Place: Ferraz de Vasconcelos
Attendees: Students mostly aged 16-18, mostly from Ferraz
When we walked into the school the morning of our arrival, many students, mostly in their late teens, were busy in the kitchen preparing food in huge saucepans. These 70 odd students use the space of a local school to spend the day revising for the ENEM, the crucial exam that dictates if and which university they will go to. They and the teachers volunteer their time to do this from morning till night every Saturday. And they share responsibilities such as cooking and cleaning the place. Ferraz is one of the poorest regions of São Paulo, so despite some efforts in the last 20 years to improve the chances of people in this region to go to university, it is still very hard to do so.
CPMLK is run by Vagner Marquez, who is a history professor at PUC university and was born in a similar area to Ferraz. He is also an Evangelical Christian. He has written a book called Faith and Crime about the Evangelical Church and the PCC (the crime network that dominates São Paulo and more recently began taking more territory in Brazil and South America). CPMLK is basically a group of young people who choose to do extra classes on Saturdays with volunteer professors coming to help them take this ENEM exam. A local school gives them the space and it is not ideal because there is so much noise from the road and the acoustics are terrible. But they make the most of it. They share the responsibility on the day for cooking, cleaning, etc.
About 100 people were there for the screening in the afternoon, which took place in one of the classrooms. It was possibly the most special because we entered the room when the film was finished and most people, boys and girls, were in tears and hugging each other. A boy, called Gabriel, stood up and went to Vagner, the course leader, and gave a short speech about how appreciative he is to have the group. We talked for a few hours about the film together. It was a great spark for us to run the course and for the students to know who we are. From there, we started working with a group of 15 to start a 5-day workshop.
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