The Boy from FEBEM by Marcella

I believe that helping others is the best way of helping yourself. With that thought in mind, I decided to do volunteer work last year; to help me have a little time off my studies; I wanted to feel last stressed than I had been for the past months with all the pressure to enter a good univercity.

My uncle always told me about the social works he did, so I decided to call him first to see if he knew where I could start. When he said to me that  the place that neding more assistence was the prision for underage children in São Paulo, FEBEM, thought, all my exitment vanished, and all of a sudden I felt really scared with the idea of working with convicts.

After a lot of thinking, I decided to get involved with the project, or at least star it, before I juged them, after all, they where just kids. My job there was to help a social group analyzing the children’s mind, so they could improve the prisoner’s habits, making them realize their mistakes. I had to try to be a part of the teenager group, and play games with the children, to show them that life can be fun if you enjoy the simple things about it.

I wasn´t expecting to get involved with this project the way I did. I became attached to some of those children, even though our lives were so appart. I could never understant what it is like to be starving, or to get beaten up every night because my father was an alcohol addict; and it was hard for them to accept that while they are so miseble, I had everything. In the beggining, they didn’t want to talk to me, or get too close; it took them about two weeks to realize that I wasn’t going to give up on them, like everybody else in their lifes did, only then they started to trust me.

Although I only worked there for two months, this experience marked me in an unbelievable way. About two weeks after my work at FEBEM had finished, while I was walking near my house, a group of boys came behind me whispering for me not to scream because they where robbing me. I froze, that was the first time in my life someone tried to steal from me, it was terrifing, and I had no idea how to react.

When they approached me, though, I had a surprise: I knew one of the boys; we had gotten close while I worked at FEBEM. We stared at each other for a while, – I knwe he could only be the group leader, because the others just stood there waiting for instruction – and then he simply said to the boys to leave me alone, because I was a nice woman. He gave a last look at my scared, but grateful face, and left without saying another word.

That was the last time I saw him. After that incident I discovered the power that people have to change other people’s lives; it had always been clear to me that I had changed after working with those kids, but I hadn’t realized that I had made some difference in those children’s lives as well. When I came home that day,  I could’t stop thinking about all the feeling that kept that eye contact for so long: fear, gratitude and an enourmous sadness.