Community Services projects have been a part of the EAC community since 2003. Sarah Cardoso was an EAC student when these projects started, she immediately fell in love with helping our community and until today hosts many projects. In this interview, our amazing teacher talks about her experience with the CSA and how it affected the course of her life.
When I was a student at an EAC there was something very similar to a CSA but it was called CIP, Community Interaction Program which is the same idea as CSA, and I used to participate in several different CIPs where we would visit institutions and do activities with children with different kinds of Social and financial economical vulnerability. After I graduated from EAC I kept on doing a lot of community service projects on my own, it became a passion for me, in fact, I met my husband in a community service project. And when I came back to EAC I really believe that more than teaching mathematics or chemistry, which is what I teach, or any other topic, I want you, EAC students, to be good-hearted people, to realize that there are realities other than ours and that we can make a difference in people’s lives. Get out of your bubble and go somewhere else to donate to someone who can’t offer you anything in return. I believe that this is something that cannot be worked on in the classroom, discussions in Portuguese, history, geography, and English classes do not have the same impact as going to Casa Ronald and playing with a little child, or going to an orphanage and playing with, and providing affection to that lonely child. I believe that, raises people’s awareness of the world outside their immediate surroundings, which is one of the reasons I wanted to get engaged in volunteer work.
So, my first CSA project as a student was led by my Drama teacher which was also my English teacher and she drove me into it, we went to Lar da Crianca Feliz, and we would do things related to drama with the kids, I spent many years working in this project, therefore later on during my junior and senior years due to the hard studying and my 4 AP’s, I started a project which was mostly fundraising in order to fit my schedule.
The CSA project that impacted me the most was not related to EAC, but it was a project that I participated in for 3 years, in Limeira where every Saturday I would teach music to girls who lived in the community which was a very tense neighborhood where a lot of drug trafficking and violence occurred. That was extremely impactful for several reasons, one being that oftentimes some girls of 5 to 12 years old would come up to me and say “O tia quantos filhos você tem?”. They didn’t ask me if I had any kids, it was how many kids I already had at 23 years old, and I answered “none” they were completely shocked, because in reality, at the age I was at the time, I needed to have at least 3 children. The other reason was that I did a lot of work with the girls about their dreams and what they want to be when they grow up, and all of them answered that they wished to get pregnant by the drug dealer, that was their life goal, the wish they begged every night to become true. One of the things I worked a lot with the girls on was the fact that they were much more than just a simple objects designed to provide pleasure for the man or to have a youngster with a specific person. I’m not sure if these dialogues made a difference in their thinking because this was heavily exploited in the girls’ thoughts. The final factor that made an impression on me was that, with the exception of two of the girls I taught, they had all experienced or were presently experiencing recurring physical and sexual assault from members of their own families. Worst of all, they believed it was entirely normal. Meaning, it was quite difficult to abort and treat their skull. This endeavor provided me with several intense experiences.
I used to participate in many different CSA projects at once, but now I only do Casa Ronald which is an independent American nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to develop, identify, and fund programs that directly improve the health and well-being of sick children.
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