meeting 2003

AVSI in the World. Education, the First Form of Charity
Brazil, Argentina, and the former Ivory Coast. Working together with the favelados, with the Opera Padre Mario Pantaleo, with Fr Zuitton and Brigitte to ensure happy days for thousands

by Andrea Costanzi

Stories from decades of the AVSI presence in Latin America and Africa, but also stories of the encounter with phenomena that have their own history, like the Opera Padre Mario Pantaleo Foundation in Argentina, now supported by AVSI, or Brigitte’s cooperatives in the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire. In the favelas and the big cities of Brazil, from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, AVSI’s work has been going on for more than twenty years, as Enrico Novara recounted. It faces two great challenges in the sphere of employment. “The first is the unemployment of the young, generated by the stagnation of the economy and a provisional educational process. The second, much more dramatic, is the exclusion from the job market of family heads between the ages of 40 and 45, who can no longer find work. In the poor areas, we are talking about a 35% employment rate. Our project fits in between these two trends. On one hand, it tries to train young people and insert them into the job market through contacts with hundreds of businesses. For those responsible for a family, it offers the opportunity to go into business for themselves, through training and the grant of a small loan to help develop it.”
Analogously, in Kenya, where 70% of the population is under the age of 30, AVSI is deeply involved in the field of vocational training. “In Nairobi,” says Stefano Montaccini, AVSI Responsible for Kenya, “we have set up a vocational training school, with 400 students, 10 courses of study, and an agency for the development of youth employment that has already put 2,500 young people in contact with 150 businesses that offer opportunities for work.”

Central theme: Education
In Argentina, the Opera Padre Mario Pantaleo Foundation, created by a priest who emigrated from Tuscany to Argentina, is made up of a kindergarten in the slums of Buenos Aires, a basic general school, and a secondary school, to speak only of its educational portion. Carlos Garavelli, President of the Foundation, says, “We try to respond to all the needs of more than 3,000 families (20,000 people) in the areas of health care, aid to persons with disabilities and to the elderly, sports, culture, and small businesses. Education is the central theme of our activity, and here the help of Communion and Liberation is absolutely essential. Also of concern is preparation in order to overcome the technological gap that hinders our efforts toward insertion into the work world. One of our initiatives in this regard is the possible organization of long-distance university courses. In the social sphere, the worst economic crisis in Argentine history means that we now have to face the marginalization of the new poor. In this area, working together with AVSI has opened up horizons to us that we never even imagined before. In the social-sports field, we have tried to create an attractive alternative for sports that enables a completion of the formative work of education. Working closely with the Real Madrid soccer club opens up new perspectives, shared also with CESAL (the Spanish NGO for international cooperation).” Responding to the theme of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, Garavelli recited an ancient Argentine poem, “‘Where are we going? Who is pushing us? What illusion clouds our eyes? We are going there, God is pushing us, love for others and solidarity guide us, there where the pain is deepest, we want to fight to better the world.’ Is there a man who desires life and longs for happy days? Yes, we do.”

Brigitte’s story
In the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, the Ivory Coast, Fr Paolo Zuitton has shared eleven years of life with Brigitte, a 40-year-old woman, who was denied a visa to come to Rimini. “In Buaché, in the center of the Côte d’Ivoire, there has been a great emigration, especially of young people, from rural areas to the richer coffee- and cocoa-growing area in the south of the country. Brigitte has brought together 850 women who were struggling every day to feed their children, grouping them in village cooperatives to grow manioca [a nutritious root plant] and rice and to process and sell their products. In just a few years, the experiment has spread to 50 villages, giving rise also to a small savings bank. Even the young people today prefer to stay in their villages, working in these rural mini-cooperatives. Faced with the war between the army and the rebels, Brigitte fed and sheltered runaways, defying the wrath of the army that punished her in public.” As though this were not enough, she took into her own home some thirty children who have been entrusted to her, and she works with Grégoire (see Traces, Vol. 4, No. 2 [February] 2002, p. 22), a psychotherapist who has rehabilitated more than 3,000 mental patients. Why does she do all this? Fr Zuitton answers, “At a certain point in her life, she encountered Christianity, which freed her from all the fears inherent in traditional African religion, and also gave her the strength to ‘emancipate herself as a woman’–which is not such a foregone conclusion in Africa. Thanks to the encounter with Christ that changed her life, she has received the strength to go to meet others who are needier than she.”