Association of Curumins

“Curumim” means “boy or girl” in the tupi-guarani language, and the Association of Curumins works to use all aspects of Brasilian pop culture to serve street and working children in the northeastern city of Fortaleza. It emphasizes creativity and innovation, and has developed some of the most interesting programming of any program for street children.

The first thing one notices in the Curumins courtyard is that it looks like a skate park: ramps, obstacles, and a dozen kids doing tricks on their skateboards. In Fortaleza, street children live and beg on the Beira-Mar, a wealthy neighborhood by the beach. One the same streets, rich kids play on their skateboards, and street children feel painfully left out.

Thus, skateboarding is an activity that happens on the street, but is not of the street. Being included in a skate group is a liminal space between the street and something else. It also captures the rebellious image that street kids want. Skateboarding takes a privileged role in getting kids off the street. However, Curumins insists that “We’re not training professional skaters. We’re educating people.”

Curumins also runs other workshops with the same ideas: rebellious activities that help get kids off the street. There is street theater (mostly clowning and comedy), street games (like tops, hopscotch, and kites), and a steel drum band. These workshops always present their work on the street -- the theater group goes to bus stations to present puppet shows about citizenship and life on the street; the steel band plays at sporting and cultural events.

Ceará, the state of which Fortaleza is the capital, is famous in Brasil as the home of comedy and humor, so clowning and jokes are fundamental to Curumins’ work. Instead of a typical outreach team, Curumins has an educator who dresses as a clown and drags a boom-box through the streets of Beira-Mar. He sings, tells jokes, and invites kids to follow him to the beach for a meeting. On the beach, all of the kids can talk through the microphone, so they feel important. At the meeting, educators teach important skills and invite children to come to Curumins.

There are ten programs that work on the street in Fortaleza, so Curumins proposed “collective outreach” as a way to save money and to train the newer programs. In this project, all of the programs join together on outreach teams, then direct children to the program that will serve them best.

Another fascinating project is modeling for ex-prostitutes. Curumins did research on the motivations for girls to become prostitutes: they found that poverty was a cause, but that self-image was even more important. Favela girls felt like they were ugly, because the Brasilian media only presents blond southerners as models. However, many European men come to Fortaleza looking for black prostitutes (Fortaleza is one of the centers of world sex tourism), so these black girls felt like they were beautiful and desirable when they were with rich white men. Many also dreamed that these men would marry them and take them back to Germany or Holland.

Curumins uses modeling as a way to improve the girls’ self esteem, to make them feel beautiful. They design and make their own fashions, then they learn make-up from a professional and learn to walk a runway from a professional model. When they think that they are beautiful, the girls are less willing to be exploited.

Curumins began as a project of Terre de Hommes-Switzerland, which came to Ceará in the 1980s to provide emergency help during a drought. The aid workers always passed through Fortaleza and were shocked to see the number of street children, so they decided to create a program for them. In 1996, Curumins became independent, though it still receives financial and administrative help form the Swiss foundation.

With the help of a Swiss professor and a Brasilian researcher, Curumins developed the “Child-Street System,” which archives and organizes the way that the program works with children. Educators observe every child and put their observations into eight categories:

1. Space: Where do they live? For how much time? What is this place like?
   
2. Time: Child’s age and length of time on street. Duration of drug use.
   
3. Socialization: What is the child’s referent group? What norms does s/he follow? Is the family still important?
   
4. Sociability: how does the child relate to other people on the street? With peers? With adults?
   
5. Dynamics: What does the child do on the street? How does s/he earn money? Why?
   
6. Identity: How does the child define h/erself? See h/erself?
   
7. Motivation: what inspires the child? What does s/he wish for? What does s/he think of h/er life?
   
8. Gender: How does the child define h/erself? How does s/he relate in same and other gender relations?
   

After seeing how these systems link up, the educators and children can work together to think out a way to get off the street. Educators use paintings and paper dolls to talk through this process. The child plays with the figures to show where s/he is today and where s/he would like to be in ten years.

Curumins works with the families of working children to find income for them, so that their children do not have to work. They have a partnership with the Young Businessmen’s Association, where businessmen teach the mothers how to run a business and help them to create a coop that sells lunch to construction workers.

Children can stay in the program for only a year (except for those without families, who can go to live in a special shelter), so Curumins puts great effort into finding neighborhood programs that will interest the children. Unfortunately, Curumins does such great activities that many children never want to leave.

Associação Curumins
Rua Coronel Manoel Jesuino 112
Muricie, Fortaleza, CE 60175 270
Brasil

85 263 2172
fax 263 1093

www.curumins.org.br

Contactos: Raimundo Coelho de Almeida Filho, o Flor Futinele
curumins@fortalnet.com.br