Better Than Riots

Until recently, Brazilian students were prone to expend their youthful idealism on attacking their universities. Ironically, most of them ignored the nearby favelas, the big-city slums that cry out for reform. Instead, they seemed to spend the winter rioting, the summer on the beaches or touring Europe. All too many were privileged rebels without a cause--a familiar phenomenon at other universities throughout the world.

Now the Brazilian students are doing something constructive. Two years ago, astute government officials decided to yoke the students' energies to the country's biggest problem--developing its vast interior. Three-quarters of Brazil's 85 million people live within 100 miles of the coast; the rest are scattered in pockets of poverty across thousands of miles of inaccessible jungle and remote highlands. The government's solution was Projeto Rondon (named after Brazilian Explorer Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon), which takes student volunteers into Amazonia and the northeast territory for month-long "vacations" of unpaid toil among the area's impoverished people.

The latest group has just returned, sunburned and weary, but enthusiastic about their accomplishments. Out in the bush, they applied their university skills to helping Indians and other backlanders who had never seen schools or doctors, much less census takers. The students told of treating one Indian who had amputated his own arm to avoid death by snake poison; others found a woman who had seen all of her 15 children die in infancy. In one remote village every inhabitant had leprosy.

Working in groups of up to twelve, the Rondonists gave medical help and teaching assistance, provided engineering expertise, formed cooperatives to make bricks and build roads. In 38 communities in the Jequitinhonha valley, the teams taught 52 hygiene courses, helped construct 300 septic tanks, pulled 30,000 teeth and administered vaccine shots to 150,000 persons. At an abandoned road-construction camp in north-central Brazil, one crew even started a town called Vila Rondon that now boasts a new school and other municipal services for 5,000 people.

Convinced of the program's merit, the government recently decreed that Rondonists will be given preference in hiring for federal jobs in the interior. The students approve too: 15,000 applied for the 4,500 places this year, and one-fifth of the 1969 crew has signed up to return next year. Beyond its practical effects on the country's interior, Projeto Rondon is also reconciling many Brazilian students with their government, despite its dictatorial tendencies. For one thing, both sides now have a common purpose that rises above political passions. For another, the participants gain immense self-confidence, plus a knowledge of their country that few could acquire on their own. Sums up Oswaldo Deleuze Raymundo, a young Rondonist from Rio de Janeiro: "The young are proving that they want a dialogue to resolve the problems of Brazil. Dedicated students do not have time for street demonstrations."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.