First Contacts

Today I went with Sérgio to visit the Education of the Countryside program just outside the city, where he gave a lecture on the agrarian situation of the Cerrado. (The Cerrado is the highland savannah of central Brazil where I am from. It is the world’s richest savannah in terms of biodiversity, but it is also one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems by the expansion of soy monocultures, as well as cattle and, more recently, sugar cane. It is being deforested at twice the rate of the Amazon, and some estimates indicate that close to half of the entire ecosystem is already destroyed. Unlike the “charismatic” rainforest, however, the Cerrado remains relatively neglected in domestic and international environmentalist circles alike.) The other lecturer on the topic this morning was Donald Sawyer, who works on the agroecology of the Amazon and the Cerrado at the University of Brasilia’s (UnB) Center for Sustainable Development (Centro de Desenvolvimento Sustentável – CDS) and with related NGOs. Donald will be my first contact in that program, with which I intend to further familiarize myself this week. The students of the Education of the Countryside program are primarily from peasant movements, including those from Quilombola communities (ex-slaves and their descendents who set up their own communities). Hence, the program is structured on a work/study basis that allows the students to spend several months living in their own communities, and crams full semester loads into 30-40 day periods of morning/afternoon classwork and evening study. The students live in community while studying here, near Brasília, taking common meals prepared by a women’s cooperative organized through the MST. Students with children bring them along for their study periods, so daycare facilities are also set up right there where they live and study. The students were quite even in their gender, and there were both younger (20’s) and older (30’s and 40’s) students, as well as a typical racial spectrum for Brazil. Several times during the day they took breaks to play music and sing together, keeping away the lethargy that would overwhelm anyone on the harsh study schedule they keep. I had opportunities to talk to several of the students during these breaks, as well as during the (delicious) lunch they invited me to share, and I also met several of the academics involved in several ways with the program (younger graduate students and established professors alike, from areas as diverse as pedagogy, anthropology, biology, sociology, geography, philosophy, economics, literature, and theater). In the afternoon, the course took a turn to language, literature, theater and social engagement. Some of the students were noticeably less interested in these “idealist” topics than the issues discussed in the morning, which are more directly related to the struggle for land on which they seem to base their lives. Still, the general feeling I had was that the students were all very happy to be there, and excited to integrate their education to the common education and progress of their own communities in the countryside. The most important developments for myself were the contacts I’ve started to make with members of the social movements like the MST, such as with “Janjão” (Janderson’s nickname that affectionately indicates also his large size and charismatic presence), who is here from the Federal District itself, and therefore someone with whom I can maintain closer contact even after this study period of the Education of the Countryside program is over next month. I asked if he’d introduce me to others from the Movement around Brasília and if he’d show me around the encampments and settlements around here (including, for example, the settlement where he lives himself). He not only agreed, but even suggested that I could perhaps work with them in the Movement on philosophy/education at the encampment and settlement schools. I am very honored and excited about this possibility, but I tried to be clear with him from the get-go that I am here to learn with them, and not to teach anyone the highly bookish thing that I was taught in the name of philosophy. He agreed that we learn best when we learn together. Hopefully, the seeds planted in these first contacts today will bloom into friendships and good work partnerships. I look forward to what is yet to come.