Perspectives in Health Magazine
The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization
Volume 8, Number 1, 2003

Residents of Jardim Paraná, on São Paulo's northern outskirts, organized and obtained potable water and sanitation services from the city government. Improving their children's health was a major motivation.

"Canu," a 23-year-old soccer enthusiast, bounds off the field where he has been helping out with the tournament. The 6-foot-tall right-midfielder’s real name is Jose Nilton Adelino Pereira. He confides to a visitor that he is waiting for the most important news of his life: whether he will get a professional contract with a soccer team in the state of Santa Catarina or with the club his manager is negotiating with in the town of Guaratinguetá in São Paulo state.

The improvised soccer field also serves as the main venue for community meetings, Pereira explains. More important, it is where the municipal government will soon build a $3.8 million educational project that includes a kindergarten, an elementary school (it will be the neighborhood’s third school), cultural and sports centers, and a community space known as CEU, an acronym for Unified Educational Center that in Portuguese also means "heaven."

"It will be good because it will take a lot of the kids off the streets, and that is just what they need," says Pereira.

Pereira speaks of children’s needs with the authority of recently acquired adulthood and its responsibilities. He lives with his sister, and together they pay about $25 a month for their 60- square-meter lot. They also pay for running water and electricity. When a new sewage drainage system is completed, as expected in the near future, they will also pay for and benefit from that.

But Jardim Paraná has not always been the community it is now.

"I arrived here when I was 16, and violence was rife," Pereira recalls. "Besides the drug trafficking gangs there were petty crooks and lots of fighting over land, since community leaders tried to stop new settlements. At the time, one of my friends got killed in a bar robbery because the girl carrying out the robbery fired by accident. I kept out of trouble because I always make friends with everybody."

He also remembers long trips to health centers and hospitals and long waits to get treatment. His main ailments were the flu and stomach aches. Bad conditions did not help, he says: "At the time we had to filter the muddy water and boil it to drink, but I know a lot of people didn’t do it," he says.

Jardim Paraná’s transformation was difficult but did not take long. The community came into being in the early 1990s, when rising rents and lack of housing options prompted some 180 settlers to invade what was at the time privately owned land. In 1995, a court eviction order forced the occupiers to organize, and in the end they and hundreds of other followers purchased the land for just over $570,000 to be paid over 10 years. With legalization came the possibility of improving living conditions.

"The eviction notice was the last straw; ever since then we have organized ourselves," says Antonio Calisto, a bus driver and community leader.

A second turning point in the neighborhood’s history came in 2000, when a child and an adult died of hepatitis after drinking sewage-contaminated water. The deaths prompted demands to the state government for potable water and sewage collection. In October 2001, after several months of protests and negotiations, the whole neighborhood received treated water and a rudimentary sewage collection system from the state sanitation company. Now the community is negotiating a storm drainage system and the installation of a medical post, and is raising funds to build a kindergarten run by the community center, Calisto says.

Continue