This Women’s Day, We Honor the Women Who Are

Transforming Waste to Wonder in Rio Favelas

March 8 is International Women's Day

This is the ninth article in a year-long partnership with the Behner Stiefel

Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University to produce
a series of monthly favela-sourced human rights and environmental justice
reporting from Rio de Janeiro on RioOnWatch.

On this International Women’s Day, we pay homage to the women of Rio de

Janeiro’s favelas that, on top of the work they do at home, also seek to make a
difference in the world, promoting sustainability and preservation in the
environments that surround them. Here, we’ve chosen to briefly present six
women participants in the Working Group on Solid Waste, one of seven groups
comprising Rio’s Sustainable Favela Network.*

‘Cris’ Zoraide Gomes — RecyclAction, Prazeres

Cris dos Prazeres, as Zoraide Gomes is popularly known, is a resident of Morro

das Prazeres, a favela in Santa Teresa, Central Rio. She is one of the founders
of the PROA Group (Prevention Undertaken with Organization and Love)
through which she implements the RecyclAction project (ReciclAção). The
project began after the 2010 catastrophe in which a landslide triggered in large
part by trash accumulated in pockets on the hill killed over 30 people. With the
goal of dealing with the build-up of uncollected trash in the area and engaging
residents in recycling activities through environmental education, Cris and her
partners created RecylAction. Residents deposit recyclable waste in 20 giant
ecobags distributed throughout the community, and the material is then sent to
the NGO and recycling entity EccoVida, located in Honório Gurgel. The returns
are then reinvested in educational programs. Aside from reducing landslide risk
and waste, the project also improves residents’ daily health, as areas with
garbage accumulated on the street had become breeding grounds for diseases.

Through Grupo PROA, in addition to Cris and her colleagues developing

workshops on the reuse of waste (for example, courses on how to transform
leftover cooking oil into candles and soap, and coffee capsules into earrings)
and conscious consumption of natural resources, recycling, and educational
campaigns, they make numerous other initiatives possible in the community,
ranging from HPV awareness to computer programming classes.

“If you want an example, you need to be an example. You need to show that
you believe so that someone else will believe as well.” — Cris dos Prazeres

Ilaci de Oliveira — Transvida Cooperative, Vila Cruzeiro

Ilaci de Oliveira is a resident of Vila Cruzeiro, in Complexo da Penha, in

Rio’s North Zone, and founder-director of the Transvida Cooperative. She has
worked in diverse social projects for over 25 years, a life dedicated to the
“poorest and most needy in Penha,” she says. Transvida seeks not only to deal
with the question of trash in the community and promote socio-environmental
awareness, but also to transform the lives of residents through resocialization
via income generation from waste collection. The cooperative has already
managed to rescue a local square that was covered in garbage, returning it to
resident use. Ilaci had the idea to form the cooperative when she saw a group
of residents collecting trash in 2011. Since then, she has worked intensively to
strengthen members of the cooperative and realize the community’s
transformation.

In addition to her work heading Transvida, Ilaci also works with literacy, after-
school tutoring, and reading and crafts workshops for children and adolescents
who accompanied the waste collectors. It was in this way that, out of her own
home, she launched the Home of Dreams National Institute (Instituto Nacional
Lar dos Sonhos).

“To mobilize people it’s important to listen to them, map out in the community
who shows solidarity, and go to people’s homes to meet them and talk in
person.” — Ilaci de Oliveira

Josefa Maria — Verdejar Socioambiental, Serra da Misericórdia

Dona Josefa is an artisan and a volunteer with Verdejar, a socio-environmental

organization founded in 1997 to reforest the Serra da Misericórdia, the largest
wooded area in Rio’s underserved North Zone, on the edges of the Complexo
do Alemão favelas. The organization maintains a garden, holds environmental
education workshops, and undertakes audiovisual projects. Dona Josefa holds
workshops on how to reclaim cooking oil as soap and make handicrafts from
reused materials (see photo above). She is also creating, in her own house, an
EcoPoint, which will host workshops, recycling activities, and seedling
distribution. The goal is not only to leave the community cleaner and more
sustainable, but also to generate income for residents. 

“We see so much material wasted. I don’t see plastic, I don’t see garbage. I see
money wasted. Not just for me, but for the other residents. I want to pass along
to them that there is a right destination to be given to these materials.” — Dona
Josefa

Lidiane Santos — EcoNetwork, City of God

Lidiane Santos is one of the coordinators of the EcoNetwork (EcoRede) project,

an initiative of the Alfazendo community-based organization in City of God, in
Rio’s West Zone. She has lived in the community since the age of five and, in
2017, received her Biological Sciences degree from the Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), becoming a teacher. EcoNetwork is a project
of Alfazendo, an organization that, since 1998, holds literacy classes, a college
entrance exam prep course, and other educational services for the residents of
City of God. EcoNetwork, by comparison, focuses on collective solutions
through participatory methodologies for environmental challenges faced by the
community, seeking to promote health and improved quality of life for residents.
This is done through environmental education, communication, continuing
education, the professionalization of informal waste collectors, and local
development.

In addition to planting gardens in schools, promoting workshops for the creation

of playground equipment with recycled material, and nutrition awareness,
EcoNetwork also believes in the professionalization of informal waste collectors,
which thus includes a training course, information on their rights and access to
public services. The EcoNetwork also promotes habit change among residents
with regard to discarding waste and the establishment of EcoPoints where
proper trash disposal can occur. The EcoNetwork participated in the 2018
Sustainable Favela Network exchanges (click CC for subtitles in English):

The project organizers believe that all of these actions cause residents to value
their community, leading them to want to improve their area rather than leave it.
Lidiane says that Alfazendo’s mission revolutionized her life, and that the goals
of the EcoNetwork allowed her to join elements of her personal and academic
training that previously made little sense together because here, she saw an
opportunity to be a protagonist in the environmental transformation of the place
where she lives.

“We hear so much about protecting the Amazon rainforest, why not try to
preserve the place where you live?” — Lidiane Santos
Valdenise Brandão — Comlurb, Maré

Valdenise, or Val, as she is known, is a resident of Belford Roxo, in Rio’s

outer Baixada Fluminense, but as a street cleaner for the municipal waste
collection utility Comlurb, she works in the favelas of Maré, in Rio de Janeiro’s
North Zone. Through her work with Comlurb, she began to engage in social
projects in the community, as an official part of her job and then beyond, as a
volunteer, such as with sustainable gardens of seedbeds in the public squares
where previously there had been irregular dumping of waste, cleaning the
Ramos bathing area (Piscinão de Ramos) and with the recycling of objects
found in the trash, creating original works in the form of playground equipment,
tables, and benches for public spaces. Her experience, creativity and dedication
have led to her receiving numerous invitations, including from the press and to
present her work in a number of public forums. It even earned her an invitation
last year to speak on the topic of urban upgrading to a group of architecture
students, the subject she dreams of studying, at the State University of Rio de
Janeiro (UERJ) in Petrópolis.

As a teenager Val already created, with her friends, pamphlets for awareness-
raising on environmental preservation.

“We have to get rid of this idea that we are only working for others. I, for
example, also clean the streets for myself [my own well-being]. Garbage has an
immense value that not everyone recognizes, not even the government.” —
Valdenise Brandão

Vania Nascimento — Lata Doida, Realengo

Vania Nascimento, an artisan and environmental agent, began Lata

Doida (Crazy Can) in 2004, together with her children Vandré and Vanielle. Lata
Doida is a non-profit association that is also recognized as a Cultural Point
in Realengo, in Rio’s West Zone. Lata Doida develops socio-cultural and
environmental projects and seeks to occupy areas and transform them into
spaces for artistic manifestation, community engagement, sports, and leisure.
To this end, the group undertakes music workshops and workshops on how to
create musical instruments out of recyclable materials, instruments that are
even used in concerts by the Lata Doida band:

While her children focus on the music workshops, Vania gives handicraft
workshops to the mothers of the students, produces the backdrops for musical
presentations, and paints the instruments. Other activities include workshops on
bodily and mental health with waste collectors, and recycling, undertaken
through the project Collecting Ideas (Catando Ideias), in partnership with the
Armando Palhares Aguinaga Family Health Clinic. In this project, the idea is to
promote the recognition of waste collectors as professionals, in addition to
holding art workshops dedicated to environmental education and the collection
of vegetable oil for the production of soap and subsequent sale to generate
income.

“When I woke up to this question of trash—that there is a lot of trash in the

street and that this was a problem for my community—I began to pay attention
to the collectors as well. At that moment I began to pursue a degree in
environmental management and I created [Collecting Ideas], and I began to
speak about how important it was for us to clean our community and […] collect
waste in the right way.” — Vania Nascimento