Normando Batista Santos

Normando Batista Santos is helping poor communities in Brazil create their own schools--schools that area residents staff, manage, and finance largely themselves. He is now extending this local self help model to health.

Normando's work utilizes the power of a community united in a single cause. When a community comes together on a project, it can greatly improve the quality of life of its people, especially in areas abandoned by the government. Normando learned this while working as a public school teacher in his native state of Bahia. He noticed that the people of small interior towns were quickly losing their sense of culture and tradition. These people, mostly poor and uneducated, were idle and apathetic in their leisure time. Their sense of community was burning out. Normando decided to rekindle their community spirit by turning the school into a community center and organizing activities like soccer games and dances. He then realized that the best way to unite a community was through its schools. Since education was a common concern among families, the school was a unifying point.

In 1982, Normando started the Center for Education and Popular Culture (CECUP) in the city of Salvador. CECUP primarily starts up schools in poor areas that are generally not seviced by public schools. The schools are run by the community. CECUP trains the teachers, produces the materials, prepares the curriculum, and gets the schools going.

Today CECUP has helped create or revitalize eighty six schools throughout northeast Brazil. Normando now envisions using the same model to create self help health posts in poor areas. Finding people in the community with a knowledge of nursing or traditional medicine, he involves them in health planning and evaluation in hope that the health posts they create will provide needs defined as basic health care. The posts' primary focus would be preventive medicine, educating people about health and hygiene. Such knowledge will likely help prevent illnesses like cholera, which is now also epidemic in parts of Brazil. CECUP will also work on primary health issues immediately impacting the community such as dehydration, nutrition, vaccination, and reproductive issues.

The lack of education and the lack of health facilities are arguably the two greatest problems facing Brazil's lower class. Ten percent, roughly five million children, never go to school. Probably seventy percent of all school age children are not in school because they are either kept out to help their families or live in areas where there are no public schools.

In Normando's city of Salvador, there were close to 125,000 children not attending school, according to the state secretary of education. While nearly twenty percent of Brazil's population is illiterate, in Salvador, one of the poorest areas of the country, the illiteracy rate is estimated to be as high as forty two percent.

Even for children attending schools, "the quality of public education is degrading with each passing day," Normando says. The public schools are overcrowded and often in dilapidated condition. Schoolbooks, pencils, paper, and even food are in short supply. Teachers are poorly paid, often only making a minimum salary of eighty dollars per month. "Education is a fundamental human right," says Normando, "a right that many Brazilian children are denied."

The problems facing schools are also true for public hospitals, which lack medical supplies and adequate equipment. Diseases like cholera, which is easily preventable through good hygiene, hit hardest in poor areas where there is no sewage system or clean drinking water.

Normando understands the key to making community based schools and health posts work is ensuring their independence. He trains people in the community to be teachers and health workers so that when he and his staff leave, the community facility functions on its own. He also ensures community participation in the planning, execution, and evaluation of the project. Normando explains, "We consider it fundamental that community organizations be autonomous, so in the end there is no dependency on any of us at CECUP."

In addition to his community based approach to training teachers and health workers, Normando will continue to help communities find funding using his vast network of government and private organization contacts. Utilizing the same network, Normando will spread his ideas by organizing a series of national education and health meetings. He has recently won the support of such major organizations as UNICEF and the World Health Organization for his efforts to spread his model. This support will help Normando adapt his
community based education approach to solve community health problems, and also to expand his program well beyond the northeast region.

Since the early 1970s, Normando has played an integral part in community school projects, serving eventually as the secretary of community schools for the state of Bahia. His roots are in community and educational work. "I always had an interest in working with education and popular culture, because I consider it an important contribution to the formation of a democratic and just society," Normando says. He also feels it is important to instill in people a sense of their racial and cultural identity. In Bahia, which is eighty percent Afro Brazilian, that means helping black students become aware.