newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MARIO OSAVA

IPS NEWS AGENCY

SÃO PAULO — "It takes us an hour and 20 minutes to get there. We have to walk, because we can't afford the 30-minute bus ride. But the girls never miss their music classes, not even when they have to go without lunch because they don't have time to eat after school," says their mother, Maria da Cruz.

That day in June, nine-year-old Jaqueline had a sore throat, which kept her from her violin rehearsal. But she went along when her mother took her 12-year-old sister to the Projeto Guri (Guri Project) centre, so her sister wouldn't miss her drumming class. "Both of them have to come, because I don't have anyone to leave the other one with at home," said da Cruz.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, da Cruz and her daughters make the long trek to the Guri Project centre in Itaquaquecetuba, a poor municipality of 350,000 people on the outskirts of the southern Brazilian city of São Paulo.

"Guri" means child in the language of the Guarani Indians. The project, launched in 1995 by the state of São Paulo Secretariat of Culture with the aim of fomenting "the sociocultural inclusion of children and adolescents through musical education," gives free classes to around 40,000 mainly low-income youngsters.

Although that number is a record for initiatives of this kind in Brazil, it is equivalent to just 0.5 percent of the state's primary and secondary school students.

The program serves as an unprecedented source of work for musicians, offering 1,800 posts to teachers and their assistants.

The classes are given in 362 centers scattered around 302 municipalities, which are financed by the Guri Project Association of Friends, mainly with state government funds, as well as contributions from sponsors and from partners like city governments and institutions that offer facilities.

Improving learning

"My children dream of becoming musicians, they play their instruments and sing all day long," says Eliana Mendes, who takes three of her four kids to the Guri Project. But whatever their future may hold, she is pleased with the immediate results. Her oldest son, a 12-year-old, greatly improved his speaking difficulties thanks to choir, and her daughter, who is studying guitar, is overcoming her excessive shyness.

For her part, da Cruz says drumming has helped her daughter become less aggressive and forge a better relationship with school, which she used to complain about having to attend, arguing that "it's enough just to know how to read and write."

But the mothers lament that the Itaquaquecetuba centre, which has 428 students, stopped offering lunch early this year, when it was moved out of a large local school and into the changing room and offices of a football stadium in the same neighborhood.

The new installations, which are small and have few windows, are hot in the summertime and cold in the winter. And because there is no space for the entire 120-piece orchestra to practice together, they have to rehearse in smaller, separate groups, complains the head of the local Guri centre, Jocimara Caetano. Moreover, because of the problems with damp, mildew has actually grown on some instruments, she says.

The city government moved the centre because it needed more rooms in the school where it was operating, in order to serve children from a newly-built housing project that expanded the population in the neighborhood. Regular education has to take priority, officials explained.

"We just want facilities that are suitable for a serious, well-organized project that socializes kids and helps them become good citizens," says Raimundo Siqueira, whose daughter and nephew attend the centre. He criticizes the Municipal Secretariat of Culture for the failure to assign the centre a better locale.