‘Soul of the Hill’ collective brings culture, education and digital inclusion to community residents in AM

Ívina Garcia – From Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – The access to education, leisure and sports is a right assured by law to children and teenagers. However, the reality of peripheral neighborhoods is different. The idleness during childhood and adolescence, in these places, can lead to different paths than the educational ones. This is why, in many neighborhoods, the community members themselves create spaces for leisure and culture to compensate for the absence of public policies that allow access to these rights. This is how the ‘Soul do Monte Collective’ was born two years ago, located in the Monte das Oliveiras neighborhood in the North Zone of Manaus.

According to the project’s coordinator, Rojefferson Moraes, the creation of the collective came from an experience of his. Born and raised in the neighborhood, Rojefferson faced head-on the problem experienced by other families living there.

“When I thought of doing a project here in the neighborhood, which is a 30 year old neighborhood that has not had any kind of work in this field, it came from the fact that I lost two brothers and a cousin here to drug trafficking. So I know what it’s like to have a family that has been plagued by these problems”, he says.

The Monte das Oliveiras was born from the invasion of land in the 1980s, led by Sister Helena Walcout, also responsible for the creation of eight other neighborhoods of Manaus, known for violence and drug war.

“In the past, it was risky for us to go out on the streets, we were afraid of being robbed, of being killed, before our lives were surrounded by violence. Rojefferson has been rescuing people, trying to create a space, and the community started to get together, and now there are many volunteers”, says Alessandra Lopes, a volunteer in the project.

Soul do Monte seeks to repair vulnerabilities, creating spaces for children and teenagers to participate in workshops and for parents to accompany their children.

“The idea is to keep the children busy and take them out of idleness, but also to be a place of support for these mothers and families who often have their lives marked by prejudice for losing children to drug trafficking. The ‘kids’ got involved in drug trafficking because the State failed them; they are not here doing what they should have done,” explains the coordinator.

Among volunteers and students, the collective counts with more than 130 people involved in audiovisual, photographic, and theatrical projects, as well as in the production of podcasts, textual genre workshops, creative writing, and fanzines.

According to the coordinator of the collective, the pandemic was responsible for bringing the community together. During the most critical period of Covid-19, the space started receiving food baskets and was responsible for the distribution. This action counted with four people initially and ended up bringing more people inside the shed as volunteers.

“There were 400 families assisted, more than a thousand food baskets donated, 500 hygiene kits, more than 2,000 protective masks produced, and more than R$100,000 in food donated through a food card via Gerando Falcões,” says Rojefferson.

Currently, the project receives support from the state government, through the Sustainable Amazon Foundation and the Global Shapers, which enabled the construction of the bathroom, the biological septic tank, and the multimedia room of the space.

Among the workshops and courses offered in the collective, the computer classes stand out for providing digital inclusion for the community. With three classes and using an online learning platform, the basic computer course has already served about 60 students and is supervised by volunteer Lyzandra Lopes, who received training and now passes the learning to the community.

Lyzandra says that giving this support made her discover her passion for teaching. “First, I took it for the experience, but then I realized that I enjoy teaching. I enjoy teaching each student until I realize that they have learned. Before I was here I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I think I want to continue being a teacher,” she said.

In the search to guarantee the inclusion of women in the job market, the Soul do Monte Collective offers training courses, and it was in the creation of one of these that the need to create a computer course arose.

“We had offered a cashier course for mothers here in the neighborhood, but when they went to take the technical course, we realized that they had no notion of computers. So, that’s why we started offering the course”, explains Rojefferson.

Currently, the collective has already managed to employ six women at the Grande Circular Mall, at the Sodexo Company, and in the local market. Besides the workshops, the site offers permanent activities, which include collective gymnastics classes for 30 women, capoeira classes for 30 children, and lectures on dental prevention, legal orientation for women, types of violence against women, and attention to women’s health.