.

Alastair’s dreams and ambitions were intensely family orientated too.  I believe it was his own absolute love for his family that was at the heart of his drive to help other communities. To be able to think beyond our immediate household, and to extend our care and attention to a larger family seems to me the essence of love. It is an extraordinary message. He was an extraordinary man, whose memory is invoked in many everyday ordinary ways, and in the simplest of pleasures.

As Bébhinn, Walbert, Tom and Liam Óg welcome Eoin into their lives I have a strong sense of hope for the future. I wonder if after all, whether or not it is clear to us, the universe is in fact “unfolding as it should”

In the meantime, I shall have to consider knitting blue booties, as I was convinced Eoin would be a girl.

Onwards and upwards, friends.

Much love,

Méabh

This month in the life of Recontar in Brazil has been a lesson in the art of letting go:  realizing the limitations of Recontar´s control on the lives of the families we support and of my control on Recontar.    This has been a painful lesson that has left me in tears and kept me awake at night.

One of the families that we have been supporting is that of a young vulnerable mother, aged 18, her 17 year old boyfriend with a drug habit and their beautiful one-year old son.  She is a young woman whose mother died of AIDS, who has been in and out of state care in her teenage years, who suffers from depression and has been taking sleeping tablets since she was 15.    She had been showing great improvements in her life, becoming engaged in the arts and craft work, through our help, moving out of an abandoned squat to live in her first independent apartment and finding a job as a cleaner and a crèche place for her son, which would enable her to maintain her small family and finish her education.   When I spoke to her earlier in the year, there seemed to be so much hope for a new life.   One of our group therapy sessions focused on celebrating the way she was managing to turn her life around.   

Over the last two months however, she started back-tracking on all her advances.   She often did not bring her son to crèche, she had stopped attending the arts and crafts sessions, even though her production was tied to the short-term rent-support that we were providing and in the first week that she started her job, she didn´t go for two days because of a lack of interest.    Finally, she was dishonest by forging one of our pharmacy request-forms for baby´s milk to 10 times the quantity that the nutritionist had prescribed and then forcibly denying any wrong-doing.   She had broken the rules of our contract together, by her dishonesty and by not taking on the responsibility that is an essential part of the Recontar programme.  This responsibility on the part of the family is necessary if there is any hope that the programme truly provides an impetus for life change, rather than mere dependency-inducing charitable support.    On the day before her son´s first birthday, I had to tell her that she was being suspended from the programme for three months.  

She cried and I hugged her.  Internally at the time, and later at home, I cried with her. 

It is clear however that if we are to help her in any meaningful way, we have to suspend her, treating her like an adult in a binding contract with us, not a child whose actions have no repercussions.    The social worker referred her to emergency government support programmes in her area and provided her with bus-fare to go home.   As I was leaving, I spoke again to her and her boyfriend as they sat outside on the step of the NGO, making clear that their continuation in the programme and their responsibility for improving their lives was squarely in their own hands.

In three months, she has the opportunity to come back and discuss with the social worker whether or not she is ready to rejoin the programme.    I hope with all of my heart that the suspension is effective and that it shakes her into taking responsibility for her own life and that of her child and that we can truly, meaningfully help her.   Maybe this suspension will be more helpful in her young life than food baskets and free nutrition and dental advice.  Maybe even more helpful than the money she has earned through doing arts and crafts.   Maybe even more helpful than the genuine affection, psychological support and friendship that the team has shown her and her young son over the last eight months.          

What is clear to me though is that it is not in our hands.    This fills me with a sense of impotence and brought me face-to-face with the limitations of the programme.   It can only truly help those who in some way are prepared to help themselves.        

The limitations on my own control of the smooth development of Recontar were also brought into a clear light this month.

Since the beginning of Recontar in 2008, I made very clear in the social business plan that my executive involvement in the organization would end by the beginning of 2010, though I would continue my supportive role on the Board for a further two years.   The rationale behind this was that I would provide energy and impetus for the organization´s initial beginnings, while engaging as many local people as possible in the first year with the objective of the organization becoming locally-run from year 2 onwards and completely self-sustainable by end of year 3.    This made sense not only for the organization in the long-term, but also for me.   The freedom from an all-consuming executive role within the organization would allow me the necessary time and space to rethink what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, as the dust obscuring my future after Alastair´s death, began to settle. 

All of this had been going to plan.   At the beginning of this year, we hired two co-directors, one of whom is the young, talented woman who has worked with me since the early days of developing the social business plan.   Over the last four months, I have been helping these two co-directors to develop a clear work-plan for the year and have been overseeing the implementation of that work-plan.    So far so good.    My pregnancy, now into its final stages, played a strong role during these months in forcing me to relinquish executive control of the organization.    I was congratulating myself on my own ability to hand over ownership and a sense of responsibility, while maintaining high-level quality control and maintaining ongoing input on how the organization and its work on the ground developed. 

Then out of the blue, at our last pre-baby meeting, this young talented co-director dropped the bombshell that she had an opportunity to study abroad and would be leaving the organization.    Over the next few days, my mind went into a panic and I found myself repeatedly awake at 2 a.m. wondering what on earth I would do.    Not only is the co-director a smart, capable young woman, but she was the only other person, besides myself, who was plugged into the full network of people we had mobilized over the last eighteen months.   She also embodied the embryonic organizational culture that we have developed during this time, focusing on providing an enabling, fun working environment, laced with professionalism, dedication and effective project management.  Her earlier commitment to stay for at least one year as co-director had made me feel secure about the organization´s ongoing development.

With the news of her departure, the question formed in my mind of how I could postpone the birth of the baby to be able to step in, take over and ensure continuity.  The formation of this question made me see that I had not been as effective or quick as I thought at letting go of executive control of the organization.   

The formation of this question made me realize also that in my own mind I was going on maternity leave rather than truly allowing the organization to be more locally run.   

Reluctantly realizing at 2 a.m. that the baby´s birth simply couldn´t be postponed, I began to understand that this challenge gave me an opportunity to step out of the maternity leave mindset and to truly embrace letting go of the tight hold I still had of the organization.   

I realized that this situation was an ideal way of truly allowing space for the Board and the co-directors themselves to resolve the organization´s challenges.   As with the family that we had suspended, I realized that the situation was out of my hands.   I went to speak with the vice-president of the NGO and then called a meeting including him, the co-founder Marisa and the two co-directors.    I involved the whole Recontar board on the issue and it was clear collectively that the responsibility to suggest and implement a solution to the situation rested with the co-director, who had committed to take executive leadership.

The co-director, eager from the beginning to minimize the disruption of her departure on the organization, has now designed a plan and agreed it with the Board, which includes a process of recruiting a replacement and committing to a largely voluntary transition period up until August to guarantee as much continuity as possible.  My role in this will be peripheral, as I concentrate in the next three months on giving birth and surviving the early days and sleepless nights of a new baby.

Since Alastair´s death three years ago, life has pushed me to practice the art of letting go when the power to resolve certain situations is simply out of my hands.   Despite the tears shed and the few sleepless nights, I´m slowly getting better at it.    

The landscape in Agronômica, a district of Florianopolis, where Recontar is based, is reminiscent of Rio de Janeiro.   On one side, the curving bay and blue skies stretch before us, framing the spectacular sunset.   On the other side, the slant of the hills is speckled with illegal, informal communities of precarious homes and poor public services.    

This year, we have widened our remit beyond the State Hospital to include families attending the local health centre, whose children are suffering from ill-health or at risk of ill-health.   This is important to begin to prevent more serious illness in these children and stop them from ending up at the hospital. 

We have met several times with the health centre staff.   The team of local health visitors, who carry out home visits in the community, will refer families to Recontar.   Their response to Recontar was enthusiastic and they confirmed that there are many families that would benefit from the programme.   ´However,´  one health visitor cautioned, ´the question is where or not they will come down the hill to participate.´   

Here we are again with this question of programme participation.   I have come to realize that a huge part of our work is to help people come down from the hill of poverty and lack of motivation and ideally to stay down.    In this country of growing opportunity, those who are already eager to come down the hill don´t need the programme.  They have kick-started themselves into improving their lives for themselves and their children. 

Those who are reluctant to truly come down the hill are those who are more likely to take part in pure aid programmes.   Our new social worker, Marcelo, tells of research he did at a Florianópolis charity connected to the Catholic church which offers monthly food baskets to poor families out of four different offices in the city.  His research showed that in several cases, up to four members of the same family were registered for food baskets, taking advantage of the charity´s lack of centralized information.   

Why enter a programme like Recontar´s, which demands active engagement and motivates and pushes families to pull themselves out of poverty, when they can live on hand-outs?

Communicating the benefits and gradually helping to change the outlooks of these families is one of the key challenges that we face.   Working with local donors to invest in these longer-term projects of income generation, housing and workshops to promote attitude and behavioural change is also a challenge.  Everyone wants to give something that directly goes into the hands of the family – powdered milk, a plastic toy or toothbrush.   Few want to pay the social worker´s salary or the rent for the space to house all the activities with the families.   

Among the twelve active families in the programme, participation has increased and improved, as they perceive the benefits and opportunities of their own active engagement.  Four new additional families have attended initial interviews and been visited at home and will now join the programme in April.    Some families contacted though never turned up for the initial interview.   Two families left the programme in 2009 due to lack of attendance and commitment.   

As we become more confident in our work and the number of families increases, our posture towards the family is becoming stronger.  We are getting better at demanding that the families gradually take more and more responsibility for their own progress and reduce the focus on  hand-outs.  Some moaning is audible as family members remark on how the programme is more challenging this year.  For example, on the weekly arts-and-craft days, when the families make products to sell, the mothers themselves have to make the lunch.  The recipe and preparation is overseen by a volunteer nutritionist, but the work is done by the mothers.  Last year, we prepared it for them.   Lack of attendance without good reason results more rapidly now in benefits lost.  

Slowly however, the families are responding to the tougher posture.   Mothers are telling us of  how they are trying the recipes handed out at home, several mothers are starting to work alongside the programme, mothers are taking more ownership of the programme centre and providing more suggestions of improvement, and the families are beginning to help eachother out, donating old clothes or furniture from one family to another.  Some are being more challenging of course, but each challenge is an opportunity to discuss with the family why they need to take responsibility for their own situation, rather than finding someone to blame or someone else to solve it. 

The culture of dependency and one-way entitlement within these families is slowly, slowly breaking down.  

´Have you seen João´s new mobile phone?´ Pedro, a 12 year old boy in the programme asked me as I sat comforting João´s mother on the sofa in the Recontar office.

João is a 10 year old boy with a serious heart defect.  He has had over 10 operations in his young life.  He wears a thick gold chain around his neck and his hair is cut razor short.  His young face is still childlike as he concentrates on his drawing.

His mother, Sonia, sits with me crying on the sofa, nursing her one-year-old daughter.    Her mother has thrown her and her two children out of her home.   Sonia says they fought because her mother was violent towards João in a drug-fuelled temper.  ´You can hit me all you like, I told her, but please don´t start on my children.´    João´s father died years before and Sonia´s new partner is in prison. 

´I´m totally dependent on my mother, I can´t work with the baby, I don´t have a tostão (a penny to rub together) to pay rent anywhere:  we have nowhere else to go,´  she wailed between frantic tears.  ´I´ve lived on the streets with João before, but I have the baby now, and his heart is bad and he has to go to school.´    ´He needs somewhere to live to go to school,´ she stated defiantly.

With my arm on her shoulder, I soothed her reassuringly, feeling a mixture of compassion, the edge of skepticism and a sensation of being out of my depth.   ´I´m going to call the psychologist to come and talk to you and she can help you think of ways of working it out with your mother or finding someone else to live with.´ ´You know we don´t have a space to sleep here, ´ I continued  ´and we don´t pay people´s rent, but we can help you think of a place to go and help you to start working to have an income to pay a rent.´    Sonia quietened down  ´ I know,´ she said ´even just talking makes me feel more calm.´

I sat with Sonia on the sofa and Pedro spoke to me again.

´Have you seen João´s new mobile phone – it´s massa/fantastic´.      With one arm still on Sonia´s shoulder, I took the sleek, new, black mobile phone that Pedro handed to me.  It looked like an i-Phone with games and gadgets spiralling out of it.   ´Hah,´ I said  ´look at mine.´  I lay my mobile phone next to João´s  expensive new phone.  Mine was also black but the similarities stopped there.  Mine is the simplest model you can imagine – it keeps phone numbers and makes calls.  Full stop.    João looked up from his drawing and half-proudly, half-sheepishly put his mobile phone in his pocket. 

The irony of the situation struck me – on the one hand this family didn´t have a penny to pay rent, but they were spending money on luxuries, such as expensive mobile phones.    Two other similar situations ran through my head – the young mother with the eight month old baby who was also kicked out of home and when moving into a small house, asked for the donation of a television, a priority for her before the donation of a fridge or a cooker.    The young father who gives his three-year-old, fragile son sugar-fuelled soft drinks instead of fruit juice or water, because he wasn´t given soft drinks as a child and it is his way of showing his son how loved he is.        

These priorities differ so much from my own middle-class priorities.   This incongruity of priorities reminds me of my experience as a supply teacher among the nike-clad five year olds in Jobstown, a deprived area of Dublin, and the research on poverty in the UK that filled my MSc reading list. 

This poverty and social exclusion we are dealing with in the South of Brazil is not a different animal to that in Ireland and England.    In some cases it is of course more extreme materially, with less government housing assistance and welfare benefits.   Material hardship seems however the easy part of the problem.  The mixture of psychological and cultural barriers to providing these children with a better opportunity to survive and thrive is a hard nut to crack – no easy nor quick solutions. 

The psychologist comes to talk to Sonia and as we swop places, she confirms with me that she has organized the Family Planning and Family Finances workshops for the families in March and April.  

As I go, I bend down to give Sonia a hug and offer a heartfelt ´all will be well´.  

Hoping with both idealism and the shadow of realism that Recontar will increase the chances of this being true.  

´I spent 7 months with Lucas in the hospital totally on my own,´  Silvia began.  ´I would cry to my mother on the phone that it was too much, that I was too tired, saying that I wanted to leave the hospital but nobody let me leave.´  ´I was told he had down´s syndrome, that he had a hole in his stomach, that he couldn´t breathe without a machine and I had to stay with him for months and months without leaving the hospital.´ ´I didn´t see my one year old daughter for months on end.  I just stayed on my own in the hospital.´  Her tight tears were clenched in a quiet anger.

Each of us in the close circle hung on her words – the twenty one year old mother with her three year old son who had also spent many nights and weeks in hospital as they diagnosed and treated his severe heart problem, the couple whose child had a rare genetic disease that has left her severely disabled and with a short life expectancy,  the volunteers who struggle with their own miscarriages and family separations and life challenges, the arts-and-crafts coordinator who spent a month in intensive care with an aneurism when 6 months pregnant and me too, remembering my short time in hospital with Alastair with a shudder.     Each one of us trying to make sense of what life has thrown at us and those around us. 

Welcome to Community Therapy -  a technique we have begun to use in our work together with the families this year.  This is a technique that was developed by a doctor in the North East of Brazil twenty years ago and is now being adopted nationwide to provide opportunities for communities of people to come together, share their experiences, learn from the experiences of others and create and strengthen the bonds within these groups.   I have been doing a course over the last year to become a community therapist to bring this powerful technique to the NGO.

There are some simple rules – you can´t give advice, can´t give sermons, can´t make judgments on others, you focus on what you have done to overcome difficulties and always, always speak in the first person.  And jokes, popular sayings and songs are encouraged, alleviating sharp pain with sudden humour and lightness. 

The technique is based on the belief that we all have similar problems, similar fears and that by listening to others´ experiences we realize that we are not alone and by hearing the ways other´s used to overcome their difficulties, we can find keys to overcome our own suffering. 

Silvia continued through her tears.   ´I don´t usually let people see me cry´ she said ´but these tears are of happiness, not sadness now – he is out of the hospital, he can breathe on his own, I am back with my husband,  things are getting better for us ..´ 

Ana, the co-facilitator directed her gently ´Silvia, what did you do to overcome all of this, how did you get through it?´

Silvia didn´t hesitate. ´Positive Thinking´ she stated strongly.  ´I was on my knees for hours in the toilet cubicle, crying and crying and nobody knew I was there.  I just kept thinking that he was going to be alright, that he was going to get better.´

I am struck by how young she looks as she speaks.  Silvia is just 20 and has already dealt with challenges seemingly light-years beyond her young age.

These first sessions of Community Therapy have gone well in the NGO, with in-depth discussions on deeply moving topics chosen by the group itself:  fear of dying and leaving our children vulnerable and the pain and helplessness of seeing a family member with an illness. 

It surprises me that the mothers and fathers are so vocal, so open in these first sessions. 

Perhaps because of the trust we built up with them in 2009.  

Perhaps because of the wound up need to offload overwhelming experiences.   

It surprises me too how powerful the technique is in engaging the volunteers.  One by one each of the volunteers has told me how powerful the technique has been for them and how they have been working through these new insights and understanding for days afterwards.   I guess it´s true what Paulinha, one of the mothers said, after Silvia talked at length of her hospital experiences with her son:

 ´Now´ she said as she looked around the whole group ´you have a better idea of what we mothers go through.´      

This month, we held a three-day celebration to mark the first year of Saúde Criança Recontar here in Florianópolis.   We held a children´s party with story-telling and a trampoline on the beach, an arts and crafts workshop and a ceremony to recognize the 138 people and organizations involved as families, volunteers, partners, workers and Board members.

The year has been a whirlwind of activity:  from our seaside christening last year to the legal set up, the recruiting of our staff and volunteers, the set up of our small office, the development of our first site, our launch, monthly training and information visits to the service in Rio de Janeiro, the recruiting and engagement of our Board, the selection of families, the support to families and their children, the start of the weekly arts and craft income-generation project, the development of our organizational systems, the organization of fundraising events and the continual creation of partnerships.

In numbers, we helped 57 people from 14 families.  We engaged 37 direct volunteers from everything from psychological support for the families, to website design to fundraising support.  We are now a full board of 10 people and have signed up 16 monthly personal donors in Brazil.  We have set up pro-bono partnerships with an accounting company, a financial software company and a communications´ company.   We raised 200% of our targeted local fundraising.

When asking the families if the programme is making a difference in their life, all who have been in the programme for over a month said it is making a big or reasonable difference in their lives and all said they enjoyed the programme.  One mother got emotional and put it down to ´the programme being the salvation of her child´. 

It has been a good year!   

At many times, it has felt like witnessing a form take shape rather than actively setting up an organization.  The form has its own life and needs only some direction and energy to enable it to unfold.  Time and time again, I have been surprised by just the right person approaching the organization at just the right time. I am aware of a synchronicity that I never recall mentioned in business lectures or even in the endless, detailed McKinsey presentation packs. 

In recent months, I have felt a strong sense of personal realization that leaves me, in quiet moments, with a deep sense of peace and I feel great gratitude for being part of the set-up of Recontar.  Thank you to all who have enabled it to happen – visible friends and invisible ones! 

As outlined in the business plan, we are hiring a CEO in 2010 who will gradually take over the executive role of leading the organization, while I continue my overseeing role on the Board and become increasingly non-executive …  gradually exchanging the role of social entrepreneur for the role of ARCH Foundation representative.   This step is essential to enable local leadership and organizational sustainability.   

It also frees me to focus more centrally on bringing up my children: a role that I am increasingly valuing.  For the first time in my adult life, my contribution outside the home feels truly secondary in importance to my contribution inside the home.  I am not sure if this feeling is a result of my sense of professional realization now or the growing awareness of the transience of the boys´ childhood – symbolized by Tom´s first permanent tooth that broke through the gum surface this month.   Certainly, this gradual handover in 2010 coincides with growing demands at home, including organizing myself financially, teaching Tom to read and write in English and my thoroughly unexpected, but extremely welcome pregnancy with my boyfriend Walbert.  This pregnancy hit me first as an involuntary wrench from my old life, but as it settles within me, I find there is space to cherish what is essential of the past, while opening to embrace new life.

And so I must bow to synchronicity once again – life is giving me what I need, when I need it.

We are nearing the organization´s first anniversary here at Recontar in Florianopolis.  Like a small child, the change from birth to year 1 is awe-inducing.   

It has been a whirlwind of activities, laced with small frustrations and big lessons professional and personal.

One of the lessons that has crystallized over the last month, is that the direct work at Recontar is the meeting of two very distinct cultures. 

On the one hand, we have a group of volunteers (psychologists, educators, dentist, nutritionist, arquitect, engineer, craft-makers) and small, modestly-paid committed staff (social worker, arquitect, artesan).

On the other hand, we have the families we are supporting.

Each Tuesday morning, the small team of staff and large group of volunteers set up their nutrition, oral health, social assistance stations in Friendship House, across the road from the Children´s Hospital.   

This group of 10 is made up mostly of women, with the occasional male volunteer.  They are all between 20 and 40 years of age. Only those over 30 have children and although one of their children has a rare heart problem, the overall health of all of their children is good.

And then there are the families we support.  Again, this group of 10 is made up of mostly women, with the occasional father participating.  They are between 18 and 35 years of age.  All of the mothers of course have children, from the 18 year old who left a children´s home at 17 to the 35 year old who has a young baby at home and two small children in care. All of them have children with health difficulties.

The volunteers are all educated to high-school or university level and from middle-class backgrounds.   The mothers´ education levels on the other hand are very low, with many either illiterate or functionally illiterate.  

The volunteers are punctual, participate in monthly team meetings and prepare for the families - cut and prepare crafts materials, prepare donations of toothbrushes and hygiene kits, prepare healthy, organic food, research housing projects etc.

The mothers are less homogenous in their behavior.  Some who have been in the programme for a few months reliably come to each meeting, but many need to be cajoled into participating:  cajoled into getting the bus, which Recontar pays for, and reminded constantly of dates. They often miss the meetings because of a variety of excuses, some plausible and par for the course such as the illness of the child but many excuses are questionable and evasive.      

During the last eight months, it has happened one time that the volunteers and full team of 10 people were all ready for the mothers and children and only one mother turned up.   A mass of well-intentioned energy  - all dressed up with nowhere to go.

There are many factors at work to make these two groups, though similar in number, gender and age, so different in terms of commitment, health and wellbeing.   I hint at some of them here – different upbringings and education levels but there are a plethora more, including drug abuse,  income levels, levels of self-esteem and possibly service-related factors that we are investigating too.  

There is a sense of abandonment of these young mothers that is day-by-day being transmitted to their children.  Abandonment by themselves, by their families, public support and seemingly by the Gods.  

One of our challenges at Recontar is to manage this difference in cultures.   Keeping the volunteers engaged, when family participation is unpredictable is a challenge that I had not expected.  Motivating volunteers, without the tools of remuneration or extensive training opportunities is a crash-course in psychology. 

Why do these volunteers give of themselves, when they receive nothing materially?   And why are some of the mothers so hesitant to give of their time and effort, when they receive services, food, medicines, clothes, furniture?

It turns on its head the assumed wisdom that receiving is more appealing than giving.

Perhaps part of the puzzle can be answered by Vera, the Rio doctor who set up the first pioneering service of this kind in Rio de Janeiro in 1991. She says that in a world of strong divisions such as Brazil, we work for social inclusion  - Social Inclusion of the Rich (as well as the poor).  

This first year of Recontar shows me this clearly.   When we volunteer, we are more integrated into society; we are taking some responsibility for its more unjust situations like the illnesses of children.  For this engagement, we receive a sense of peace, a sense that we are doing our bit.  Rather than looking for gratitude from the families we support, perhaps we should instead offer them gratitude.   

The dynamic from another day´s activity comes to mind.  We all stand hand in hand, right hands downwards, giving energy to the person next to us and left hand upwards, receiving energy from the person next to us.   The coordinator says the words:  we hold hands and give and receive energy in this way to remember that we are never so rich or self-sufficient that we cannot receive, nor so poor or vulnerable that we cannot give.   

It is this conjured image of these two groups hand in hand that is at the heart of Recontar´s potential for transformation of (little pieces of) this world we live in.