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I'm very apprehensive tonight talking to you because I don't know whether
I am going to be able to tell you what I want to tell you. Because you
could be here all night and I don't want you to be here all night. I was
reminded that the CAFOD projects this year are about water and I was very
lucky to be able to go the North East of Brazil about 2 years ago to look
at a project there. It is in the Semi-Arido part of Brazil. Huge place,
huge country: 868,000 sq km. Bigger than Germany and France together.
About 18 million people live there. Families 3 million. About 6 in a household.
Characterised by a lack of water. About 10 days a year it rains, the rest
of the year it is hot, very hot. I have a picture to pass round, there
is also a book at the back of church with more pictures in, but this one
gives you the idea of the land. It is very dry and soon turns to desert
land. Compared to Israel it is quite a wet place because for about 10
days a year usually February, March or April, sometime then, it rains
and it rains 750 mm of water, which is more than it rain in Israel.
But the trouble with being in the semi-arid the water falls and it runs
away. There is no way of keeping it, it is very difficult to keep. It
runs through the rocks, the rocks are crystalline and very often there
are no reservoirs under the rocks, very often the water goes bad because
it gets salt in. They have reservoirs there, they have built reservoirs,
and they have rivers. They do have some artesian wells. In various parts
they are all right for water, in tiny areas, but on the whole they live
for 355 days without rain. The scientists have looked at the problem and
have said really the problem is not water. There is enough water here.
So they looked at why it is, and it is regarded as one of the poorest
areas in Brazil and people are desperately poor there and why is it -
a bit of history - when the Portuguese went in, of course there were native
Indians living in this area and they were killed or they died due to contact
with the Europeans from the diseases the Europeans bought with them. The
land then became populated by poor whites, by black slaves from Africa.
The land itself was in the possession of the King and he gave it to his
friends and when the King went the Emperor came and did the same thing.
It was a gift to his friends. People who owned the land didn't live in
the North East they lived in Sao Paulo or Rio, nicer places to live. So
they were absentee landlords.
The people who lived there had no land. It didn't belong to them at all,
it still doesn't, very often. At the most they have their little house
and that's all. The absentee landlords still own the land. The land was
used for the interests of the landlords so it was exploited for cotton,
sugar or for crops for export not for the indigenous people who lived
there on the land. Now it's used mainly for cattle because it can't grow
anything, it soon turns to desert but the mentality of the owners was
the land was endless, it stretches for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
There was always enough land the cattle could roam and find bits of grass
to eat and bits of vegetation to eat and that is what it is like now;
there are cattle on the land and some sheep, but mainly cattle. But again
for export or for the use of the people in the cities. The water was privatised
then because the water was for the cattle, that's what it was for and
so they built big reservoirs and dams to hold the water but miles away
from where the people lived. But the water was used and used by the people
who owned the land because when the elections came round, when democracy
came round and the elections came then the people who were supplied with
water, with enough water for parts of the year would vote for them and
in fact they were cynical enough to send in water tankers to various areas
to win votes. The drought itself became an equal instrument for the wealthy
because in the 50's and 60's of the last century the government started
to tackle the problem and said look we must do something about the terrible
shortage of water in the semi-arid in North East Brazil and the poverty
of the people there and so they put investment in water but the water
was used for building reservoirs. The money was used for building reservoirs
for storing water for the cattle, not for the human beings, because the
people had no say over how the money should be spent but of course the
local politicians were hand in hand with the absentee landlords. So the
drought itself was used to get money from central government but to use
it just to increase the division between the poor and the wealthy and
so much so that the drought would drive the poor people off the land into
the cities where few industries were. So the land became vacant and possessed,
of course, by the distant landlords.
The project, which I looked at, decided that there had to be a complete
change of mentality. First of all people had to realise that this was
not a land without water but God had given them enough water to survive.
It was not a desert; in fact semi-arid was not the right word for that
region. It is still called that. But they had to change their mentality.
The landowners had to change their mentality to see that it was not an
endless resource and that to treat the land that way was to abuse it.
Both poor and rich had to learn how to live with 'how can you survive
in the semi-arid' and they found that the Indians that had lived there
for 10,000 years knew how to live in that area but the Indians most of
them had died off. And so the few remnants of the Indians they learnt
from them and they studied the fall of water very carefully to see that
there was enough water. They worked out that each household needed about
60,000 litres of water a year to survive; so what to do?
What they were doing at present was the people went out gathering water
- and you can pass these around - there are pictures of how water was
gathered. It was gathered mainly by the women, the men were looking after
the cattle. The women and the children go out looking for water and sometime
they would go out at 5 in the morning and come back at 5 at night. They
had to travel 10 miles with all sorts of containers. Sometimes with donkey's
and mule's. Very often carrying on their heads the water. Where did they
get it from? They get it from big puddles really. They get it from rivers,
they get it from wells. Nearly all shared by the cattle so the water is
filthy. The infant mortality rate is very high there through the diseases.
The women of course are illiterate they cannot read or write and the children
can't because they have no chance of going to school because they are
busy. They are bent and twisted; they don't grow straight because they
have to spend their days carrying water most of the year. So having decided
there is enough water then what do they do. The project said "Well
what we need is cisterns, cisterns which will gather the 60,000 litres
of water from the roofs of the houses, store it in a system and there
will be enough water for a whole year and the water will be kept pure.
So they started out an education programme first of all to educate the
people how to keep the water pure to see that there was enough water coming
off the roofs, that if they stored it and cared for the cisterns then
they would have enough for the whole year and the extra used for bathing
or washing could be filtered through into the gardens. They would have
to learn what plants grow there. The basic meal of the poor people of
Brazil is a type of lentil and they found a type, which grows well in
the semi-arid. So there was basic food there too. So they started this
project and for 2004 the object was to get 1 million systems that would
be a third of the families, provided with fresh clean water.
Roberto was working on the project employed by the Bishops Conference
in Brazil and he was the one who was guiding the project and here there
are pictures of the systems, which they make, and the 3 lads here are
drinking from the cisterns. It was no use bringing in cisterns already
made. There was a man who spent his life in Sao Paulo making swimming
pools for wealthy people and when he retired he went to the North East
of Brazil and he devised a way of making small concrete blocks, you can
see them, small concrete panels which the ordinary masons and builders
could learn how to make and so the whole aim was the people, the community
should join together and build their own systems. They found that if some
foreigner built it then it was neglected, wasn't looked after. So the
people built their own systems and I went to a farm there and they were
just thrilled. They were offering us this clean water and they let us
look in the cistern and it was full of water and there hadn't been rain
there for days/weeks/months when we were there. It is the first step on
a stage of education and change and I said to Roberto "Where do you
get the finance for this?" and he said "Well at last the government
are coming in on the project" I asked "Where has it been financed
up until now?" he said "Christian Aid, CAFOD, the money has
come from Caritas in Europe".
So it is a very tangible result of our collections here. That is what
it's about. It is revolutionary and it is a dangerous thing and it is
the work of the Catholic Church, which is also very good. I think they
said that in the 2 years since the project started 45 people had been
killed, murdered, who were working on that project or connected with it
because it is a revolution that the women are now free to learn to read
and write, the children can now go to school. The people have ownership
of their own land; they are no longer dependant, utterly, on the absentee
landlords. It is a revolutionary thing to do. So not only do they need
our help, but they need most of all our prayers.
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