Salvador de Bahia, a place of incomparable beauty, kaleidoscopic color, and a rich history, has approximately 100 favelas (slums) that surround the city centre. In the favelas, poverty, deprivation, drugs, gangs, prostitution, and crime abound. I spent a month working with children at Santa Teresa de Lisieux day care, which more closely resembles an orphanage. These children come from desolate homes and often hideously violent and/or completely absent parents. They spend more time in the decrepit walls of this refuge than in their own homes. The phenomenal, kind, and warm women that run the school have devoted their lives to these children, and ultimately their survival. These women make very clear their reason for such dedication is that if these children enter the school system and stay in it until the age of 10 there is hope for some semblance of a future; if they don't enter and/or drop out before the ripe age of 10, they will most likely fall, quite quickly, into a life of drugs, theft and violence, and probably die on the streets.
