Projeto Rondon

The town of Jeribá is little more than a large cursive ‘T’ on the face of the planet. A main arterial dirt road connects the top of the ‘T’ with Dois de Abril to the east and Palmópolis to the west. The trunk of the ‘T’ is a 15%-or-so grade hill (i.e. pretty darn steep) paved with jagged cobblestones, linking the “center” of Jeribá at the bottom with its school at the top. Even from halfway up, the view from the hill is breathtaking: mile after mile of rolling green mounds, too small to be called mountains, too large to be hills. Further off to the north, a trio of giant odd-shaped rocks juts out to reign over the landscape. In the late afternoon, when the sun gives off its daily hour of rich, soft, indirect light, the view becomes ten times more photogenic.


Just before the 5:30pm Brazilian winter sunset, our band of 16 “Rondonistas” left an afternoon of sex ed classes for adolescents and general health classes for Jeribá’s elderly at the school at the summit and headed downhill toward our modest lodging for the day near the intersection of Jeribá’s ‘T’. The deep azure sky specked with orange and purple clouds hovering over an ever-darkening terrain made us pull out our cameras and capture what would be our last sunset in Jeribá.


What a spectacular view this town is blessed with.

That was my first thought. A strange thought at that for a town that has next to nothing, that sustains itself (barely) through small-time agriculture and exporting workers to the industries of São Paulo or Belo Horizonte. Jeribá isn’t even a town; it, along with its sister Dois de Abril, is a mere district of Palmópolis, a metropolis in microcosm. All political and virtually all of the scant economic power is concentrated in this latter town of 7 or 8 thousand, 10 times larger than satellite Jeribá and 4 times that of Dois de Abril.

As the countryside grew darker, so too did the luster of the view from Jeribá’s hill. My mind drifted to earlier that morning. There, after several hours of fun and games with Jeribá’s kids at the school, 9-year-old Débora, her hair shorn like a boy's to a mere couple of inches because of a bout of head lice, remarked how hungry she was. A fellow Rondonista told her not to worry, she’d be heading home soon for lunch. Débora sadly replied, “But there’s no food at home.” The image of this poor girl walking up Jeribá’s enormous hill on an empty stomach, only to find a school with only so much potential to enrich her mind and classmates only too eager to make fun of her haircut that would be beautiful anywhere else in the world but traditional rural Brazil, made the view from the top of the hill at once turn ugly. What if Jeribaenses never even bothered to spend a few seconds of their day to take in the vista? Who’s to say they didn’t deliberately ignore it, seeing it as a curse, beauty forever mocking their plight? Who were we to suddenly gain the right to appropriate this view in little digital boxes?

How did we get so lucky to be the ones wearing the T-shirts with "Projeto Rondon" written on them, taking views like Jeribá's as a sort of "payment" for our volunteerism?

The Projeto Rondon is named after Brazilian Army Marshall Cândido Rondon, whose life and mission spanned the 19th and 20th centuries. Rondon, of indigenous descent, is renowned for his many explorations of the Brazilian hinterland—including a famous expedition to the Amazon with U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt in 1914—to get to know Brazil’s numerous indigenous tribes and help to integrate them into modern Brazilian society. One of his mottos, used today by the Projeto, was “Integrar para não entregar,” “Integrate, don’t give up.” Give up a people, give up a land, give up the dream of a country united in its forward march marked by order and progress.


The first time university students were sent in Rondon's footsteps to better understand their diverse, continent-sized country was in July of 1967, when 30 such students from Rio were flown by military aircraft to (appropriately) Rondônia, the western Brazilian state named after Rondon whose inhabitants live isolated behind the curtain of the Amazon Rainforest. Further joint university-military missions (keep in mind this was at the height of military rule in Brazil, which lasted from 1964-1985) continued sporadically until the mid-70s, when the Projeto was lost to the ever-changing and always tense political atmosphere of the military state. Further missions of integration would have to be made under other auspices until the Projeto Rondon was officially revived in 2003, the first students intervening in January of 2005 in the town of Tabatinga, located on the border with Colombia in far western Amazonas state.

The present-day Projeto continues Rondon's goal of integrating the far-flung peoples of Brazil. The Projeto's flagship programs are found at the national level, where students from the developed southern and southeastern regions of the country connect with their compatriots in the less developed northeast and north. Teams are made up of students from a range of "majors" (to use American terminology), and through a variety of workshops these teams share their collective knowledge and experience with health, literacy, business, valuing and preserving culture, leadership skills, and much more with targeted communities.

But these communities aren't limited to those hidden in the rainforest a thousand miles away from the sands of Ipanema or the hustle and bustle of the Avenida Paulista. Even within the most well-developed states in Brazil's southern half, dozens of poor, rural municipalities exist far outside the orbit of an industrialized metropolis. Thus the need for the Projeto at the state level.

The first interventions in Minas Gerais embarked in July of 2005 for communities with Human Development Indexes under 0.7. Interventions followed in December of 2005, and July and December of 2006, and this year-and-a-half span saw over 1,800 PUC students, educators and staff members bring the project to 53 Mineiro communities, touching the lives of between 50,000 and 60,000 people per trip. Ventures have continued semi-annually since.

I first found out about the Projeto Rondon at an informal get-together for PUC's international students all the way back in February, where a woman involved in the Projeto's administration gave a short presentation. It took about a month for my piqued interest to turn into action. Feeling that my time on this Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship was lacking a service side to its ambassadorialship, I decided to attend a more detailed informational meeting. Alongside about 500 fellow PUC students, I became sold on the Projeto's mission of bringing integration and solidarity to rural Minas, and the opportunity it offered me to get to see a side of Brazil that I would otherwise never have seen.

After sacrificing 6 of our Saturday afternoons throughout the Brazilian fall semester to prepare for our two weeks as Rondonistas through a series drudging workshops, teams of around 15 students and a coordinator were assembled literally on the eve of departure. For our team of 16, the first few hours on a winding 14-hour bus ride had to suffice for introductions and first impressions before everyone leaned their seats back and tried to catch a few uncomfortable winks. Our team comprised of PUC students from health sciences to social sciences, biology and psychology, engineering and law. The youngest was an 18-year-old freshman, the oldest our coordinator Ana Luísa, a recent PUC grad in psychology and a mere 25. Our destination: Palmópolis, a rural community in the northeast corner of Minas Gerais that was officially established as a municipality in 1992, finally giving its inhabitants, mainly temporarily contracted workers in cattle fields and banana groves, a place on the map. Palmópolis, along with other targeted communities, was chosen for its low HDI score: 0.615. What does that mean? Palmópolis is closer to “less developed” than “highly developed” for a variety of reasons: poor education, lack of basic infrastructure, low GDP per capita, limited access to healthcare, among others.

Ana Luísa had been a Rondonista in Palmópolis before, and after graduating college she lived and worked there for nearly a year. Her experience in Palmópolis, particularly her contacts with those in positions of power, proved invaluable. In a country where mobility is based far more on who you know than what you know, her tireless efforts to talk with just the person who could facilitate our every action made the difference, in my mind, between a successful mission and a potential failure.

Weary from lack of sleep and bruised from every bump of the final three hours of the ride on a dirt road, we nonetheless donned brightly colored costumes and, like a band of traveling minstrels, paraded through the streets of Palmópolis singing, banging drums, and making our presence known. After about an hour, children began to follow us a la the Pied Piper toward the main plaza, at which point songs and games ensued. After a few hours of singing and playing, more tired than at any point so far that day, we headed back to our headquarters, a social services shelter with Spartan facilities, and wrapped up the day with a series of meetings to prepare for the days ahead, as well as “get-to-know-each-other” games that made up for what was lacking in several waking hours on a bus. We ate our first of two weeks’ worth of delicious, home-cooked, natural and organic meals that we’d wolf down ravenously, and then fell asleep together on the same hard, cold, tiled floor almost the very second we laid prostrate on our inch-thick mats.

Days two and three involved walking up and down the sinuous, spaghetti-bowl streets of Palmópolis, knocking on doors and taking surveys of the town’s inhabitants regarding their access to basic utilities and their monthly income. Only a handful, we found, had no electricity. Slightly a few more had no running water, and hardly anyone enjoyed a sanitary sewage system. As for monthly income, the highest recorded was around 3000 reais (~$1800), belonging to a local government minister (the mayor was unavailable for interview—surely his would have broken this mark). The lowest was around 60 reais (~$38), from a widow who cooked the rice and beans bought with this pension check with water from the river, the same river that acted as the local sewer and laundromat.

More than once, the divide between “developed” interviewers and “developing” interviewees became cause for the latter to lash out at us with an indignant “what are you doing here?”, or “we have nothing here, and how are you going to help us out?”. Near the end of each day, our band would meet for an hour to decompress from dozens of interviews, share our perspectives of the town, and tie tighter the bonds we had been continuing to weave together. The evening would be capped off—as would be the case for the remainder of our days as Rondonistas—with a three-hour-long rotation to take a much-coveted shower.

On day 4, a Thursday, our interaction with the people of Palmópolis began in earnest. The morning began with a series of games at the local school: soccer, hopscotch, peteca (an indigenous game played like badminton, only you use your hands, see photo at left), and, an American classic, tossing around a Frisbee. In one of the last games, played mainly with smaller children, the de facto motto of our intervention was born: “Todo mundo ganhou!” “Everybody wins!”




Our hope with the morning of games was to rile the kids of Palmópolis up enough so that they’d be somewhat calm for more serious activities in the afternoon: talks about familial relations and storytelling and literacy activities. Not to be. The same kids from the morning were twice as rambunctious, chasing each other and climbing trees and distracting those few who wanted to participate. From American eyes, it suddenly became easy to see where lay the roots of a society that has minimal respect for law and where discipline is toothless. Meanwhile, a second contingent of our team was working with Palmópolis’ elderly on how to properly exercise in their twilight years. In our meeting later that evening the discussions generated by both halves of the team revealed yet another divide taking place all over Brazilian society—really, all over the world: the age divide. Kids solely seeking new and better means for stimulation have no patience for the repositories of wisdom, traditions and values, stories of a hard yet glory-filled past. What would the wild and crazy kids from today’s activities have to tell their grandkids 60 years from now? How they ran around and hit each other, then went home and watched cartoons?

The morning of day 5 introduced us to a group of kids in whom seeds of tradition were being carefully planted. Our planned activity for the morning was to show a film for the kids of Palmópolis, with the objectives being to 1) pull kids off the streets, and 2) give less fortunate children the opportunity to see a movie they may never have the chance to see. The movie: The Incredibles. The locale: Palmópolis’ Casa da Cultura, the House of Culture. There, along with a handful of kids we had coaxed from kicking dirt in the street, we bore witness to one of the bright spots of the town: the children’s Afro-Dance and Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) class. We let the class continue for an hour or so, about half its normal time, and even participated in some of the dance steps and percussion. At the end of the class, after the 20 or so kids had gracefully flowed through dance after dance, the three teachers had the chorus of students shout out the class rules:

1. Respect your teachers
2. Respect your classmates
3. Don’t fight
4. Don’t skip class
5. Respect all the mestres (Capoeira masters) that came before you

I wonder if one of these kids will grow up to write the book "Everything I Every Need to Know, I Learned in Afro-Dance Class."

The class went to wash up, and then came back and sat down to watch the movie. The transition seemed all too strange. Don’t get me wrong, The Incredibles is a fantastic movie, and I do believe showing it had the potential to expand the budding imaginations of all the kids in that room. But to cut into a class that taught these kids the values of their own cultural heritage, only to show them a film that had nothing to do with their lives, that didn’t teach them order and respect, it seemed terribly out of place. Marx would call it alienation of one culture by another. I’m no Marxist, but I’d have to agree with him on this one.

Day 5 ended with a raucous meeting of the youth of Palmópolis, in which Rondonistas and local teenagers worked together to diagnose the ills of the town, as well as prescribe solutions. The atmosphere was electric with hope for real change and a future generation of concerned leaders. The question was, how long would the charge last?


After the meeting, our spirits dampened with some tragic local news that we received from Ana Luísa: a mother of twin infants had committed suicide after discovering that her lover and the father of her children had a mistress. The hardships of daily life being a poor mother in rural Brazil became that much more hard for her to bear. What this meant for our intervention was that the carnival we had planned for the following afternoon for the children of Palmópolis would have to be postponed for the following Saturday. Really, all we could do in the wake of this tragedy to not disturb an already tense and troubled population was spend some much needed R&R.

We slept in a few extra hours Saturday morning before ultimately heading out together to the weekly market near the edge of town, where we perused cheap clothes and plastic knick-knacks from Paraguay, fresh spices, and even fresher cuts of raw meat left exposed to the elements.

That afternoon, we hiked for a few miles outside of Palmópolis along the lone dirt highway toward one of the more beautiful (and less polluted) waterfalls in the area for a picnic lunch. The hour trek was a display of the harshness of rural Brazilian geography: a merciless sun, interminable rolling hills, acidic red-clay soil. And yet the emerald green that such a land could still produce was mesmerizing.


We arrived at the waterfall, cracked open a couple 2-liters of Coke, and devoured ham and cheese sandwiches to refuel from the hike before taking a hoard of pictures and dipping our feet in the icy flowing waters of the cachoeira (waterfall in Portuguese). In a country where eco-tourism is fast becoming a lucrative business, I couldn’t help but think of this cachoeira one day opening up a tiny stream of income for Palmópolis that could then continue to grow. One day. A day when people had reason to come to the area for other than humanitarian motives. When bureaucracy and corruption stepped aside and finally let basic infrastructure be built in Palmópolis. When the town’s youth finally received the education that could give them the mobility to make something of themselves, coupled with a reason and a will to then return and prevent a paralytic brain drain. Such a mound of goals seemed Sisyphean. But if we weren’t there for even our too-short two-week stint, Palmópolis’ boulder would never get its first push up the hill.

Sunday came and offered us another day of rest, though we used most of it to prepare for a solid second week of intervention, as well as write and present the final chapter of our radio soap opera “Chamas na Bananeira,” “Flames in the Banana Grove,” which we had been broadcasting on the local FM channel for the last few nights. The radionovela told the story of Zé Bananeira, an alcoholic and abusive husband stuck in his traditional machista ways; his neglected elderly mother; his passive yet dignified wife; the couple’s hard-working son looking to get into college; and their young daughter who falls in love with Gringo Zezinho Lima-Lemon (me), who may or may not be the father of her unborn child. With our script—always written at the very last minute—in hand, we’d run to the radio with hopes of giving the people of Palmópolis a half-hour of comic relief, life up their values, and share a pinch of education to spice up the end of their workday.

Sunday also gave us the opportunity to use three of the few computers in town with Internet. Even before checking email I opened up BBC News’ site. In the last week, Iran hadn’t bombed us, we hadn’t bombed Iran, Barack Obama hadn’t been assassinated, John McCain hadn’t died of a heart attack, and overall the world hadn’t come to an end. In Palmópolis, it certainly could have and we wouldn’t have realized it for some time.

Monday morning we loaded into a minibus and endured the bumpy hour-long ride to Dois de Abril. There, job one was administering the survey once again. Do you have water? Electricity? A bathroom? One half-toothless woman with six kids answered this last one thus: “We got a shitter in back, but it ain’t nuthin proper, no.” Not exactly the Portuguese you learn in the classroom. Not exactly the Brazil you see in postcards.


Afterward we divided our remaining day-and-a-half in Dois de Abril into two-hour blocks, broke up into our spontaneous teams, and gave workshops on basic health and hygiene, sex ed, self esteem for women and the elderly, environmental ed. In the latter I got to share with the kids of Dois de Abril one of the greatest works of one of the greatest of American poets: “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. In a less light-hearted yet equally troubling story, a young girl in the sex ed class told of three friends, aged 15, 16, and 17, who had all gotten pregnant from three brothers all over the age of 30. The three “men” all got the hell out of Dodge when they learned they’d all be dads. In a week that had been free of all political discussion, I raised the issue of whether abortion should be legalized in Brazil to protect uneducated young women such as these three from becoming mothers before their time, or from dangerous illegal abortion operations, which one of the girls informed she had already had. I equated their case as something closer to rape than consensual relations. From even some of my more liberal female team-members, I was met with resistance.

We closed our two days in Dois de Abril with a small play on the importance of preserving the environment, a few last games and songs with the kids, and a bevy of photos of Rondonistas with said kids. It was a rehearsal for a greater and more difficult goodbye to come.


We left for Jeribá at 7:00 the next morning by public bus. Halfway between the two towns, the 30-year-old diesel-belching bus stopped in the serene morning mist to let half-a-dozen men get off and commemorate another day of work under a tympanic sun, surrounded by green shrubs and red earth. We continued on. We reached Jeribá. We climbed up and down its hill several times. We put on our play again, said our goodbyes all too soon, packed up and returned to Palmópolis in an even older bus. We ate. We showered. We slept.

We never had the chance to put on our play in Palmópolis. The Rondon mother ship called us from Belo Horizonte late on our last Friday to inform us that the bus that we thought would be taking us back home early Sunday morning would in fact be there and set to leave before midnight Saturday. More than any previous day, we realized that every last second and every last drop of our energy and will would have to be squeezed out of us on our last, packed day. Our postponed carnival went off with the mirth that was absent from a Saturday prior. Then, after a lightning-fast turnaround, we returned to the main plaza for what was originally planned to be a relaxed closing ceremony for our intervention. With us having to be on board our bus by 11pm, an evening in which Palmópolis elderly, its church youth groups, and its Afro-Dance and Capoeira classes all had an opportunity to show us their stuff, all while we said our goodbyes to the dozens of Palmopolenses great and small that had touched our hearts, turned into a frenetic and slightly awkward event. Our last hours as Rondonistas were thus rushed beyond the threshold of Brazilian comfort. But, as the classic cliché would have it, all good things must come to an end, and perhaps this end had to be rushed for the two Brazils of Rondon to take their places back in reality, albeit a reality now imbued with the memories of each other, and the realization of their shared destiny.


And as for me…
...I left Palmópolis knowing that I had just completed the greatest challenge of my life. There are few feelings greater than sitting in a bus or train or plane traveling back home (wherever home may be at any given time), looking out the window and thinking simply, "I did it." Your flesh and bones are weary, but your spirit is stronger than ever before. You've got a rucksack full of laundry to do, hundreds of pictures to edit and catalog, and ten times more memories that are already at work reordering the fabric of your mind. Where you go next after some much needed time at home is for tomorrow to tell, as are what parts of here and now you will bring to there and then. You know there's a story to tell. The words still need time to incubate. More than anything, when you look out that window and see that slight reflection of your face flying by mile after mile, you realize how in transition your life really is. Whether or not you believe that the experiences you accumulate one after another are progressively linked by divinely defined destiny, a purpose greater than yourself that the vessel of your body is driven to fulfill, quite honestly doesn't really matter; this is a question that belongs to the sanctity of the faith that each and every one of us has. What we can all agree on is that with each passing challenge, from our first day at school to our first day in a forgotten Brazilian world, we do grow, we do become better human beings, we do see the world that much more clearly. Like the view from the top of a big hill. Maybe not too unlike the hill in Jeribá.

Para todos os meus colegas rondonistas de Palmópolis de julho, 2008.
Amo vocês com todo meu coração.
Obrigado pelas memórias que nunca vou esquecer.