´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.