Every few minutes the conversation stops short in the tiny house as another jet swings low overhead, carrying sun-seekers from Milan or Montreal to this sun-drenched resort city at the tip of Brazil’s northeastern coast.
Eight-year-old Maria Cleidiane da Silva passes her days in this crowded, dun-colored shack, the house of her grandmother, 5 miles and several light years from the ocean front hotels that line Fortaleza’s towering Gold Coast.
Cleidiane’s world is bounded by the dusty streets of Tancredo Neves, the desperately poor Fortaleza backwater named for one of this country’s populist icons, the first president elected in 1985 after two decades of military rule.
As in Brazil’s other slums or favelas, the men of Tancredo Neves tend to father children and move on, leaving behind a society of matriarchs, the maids and laundresses of the tourists and the well-to-do.
Cleidiane’s father, who left when she was 18 months old, is now far away in Sao Paulo. Her mother, Maria Cleide, is on her third boyfriend, to whose decrepit lean-to Cleidiane and her 6-year-old sister, Maria Cleidilene, return each night to sleep in hammocks strung across the single room. The nexus of Cleidiane’s life remains her grandmother’s house, where she plays away the days surrounded by various siblings, female cousins and aunts.
A baiduhai reporter, responding to a Christian Children’s Fund appeal to “work a miracle in the life of a child,” was randomly assigned to sponsor Cleidiane. In return, the Richmond, Va.-based charity promised to make sure she received “the food, clothing, education and medical care that child desperately needs to grow and develop a healthy mind and body.”
Cleidiane needed all of those things and more. Between June 1995 and July 1996, the Tribune gave CCF $144 on Cleidiane’s behalf, some of it earmarked for birthday and Christmas gifts, the rest destined for Projeto do Bem-Estar Comunitario, the CCF outpost in Tancredo Neves.
Her mother used the gift money to buy Cleidiane clothes and toys, including a pocket electronic game and a doll. But much of the money CCF sent to Bem-Estar was spent not for food, clothing and other essentials for Cleidiane and younger children like her but on computers and dancing lessons for older children and teenagers.
When two Tribune reporters arrived there last June to assess the impact of sponsorship on Cleidiane’s life, they found not the child CCF had described as “a sweet and alert little Brazilian girl” whose health was “quite good,” but a frail, sickly girl whose expression already seemed flattened by poverty–and in whose life no miracles had occurred.
“Right now,” Christian Children’s Fund tells prospective sponsors, “one girl in a dusty village and one boy in an urban slum are praying for an angel. You can be an angel to one child now.” But the sense of urgency implied by such appeals is manufactured.
When Cleidiane finally acquired her angel, it made little difference in her life. Like many children, Cleidiane had been enrolled at an early age by her mother in Bem-Estar, which means “well-being” in Portuguese. According to Bem-Estar employees, children awaiting sponsors, or whose sponsorships have lapsed, receive virtually the same benefits as those who are currently sponsored.
In the years before she became a sponsored child, Bem-Estar’s records show, Cleidiane’s family was given some hammocks, a pair of sheets and a water filter whose whereabouts no one now recalls. Like most of their neighbors, Cleidiane’s family drinks chlorinated water from the municipal tap down the street.
Cleidiane got some school supplies and a little uniform to wear during the few months she attended Bem-Estar’s kindergarten. She got another uniform and a spiral notebook in early 1995, after she began alphabet classes at the local elementary school.
Indeed, Cleidiane discovered she had joined the ranks of CCF’s sponsored children only when someone delivered a card to her grandmother’s house, directing her to report to Bem-Estar to write her Tribune sponsor a thank-you letter.
The girl was accompanied by her 23-year-old aunt, Regina Claudia da Silva, who recalled explaining to Bem-Estar’s correspondence director that “Cleidiane only knows the alphabet. So they asked, `Can you write the letter for her? I said, `Yes, I can write.’ The woman wrote the letter and told me to copy it.”
Ester Honorato, the cheerful young woman who manages the voluminous correspondence between Bem-Estar’s children and their CCF sponsors around the world, confirmed da Silva’s recollection. “Regina, she didn’t know what to write,” Honorato said. “She didn’t know how to make the letter. So I told her what to write.”
Signed by Regina da Silva on Cleidiane’s behalf, the letter depicted Cleidiane as “a nimble, healthy child that enjoys playing dolls with her friends.” Subsequent letters, also composed by Honorato and copied by Cleidiane’s mother–thank-you notes for two $20 birthday gifts and a $20 Christmas present–were equally reassuring, describing Cleidiane as a “healthful child” who was “performing well in her studies.”
To a visitor, Cleidiane’s mother confided that the letters dictated by Honorato weren’t entirely accurate. Cleidiane has had more than her share of sickness, including several bouts with pneumonia. Besides her evident frailness and some angry red lesions on her right forearm, Cleidiane complained of frequent headaches–so bad, her mother says, that “her teacher brings her back from school.”
Not surprisingly, she is doing badly in school; on a scale from 1 to 10, her marks have mostly been 5’s, the lowest passing grade. Cleidiane’s 1st-grade teacher, Mirtes da Costa, says the child can barely read or write, and that she has missed many days because of illness.
CCF promises sponsors that Bem-Estar “systematically follows up the children’s progress in school,” offering “tutoring sessions for those who are behind in their studies.” While Bem-Estar staff members do stop by the school to check the progress of other sponsored children, da Costa doesn’t recall anyone ever asking after Cleidiane. And though Bem-Estar’s records list Cleidiane as a child in need of remedial tutoring, she has yet to attend a single session.
The Christian Children’s Fund also maintains that “primary health care is offered to the children and their families” at Bem-Estar. According to Cleidiane’s mother, however, there hasn’t been a doctor available at Bem-Estar for several years. Like the other CCF-sponsored children, Cleidiane must go to the government clinic 2 miles away, a trip she makes balanced on the handlebars of her mother’s bicycle.
The only exception is immunizations, which Bem-Estar also claims to provide. But Cleidiane’s immunizations, like those of the other CCF children, have all been given by government health workers, who sometimes use Bem-Estar as one of several neighborhood facilities where children are inoculated during Brazil’s national “vaccination days.”
More Top Picks Best Weighted Blankets For Adults
Under Bem-Estar’s rules, children are provided free medicine prescribed by doctors at the government clinic, either from the project’s own dispensary or a local pharmacy. Project records show Cleidiane has received vitamins from Bem-Estar in the past, as well as medication for her respiratory problems. Lately, Cleidiane’s mother says, medicine seems harder to come by at Bem-Estar. “Whenever I go with a prescription,” she complains, “they never have it, and I can’t afford to buy it.”
In January 1997, a doctor at the government clinic prescribed Bactroban, an anti-bacterial cream, for Cleidiane’s skin infection. Bactroban sells for $13, an impossible sum for a family whose food budget is $5 a week. But when Cleidiane’s mother took the prescription to Bem-Estar to be filled, she says, she was told the project didn’t have any Bactroban and couldn’t afford to buy it. She still has the crumpled prescription in her purse.
In addition to her other health problems, Cleidiane is unusually small for her age. For breakfast this morning she had bread, butter, milk and coffee. For lunch, the Brazilian staple of rice and beans–and, her mother says, an egg. But eggs, which sell for 10 cents apiece in the local open-air market, must be a very occasional treat.
Tancredo Neves is not without access to resources. Besides the government clinic and several elementary schools there is a hospital, a municipal community center and other privately funded assistance projects. What is most often lacking is food. Bem-Estar used to serve its children a hot lunch, but no more. “It lasted about six months,” Cleidiane’s mother says, “and then it stopped one year ago.”
CCF also tells sponsors that Bem-Estar provides children a new school uniform each year, a pair of Bermuda shorts and a shirt or blouse. But this year the children are wearing last year’s uniforms. At a meeting of project mothers, it was announced that there was only enough money for uniforms or school supplies, but not both. The mothers chose the supplies.
An oasis of calm
The gossip in Tancredo Neves is that Bem-Estar has fallen on hard times, that the money from CCF has stopped. But Bem-Estar doesn’t look like an operation in financial trouble. Behind its gated walls, pockmarked and stained with graffiti, the project is an oasis of cleanliness and calm in the midst of a noisy, dusty slum.
Unlike Save the Children, which primarily underwrites community development projects like schools and wells, or Children International, which gives children handouts of clothing and toiletries it buys in bulk, the Christian Children’s Fund finances community centers like Bem-Estar that provide essential services for children like tutoring, meals, rudimentary medical and dental care.
Once a government-operated hammock factory, Bem-Estar’s building, still owned by the Brazilian state of Ceara and leased to Bem-Estar for free, has been converted by CCF into a pleasant, airy space with high ceilings and lots of light, an enclosed courtyard with an herbal garden and a jungle gym, even a small library.
Bem-Estar is clearly a popular place, even though much of what it offers Tancredo Neves is replicated by nearby government and community facilities. The project’s unique attraction is a three-chair dental clinic. One of the chairs was paid for by CCF sponsors. Another was donated by the British consulate and the third by a local university. The state gives Bem-Estar $450 a month to cover the clinic’s supplies and the salary of one of its two dentists.
On this day, however, the dental clinic is running on lean. The amalgam machine, which mixes silver with mercury for fillings, isn’t working properly and there is no autoclave for sterilizing the dentists’ implements, just an ancient electric oven that doesn’t approach autoclave temperatures. The only antiseptic available is a homemade solution from Bem-Estar’s herb garden.
Although residents say the clinic is supposed to see the occupants of each street in the neighborhood once a year, Cleidiane’s first visit to the clinic occurred a few months before, when she had three cavities filled and a tooth extracted. She also received a lesson in tooth brushing–but no toothbrush, which she still doesn’t have because her mother can’t afford to buy her one.
Bem-Estar closed its medical clinic three years ago, after the project director, Maria Tereza Simao, concluded it was a “wasted resource” with the government clinic so nearby. All Bem-Estar offers in the way of medical care is a first aid station, for scraped knees and other small emergencies. The tiny dispensary contains a meager supply of medicines: some anti-parasite pills, a medicine for asthma and one for allergies, a few antibiotics and an anti-bacterial cream–but no Bactroban.
At mid-afternoon about 30 children are seated in Bem-Estar’s cafeteria, each sipping a few ounces of chocolate milk from his or her blue plastic cup. Bem-Estar’s resident nutritionist, Lucisania Lopes, confirms that meals are no longer provided for the children, only what Lopes calls “a reinforced snack”–a drink and a cookie on some days, a small bowl of soup or a sandwich on others.
“Before we used to have lunch here,” Lopes says. “But it was stopped last year. This year we didn’t have it any more. We didn’t have the means to provide support to all the children who are here. The problem is that it becomes more expensive for us.”
Lopes leads a visitor to the small storeroom where the food supply is kept and which contains little for a project that must feed 400 children a day: a dozen bottles of an avocado shake, four boxes of maize, two cans of guava in sugar syrup, one can of some unidentified green vegetable, eight bottles of ketchup and a few pounds of dried red beans waiting to become the next day’s snack, a watery bean soup.
Asked about CCF’s assurance to sponsors that malnourished children receive “special attention with four meals daily,” Lopes exclaims, “Oh, no! It doesn’t happen here.” The mothers of malnourished children don’t receive food, Lopes says, only nutritional advice. “We call the mother in to talk. What does the child eat? What’s the health state? We just give guidance.”
As Lopes talks, Bem-Estar’s director, Tereza Simao, pulls up in front of the project in a shiny, white General Motors sedan, cell phone in hand. Offering a smile and a handshake, Simao leads a waiting visitor to her spacious office, outfitted with a computer and a stereo.
Despite the impression in Tancredo Neves that Bem-Estar is in financial straits, Simao says the project is receiving more money from CCF in 1997 than it did the year before.
Of the 1,359 children enrolled at Bem-Estar, Simao says 1,090 currently have CCF sponsors. According to CCF executives, projects funded by the charity receive 70 cents of each sponsor’s dollar–about $15 a month for each of Bem-Estar’s 1,090 sponsored children, assuming all sponsors make their $21 monthly payments on time.
Thanks to favorable exchange rates and a number of German sponsors who pay in marks, Bem-Estar is ahead of the curve. During the first five months of 1997, Simao says, CCF has sent her an average of $23,000 a month–more than $21 for each sponsored child. The reason there are no school uniforms, no Bactroban and no lunch is not a shortage of money from Richmond, but how it is being spent.
Bem-Estar’s 1997 budget request to CCF totals about $180,000. It includes some $8,600 to purchase computers and hire a computer teacher, but only $5,000 for food; more than $1,500 to pay a teacher of capoeira, the Brazilian fighting dance that resembles judo, but only $1,400 for a remedial tutor; more than $1,000 to hire a girls’ dance teacher, but only $990 for outpatient health care.
Simao also has set aside $960 for a telephone line–an unheard of luxury in Tancredo Neves–so her teenage computer students can surf the Internet, and she is spending another $12,000 to construct a new wing that will house the remedial classes currently taught in a nearby house.
Simao acknowledges that the families of her sponsored children “are mad” about the cutbacks. Parents “want everything,” she says, “but we had to prioritize. We were restructuring, organizing the project, trying to build the classrooms, the computer room. We cannot do everything at the same time.”
Asked why there are no special meals or food supplements for malnourished children as CCF maintains, Simao explains that those benefits are reserved for children with third-degree malnutrition, the most extreme cases, of which Bem-Estar has none.
It does have 13 second-degree malnourished children and 136 suffering from first-degree malnutrition. But Simao says she is reluctant to give those children food to take home for fear it will be eaten by other family members or sold. “CCF sets the rules,” Simao says, shaking her head. ” `The program cannot have a malnourished child.’ But they do not give me guidelines to prevent that.”
Simao explains that the capoeira and computer classes are intended to give Bem-Estar’s older children and teenagers an after-school alternative to hanging out in the streets as well as teaching them job skills. But similar programs are offered at the Tancredo Neves community center a few blocks away, and Simao acknowledges that the computer classes have come at the expense of benefits available to younger children like Cleidiane.
When it is suggested that Cleidiane has received relatively little during her CCF sponsorship–notebooks and pens, a few school uniforms, some medicine and dental treatment–Simao falls silent. “She could have come to the dancing class,” she says finally.
Time for a checkup
Cleidiane’s name does not appear on Bem-Estar’s roster of malnourished children, and her annual child progress report, completed by Bem-Estar staff members two months before, said her health was “good, without any problems.” But the child is clearly not well.
At the Tribune’s expense, Cleidiane, accompanied by her mother and a translator, Catarina Parodi, is examined by a Fortaleza pediatrician, Dr. Lucia Nasser Hissa. The visit is an event for Cleidiane: her first excursion to downtown Fortaleza, her first ride in an elevator, her first neon lights and, afterward, her first cheeseburger and french fries at a McDonald’s across the street from the beach.
Following a full pediatric workup and a blood exam, which together cost some $85, Hissa pronounces Cleidiane more than 8 pounds underweight for her height and age, midway between first- and second-degree malnutrition. She also reports that the child is suffering from two chronic bacterial infections: the one on her arm, which Hissa diagnoses as mycosis, and another in her right ear. The blood tests show that Cleidiane is anemic.
For the mycosis Hissa prescribes Bactroban; for the anemia an iron supplement; and for the ear infection another antiseptic cream. Because Cleidiane’s mother cannot afford these medicines, they are purchased by the Tribune.
During the taxi ride home Cleidiane’s mother reveals that a few hours earlier, she and her daughter were summoned to Bem-Estar by Tereza Simao and questioned about their conversations with a Tribune reporter. “She asked me why I said they didn’t have medicines at the project,” Maria Cleide said.
Simao later had a different recollection of the meeting. “I asked her,” Simao said, ” `Why don’t you register your daughter, help her at the school reinforcement, so she can pass school and meet the goals asked by the project?’ “
Whatever transpired, two days later Cleidiane attends her first remedial tutoring session and joins the Bem-Estar dancing class.
A personal ministry
The foreign operations of the Christian Children’s Fund are overseen by Rev. John Schultz, a steely eyed Presbyterian minister with a barrel chest and an iron grip, who considers the 526,000 children enrolled in CCF projects worldwide his personal ministry.
It is a vast ministry indeed, but Schultz takes a hands-off approach. “This is a decentralized system,” he says. “There are 1,200 projects. The national offices are the ones that are responsible for monitoring projects.”
Asked about the way Bem-Estar is spending CCF’s money, Schultz replies that neither he nor anyone else at the fund’s headquarters in Richmond has ever seen the Bem-Estar budget, which was approved by the CCF regional office in Fortaleza. “The program officer in Fortaleza would be the only one that would have the full picture,” Schultz says.
According to Schultz, CCF does require that children sponsored through the charity are “adequately nourished,” with at least one meal provided each day and “some outreach to their families.”
As Schultz understands it, however, nothing is amiss in Fortaleza. The CCF office there has assured him that the children of Bem-Estar are receiving not just one meal a day but three. As Schultz speaks, he produces an invoice from a Brazilian government program, Merenda Escolar, which provides free food to schools.
In July, Schultz says, Bem-Estar received an enormous shipment of food, worth more than $8,000: carton upon carton of soybeans, cooking oil, canned meatballs, beans, sugar, biscuits, rice, cassava flour, chocolate powder, powdered milk and sardines.
“That was one month’s worth of food from the government,” he says.
More Top Picks Best Reading Glasses With Blue Light Filter For Computer Use
Schultz acknowledges that the immunizations described in CCF’s letters to sponsors are actually provided by the government, not Bem-Estar itself. But he insists that “the children would not have the immunizations if the project wasn’t there.”
“We’re dealing with kids that don’t take advantage of government services,” Schultz says. “They don’t know about them, they don’t read the literature, they don’t have a TV, whatever it is. So playing that catalytic role, that is what CCF does.”
Schultz acknowledges that Bem-Estar does not provide semiannual medical checkups for children up to age 6, described by CCF as one of its sponsorship benefits.
” `The project ensures adequate health care to children up to age 6 with medical checkups every semester,’ ” Schultz says, quoting from the CCF letter to sponsors.
“That doesn’t say there’s a doctor on the site of that project. The role of the project is to ensure that the children receive proper medical attention. In some way or another, we’re watching over the children to make sure they’re getting adequate medical care. That’s a rather critical parenting skill. These people don’t have, necessarily, those kinds of parenting skills.”
Told that a pediatrician had pronounced Cleidiane malnourished, anemic and suffering from two chronic infections, Schultz responds with a question. “Tell me,” he asks, “what conclusion would you draw from that? Is it good, or is it bad, or is it startling? Would you report that as a startling fact, that you found a child that upon having a professional pediatric exam was anemic? A child living in a slum of Fortaleza? You’d draw the conclusion that that’s highly unusual?”
Reminded that the Bem-Estar correspondence coordinator composed the letters to Cleidiane’s sponsor that portrayed her as healthy and doing well in school, Schultz declares that “CCF doesn’t manufacture letters.”
“We never have and we never will,” he says. “They’re not cooked up. They’re written by people as close to the child, or the child themselves, as we can possibly do. The correspondence coordinator doesn’t know Maria?” Schultz asks. “Doesn’t know her aunt? She wasn’t in the room? These are letters from Maria. These are letters from a preschool girl in Fortaleza, Brazil.”
The only aspect of Cleidiane’s treatment by Bem-Estar that appears to give Schultz pause is why a child barely passing in school was allowed to languish outside the remedial tutoring program.
“It is not unusual,” he says slowly, “to find that in a particular center that the outreach to the local community isn’t strong enough and that families are falling through the cracks.” Schultz concedes that outreach “is an area that we are actively strengthening.” But he asserts that CCF and Bem-Estar “did not fail Maria (Cleidiane) by any stretch of the imagination.
“Maria is alive and well and has a fighting chance for the future because of the various supports which were put in place,” Schultz says. “All of which was CCF.”
Clinic’s reaction
At the government clinic in Tancredo Neves, suggestions that few children would receive vaccinations or well-child checkups without Bem-Estar’s intervention are dismissed by health workers.
“That’s just not true. They come on their own,” says an attendant, Clarice Freitas, who points out that the state government advertises its vaccine campaigns on radio and television and in newspapers and posters with such success that more than 95 percent of the children in Tancredo Neves are fully vaccinated.
Four months after she was treated by Hissa, Cleidiane’s skin and ear infections cleared up nicely. According to her Aunt Regina, Cleidiane has been faithfully taking the liquid vitamins prescribed for anemia. Cleidiane’s 1st-grade teacher, Mirtes da Costa, reports that the girl’s attendance has improved along with her health. When a Tribune reporter arrives in late October, Cleidiane has been absent from school only one day, a new personal record.
Cleidiane acquired a new CCF sponsor a few months after her Tribune sponsorship ended in April 1997, but her connection to Bem-Estar is still tenuous. During August, she missed nine out of 20 remedial classes. In September she had only five absences, by the end of October, she will have missed 13 classes out of 20. For this, Bem-Estar’s director, Tereza Simao, blames Cleidiane’s family.
“It’s a big, poor and lazy family with a lot of problems,” says Simao, pointing out that when Cleidiane’s mother finds work as a maid the girl is left in the care of her grandmother, who Simao says “doesn’t care much” for the child. On the days Cleidiane does come to Bem-Estar, Simao says, she rarely stays more than an hour rather than spending the morning.
On this October day, Cleidiane is sitting with a group of remedial students in front of a television set watching a videotape of Jim Carrey’s movie, “The Mask.” Only a handful of students are working with the teachers.
As John Schultz maintained a few days before, a hot lunch is once again being served at Bem-Estar–not chocolate milk and cookies, but a meal with all the trimmings. Children who arrive at Bem-Estar early get a breakfast of porridge, juice and milk, and there is another hot meal in late afternoon.
Luci Lopes, the nutritionist, explains that the meals had been canceled the year before as “an experiment,” to see whether the children could subsist on a snack and thereby free up money for computers and new classrooms.
But Lopes admits that children were going hungry. Once the computers and the classrooms were paid for, she says, “We got to the conclusion that the snack was not sufficient. We thought about it and decided to return to have lunch the way it was before.”
According to Lopes, lunch was reinstated in August–two months after the Tribune’s first visit to Bem-Estar–with the shipment of food provided through Merenda Escolar–the first such shipment in well over a year. Now, Lopes says, that food is nearly gone; it wasn’t worth $8,000 but only a tenth of that, because of a computer error that valued the canned meat balls at $90 a pound.
Cleidiane had a bowl of porridge when she arrived this morning. But she is not among the children who will share the midday meal of mutton with black beans and rice, grated carrots and jellied guava for dessert. When Cleidiane’s grandmother arrives to collect her, lunch is a half-hour away from being served. Rather than waiting or coming back, she takes the girl home.
By December Bem-Estar’s new computers are on-line and the new wing is finished, four sparkling new classrooms with tile roofs and floors. For Cleidiane the outlook is not so promising.
After a few dance classes, she quit, telling Regina she preferred to spend her afternoons playing in the neighborhood. And, despite her improved attendance at the remedial classes, Cleidiane has failed 1st grade. “When you teach her one thing she can repeat it,” Regina says. “But half an hour later she will forget.”