Cooking Up Opportunity

RECIFE, Brazil — Nine years ago, when she was 14 and in the eighth grade, Rosenilda Santos dropped out of school, moved away from her family's squalid home and went to live in a shack in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Recife, a port city on the northeast coast of Brazil. She worked selling kabobs on the beach, earning about $60 a month. Her boyfriend earned about the same selling sugarcane from a cart. It was hardly enough to support them, let alone the daughter Rosenilda bore when she was 19.

Poverty, squalor, violence and illiteracy are not exceptional in Recife, or in many other cities in Brazil, which has undergone rapid urbanization. About 80 percent of Brazil's population are city dwellers, up significantly from 15 percent in 1940.

With that growth, opportunities for a living wage have diminished exponentially. But Rosenilda Santos' life changed about a year ago when she entered a culinary school program called Mãos de Moleque run by a local nongovernmental organization, Center for Prevention of Dependencies. She studied to be a kitchen worker, graduated from the program and now works at the Quina do Futuro, a top Japanese restaurant in Recife.

Rosenilda is earning twice as much as before and hopes to earn three times as much in time. That would bring her to about $180 a month, enough to improve her dwelling with real wood, to provide for her daughter and to go back to school herself.

"My life has changed now. I can go back to school. I can make my home better, and I can buy things that my daughter needs. I have opportunities!"

Overcoming Obstacles

All this is thanks to Mãos de Moleque, a culinary training school for at-risk youth. Clarissa Maria Dubeaux Lopes Barros, a psychologist from one of Recife's more prominent families, and several others started the school about a year ago.

"The typical student here may not have more than a fourth-grade education," Barros explains. "There is an average of five people in the family, living on less than $150 a month in a dwelling that has no sanitation. We take young people from the ages of 16 to 24, and 60 percent of the applicants have children."

The school opened officially last October — a feat accomplished with assistance from Catholic Relief Services — as part of a USAID-funded food-security project. According to Country Representative Richard Hoffman, CRS Brazil was "looking for an appropriate partner-led project that dealt effectively with the phenomenon of urban poverty."

"The government had promised us $10,000 to help get the school started, but they did not come through. That's when CRS came in and saved us," recalls Barros. "Now, the school has received a lot of publicity, requests for graduates and people wanting to know if the program can be duplicated."

The local government of Pernambuco state, of which Recife is the capital, supports educational programs for service-industry jobs as a means of supplying hotels and restaurants with capable staff. The Center for Prevention of Dependencies specifically targets youth from one low-income neighborhood for job preparation at the Mãos de Moleque culinary institute and, with the assistance of the local private sector, helps arrange internships for the pupils in local establishments.

Working Toward Self-Sufficiency

In addition to the instruction it provides, the school has developed its own catering business, supplying 160 box lunches a day for workers, mostly in the construction trades.

"And in this building we are preparing a place where local people can come and have lunch," Barros reports.

The idea, she says, is that eventually the young people who graduate from the Mãos de Moleque program will have both the skills and confidence to remain productive employees in the food-service industry. Some graduates already dream of training for work in restaurants and running their own catering businesses.

The nonprofit Center for Prevention of Dependencies calculates that daily sales of 500 lunches will enable Mãos de Moleque to become financially self-sustaining. After seven years with the Center for Prevention of Dependencies, Barros notes that her colleagues' fondest dream is to reach this point of self-sustainability. At that time, the program can dedicate 5 percent of its proceeds to support neighborhood children who are undernourished.

This sort of entrepreneurship has attracted attention from the business community and the U.S. government. Catholic Relief Services was able to help Mãos de Moleque through financial support from USAID Brazil.

Diana Page, the U. S. consul in Recife, is one of the program's enthusiastic supporters.

"I love this one," she says. "This is exactly what it's all about. It helps some very at-risk young people to get training in real jobs that are in great demand, and the catering side of it will lead to even more employment and genuine fulfillment for people who didn't have much hope."