Cristina Gonçalves de Aguilar
A
challenge I overcame: To overcome my mother abandoning me as a child.
A dream
for my future: To finish my college course in Social Services (social assistant
A hope for the global community: to have union, respect everyone without violation of one's rights
Cristina is one of the three educators here at Meninadança's Pink House in Medina. Cristina specialises in theatre, so runs theatre workshops with the girls here a couple of afternoons a week. It was absolutely brilliant this Saturday night to have my first experience of watching our Meninadança girls perform their theatre piece live in Medina's central square as part of the 18th May demonstrations protesting and raising awareness about the sexual abuse and exploitation of children and adolescents in Brazil. (I'll write more about this in my next post).
Cristina also works with the other educators Aline and Maria in planning and facilitating the art and craft workshops that I have begun to collaborate with this past week. She shared a brilliant Brazilian source of reference material with me, a monthly magazine publication Mundo Jovem that is aimed at educators working with youngsters.
Hugely creative and committed to socially focused work, Cristina is involved in a number of other projects outside the Pink House, volunteering at another NGO, practising capoeira (which we volunteers are excited to be going with her to try out soon) and also part of the photography project Olhares Em Foco (Eyes in Focus). Having parallels with the Kids with Cameras project I mentioned in my last post, Olhares Em Foco uses photography to help at-risk children and youngsters in Brazil explore their identities, relationships and communities by providing them with cameras and hosting international photographers who run workshops for the kids. The project apparently comes to Medina every year and when we were speaking about the Born into Brothels film Cristina told me that this film was the first reference material referred to in these workshops, and the following day brought in a pile of material from their workshops to give to me. They show some of the photos taken during the project, many of which are portraits accompanied by written-up tales told by their subjects, giving a lovely intimate insight into some of the local folk in Medina. What a beautiful project!
And Cristina manages to balance all this work whilst also being a new-mum to a gorgeous 5-month old baby girl Cecilia... impressive!
Cristina, muito obrigada para todo que você esta dividendo comigo, é um prazer conhecer você aqui em Medina. Desejando você muito sucesso nos seus projetos todos! Um abraço.
:-)
No comments:
Post a Comment