Saturday, May 10, 2008

Fallling in love with Brazil

Los Lunas resident opens school, cleans trash from river

Kenn Rodriguez News-Bulletin Staff Writer; krodriguez@news-bulletin.com

Los Lunas Some people go overseas for vacation. Camy Condon of Los Lunas goes out of the country to work.

Every three months, Condon packs up and goes to the town of Natal in northwestern Brazil, a town she fell in love with when she joined the Peace Corps in 1962.

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"I made jobs for myself (there)," she said recently. "I have two grandsons who live in Albuquerque who ask, 'Why do you go to Brazil?' And I say 'Because I have a job.'"

Condon's work in Natal is strictly volunteer, but it has become something vital — a school that teaches both English as a Second Language and ecology and recycling. She has also set up a Micro Credit bank.

How Condon ended up adopting Natal, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte, which is adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean, is quite a story in itself.

"I wanted to go overseas and join the Peace Corps," she said. "I met a Catholic bishop from the city of Natal - I met him by chance at the U.N. Building, and he said 'Come, be a volunteer in my city of Natal.'"

She lived there for three years, working on various community projects, mostly in radio, she said.

"I worked in educational radio broadcasting," she said. "This community development program was big. It covered seven states; it'd be like the whole Southwest U.S. And we would broadcast educational programs about health and literacy and about labor union organizing and the importance of mother and child nutrition."

Condon said she "fell in love with Brazil," and promised herself she would return.

"I said to myself when I was young, 'I'm probably going to get married and have children, but someday when I retire I'm going to go back to Natal and do something to contribute to the city of Natal again.'"

So when she retired in 1998, she did return, buying a small house on the same street she lived on in the mid-'60s. She began looking for "a good project to start."

The first was the Pium River School, just outside Natal.

"It's a rural area, and there are a lot of kids who live around there," Condon said. "They all wanted to learn English. So I started an English school."

The students go to the Escola da Limpeza (Portuguese for School of Cleaning or Clean-up School) on Saturdays only. Condon said in addition to learning conversational English, the students also learn about ecology and are taught about recycling and cleaning up the river, which is used by area residents for cleaning clothing and animals as well as bathing.

"People used to throw a lot of trash in the river," she said. "Now the bars and neighborhood families see the kids working to clean the river, and the river is very much cleaner. The adults aren't throwing trash in the river because they see their own kids cleaning it up. So it's been a big success."

Students pay for classes by picking up trash along the river and then use the materials gathered to learn English.

"We open up each bag - paper, plastic, glass, wood and metal - and say 'white paper,' 'blue paper...' so they're learning English with the language from the recycled trash, along with some pictures and other standard ESL teaching," Condon said.

The 45 students she teaches live in a very poor area, so learning English is an important step for them.

"When I was young, in 1962, everyone wanted to learn French," Condon said. "French was the sophisticated language. You went to Europe. But now the Internet is very popular; all the kids know about the Internet, so they want to learn English. And the adults are now wanting to learn English as well."

She said their enthusiasm for learning English is second only to their enthusiasm for cleaning up their river.

"Now they get very excited about cleaning up - they'll say things like 'I wanna pick up plastic!' 'I want to pick up wood,'" she said. "They're very enthusiastic."

The other project she started was a Micro Credit bank, an idea popularized by Muhammad Yunus, who created a micro credit bank - the now world-famous Grameen Bank — in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, and wrote about it in his book "Banker to the Poor."

"I got so inspired by this book," Condon said. "Many of the people in Natal are very, very poor, and there aren't loans for poor people."

So four years ago, Condon received an inheritance of $8,000 from an aunt in Ohio and had an idea.

"Eight-thousand dollars in Brazil is a lot of money," she said. "So instead of just using it to pay off my own credit cards or whatever, use it for ordinary things, I wondered, 'Can I make this money go around? Loan it to a poor person - very small loans with no interest and no fees. How long can I keep $8,000 circulating in the neighborhood where I live?'"

Since then, Condon said, she's been able to help 29 families with small loans ranging from $100 to $2,000 for projects ranging from building a wall for a shop to buying a house to purchasing a vehicle.

The setup is very simple.

"They make a payment every month on a certain day — they don't pay me directly," she said. "I set up a savings account in an ordinary bank, and they just go make a cash deposit at that bank. So I get a print-out when I go back to Brazil and see the payments."

One woman, a widow, bought her house after renting for 25 years.

"Now she's so happy," Condon said. "It's a very small house, but she's so proud of owning it. She's never missed a payment, and she will pay off her loan."

Another man bought a car — he is a driver at the local university but had never owned a car himself. Another local woman, named Janema, wanted to buy bricks and rebar to build a wall.

Condon said in nine years and working with 26 families, she's only had one loan default - and that was due to the man who borrowed the money being thrown off his tract of land by a double-dealing landowner.

Condon said, unlike the Grameen Bank, that her micro bank will never grow any bigger.

"I don't want to make it bigger and bigger because I don't know how to sustain it, because what happens when I don't go back to Brazil?"

She said she tried to start a committee of locals to become owners of the bank, mostly middle class people. But she said they couldn't understand the concept.

"They said, 'Why would you ever give money to someone you don't know who isn't in your family?'" she said. "They couldn't get the idea. Then when the meeting ended and they all got application forms, the people I wanted to be the steering committee wanted to get loans.

"The whole idea was if they were on the inside, maybe they could remodel their house. I kept trying to tell them you have to be very low-income people with a great need. The criteria for the loans are a crisis, very low income and no other resources. So it didn't work."

So the moral of the story in both of Condon's projects is that they both can be successful.

"The micro bank I thought had a 50-50 chance of failing," she said. "But because I read this book, I was really encouraged. In my case, I'm just one person. The loans are word of mouth. It's pretty different from the original goal to create a big bank.

"I just wanted to know if one person can be a bank. Can Aunt Mary's money circulate around and help a lot of people? And the answer, incredibly, is 'Yes.'"

She said she'd continue to go to Natal every three months as she has for the last 10 years, but she is looking for ways to continue both programs when she stops.

"I have a lot of faith in people," Condon said. "So I just think most people, when they have an opportunity to make their lives better and know it comes from an individual, they're very loyal. And they will pay that person back.

"So the next question is 'How do you sustain it?'" she said. "But I'm sure it'll get figured out."

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