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Daycare Center - Voluntários fazendo criança sorrir
This NGO day-care center offers meals and diverse educational activities at no cost for 43 children, allowing their extremely poor families to work and/or seek familial sustenance.
Isla of Governador is a suburb of Rio de Janeiro- a shantytown slum inhabited by nearly 10,000 families a majority of which are single-parent homes. There are no nearby schools or health centers and this daycare is the only resource offering social services to this community. Very few families have access to running water and most adults scavenge trash for food and items to sell. Many mothers work in the informal labor market as maids where they travel up to 2 hours to arrive at their job or they live with the families for which they work coming home only 2 days a month and often leaving the care of their own children to family or neighbors.
Many children are involved with the drug trafficking and the area has recently had many children killed either through rival trafficking violence or as a consequence of police raids. Traffickers recruit children as young as 8 years old into lower level positions such as lookouts. The majority of the population is illiterate, and the average level of education is just four years. Many children work in either the informal transportation market, wait outside grocery stores and offer to carry groceries for change, or simply beg for money.
The daycare center serves 43 kids from 4 months to 7 years old and 18 teenagers at Ilha do Governador, Rio de Janeiro, whose mothers were abandoned by husbands and whose only source of income is through collecting paper and cans in the street. Many of the mothers have as many as five children and suffer because they have nowhere to leave their children while they try to make money. Their needs are many, but they prioritize the food and the acquisition of kitchen appliances. The daycare depends on daily donations of food for the children. Many children who remain unsupervised become involved with the trafficking in order to eat.
Providing meals, recreation, early childhood learning, theatre, play area with books, social, medical and psychological assistance, tutoring, IT skills, & sports for children who would otherwise be left unattended or could become delinquent. Additionally, the project offers health services, opportunities for childhood development, and community development resources.
The project was recommended to dreams can be foundation through a brazilian partner organization called FASE, which has launched a campaign along with one of brazil’s largest rock bands (O Rappa) to bring food donations to this project.
In 2006 the Center started a new project with young mothers dealing with birth control mechanisms, sexuality and STDs. This program is coordinated by two trained mothers of the community who provide condoms in the center.
The needs of this daycare institution are plenty; the most urgent are kitchen utensils and food because they also provide daily meals to the children of the area. The center has no stable income to pay the bills and for the moment rely solely on donations.
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