Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project, student Adam Barton interviewed Dr. Nelson Arns Neumann, Pastoral da Criança’s international coordinator and acting national coordinator. He is the son of Pastoral founder Dr. Zilda Arns Neumann. In this interview, Dr. Neumann discusses the achievements of Pastoral in the public health sphere. 

What, in your words, is the mission of Pastoral da Criança?

The heart of Pastoral’s mission is the refrain “so that all children may have life, and have it in abundance.” The idea behind this is that simple technologies should arrive to those who are in most need, that simple actions can have a very large impact.

And, thinking of that refrain, what would be the ideal result for a community or family that Pastoral follows? 
 
Brazil has undergone a massive geographical shift since the 1970s, moving from being a predominantly rural country to one in which almost 90 percent of the population lives in urban areas. This was marked by the loss of large family structures—a characteristic of urban life that supported child growth and development.

The impact that we hope to have, then, is to promote the growth of communities that live in solidarity: communities where everyone knows and helps each other. This is perhaps where Pastoral has had the most success, because we know and teach that a child is something precious that needs the attention and care of everyone, not just his parents. 

In just 30 years, Pastoral has managed to expand to serve every state in Brazil. What has this process of expansion been like, and to what would you attribute the success of these expansion efforts? 

I would first highlight the development of well-defined objectives with a well-defined mission. After that, I would attribute much of our success to our solid information system that enables us to monitor and evaluate how and where situations are changing, what difficulties are being faced, and how the volunteers are handling these problems. Through the development of Pastoral’s Wikipedia-esque informational tool, all of our current data and training tools are accessible to anyone with access to the internet. This centralized information storehouse ensures that there will never be a loss of institutional knowledge, and that we can continue to help communities in need even from thousands of miles away.   

The other key is Pastoral’s leadership structure. Dr. Zilda always focused on the role of the volunteer—that he or she really wanted to work with the families and not deal with bureaucratic issues. For that reason she very intentionally imposed a working model on the national headquarters that focused bureaucracy in order to decentralize the direct service actions. 

The final point would be the infrastructure and capacity for mobilization that our ties to the Catholic Church bring. Because we follow the structure of the Church, we benefited from a clear and constant line of communication from the national headquarters down through the diocese and parishes, arriving to both new and old communities without difficulties.  

What is the role of faith in Pastoral’s work—both nationally and internationally—and how has this role developed over the years? 

Faith, in whatever tradition, teaches one valuable lessons about solidarity. One must share what they have with another, recognizing that they also have needs.

When our leaders go into the community, they put on their Pastoral t-shirt, and in that moment they are no longer going just as themselves, but in the name of Jesus Christ. The community sees and responds to this. Through this path, two strangers are able to meet each other without enmity, and are able to create a beautiful friendship, a friendship that serves as a point of rescue for those who are in need.

Internationally, this message of faith remains strong. In Guinea-Bissau, for example, a country that is 80 percent Muslim, Pastoral is doing a beautiful job. That is because our message is one of life, a message of fraternity and solidarity that does not encounter resistance. As a group founded in faith, we seek those points that unite us in mutual love and respect. 

Can you tell me a little about Pastoral’s international expansion, both how it happened and the motivation behind it? 
 
Our first expansion experience was in collaboration with UNICEF, an organization that has much experience with the exchange of knowledge and training between people of different nations. What we perceived, however, was that the emphases that we placed on, for example, training protocols and the role of the Church only worked here in Brazil because we have the “complete Pastoral package,” so to speak. We have the training materials, we have the training structures, we have control over and management of our financial resources and auditing, and we have a system of constant monitoring. When Dr. Zilda fought to bring Pastoral da Criança to Angola, for example, she had to negotiate directly with the Episcopal Conference and Ministry of Health, find and place a national coordinator, give all of the trainings herself, and then leave praying that everything would work out.

When Dr. Zilda received the million-dollar Opus Prize in 2006, then, we had the opportunity to bring this complete package that exists in Brazil to other countries. With this new model, we go into the community there without needing to ask for resources from the local government or other organizations. It has worked very well so far, with consolidated educational materials that have been adapted to fit local realities and local leaders who have been trained by Pastoral missionary volunteers.

So that Opus Prize award was a critical milestone in our international history, as it was used to establish a reserve fund that is allowing us to grow while maintaining both security and quality. 

What do you think are the three most urgent problems facing children and pregnant women in Brazil today? 

Speaking of issues related to children, the first and perhaps greatest is the massive obesity epidemic happening in Brazil at the present.

The other issue is one of child care and development. What we see is more and more parents living on their own in smaller family units, without the support and experience that large families once propitiated, resulting in more intervention from the state.

Another issue facing children is one of persistent violence in their communities. There exists today a very strong fear of taking a child away from in front of the TV or the computer to allow him to play outside with friends, and thus develop cognitively and socially, where he may be kidnapped, killed, or sexually abused. This is a new and worrying social isolation that is having a major impact on Brazilian child development.

As for pregnant mothers, I would say that the greatest issue is that women are waiting to have children until later in life, and the medical system is not prepared to support the issues that go along with that trend. Late pregnancies result in a significantly more difficult birthing process, so we are seeing growing rates of prematurity and intrauterine growth retardation. Thus, the only indicator that is steadily worsening in Brazil is that of low childbirth weight and time spent in the ICU, both of which can be explained in large part by this trend toward later parity.     

And thinking about these issues, what do you think will be the future for Pastoral? Where you are now and where are you headed? 

When thinking about the future, there is always a strong degree of uncertainty. Unfortunately, however, we still have deeply impoverished populations in Brazil, and it seems like that trend will continue for quite some time. And it is precisely these most vulnerable populations that have little to no access to basic, necessary medical services.

The question, then, is what we can do to deal with the fact that there are mothers who have highly elevated birth risks just based on the socioeconomic conditions surrounding their pregnancies and deliveries, the lack of simple medications, such as ferrous sulfate, or access to the most basic of prenatal care.

The second issue is centered on the increasing uncertainty of parents about how to care for their child. There is so much information out there on the internet with so little consensus. We want to leverage the growing access to internet across Brazil, with the goal for Pastoral to be the first Google search result when one looks up the word “child”—we are currently fourth—so that parents will have a safe and reliable source through which to find quality information on child development and guidance for child care.

What we must keep in mind, though, is that new technologies serve to strongly increase present social inequalities if they are not accessible universally. Those who have Internet had the money to buy books on parenting in the first place. So, while we must begin to augment our technologies in order to have a useful presence in new medias, we must always keep in mind this issue of access and equality, not treating the Internet as a given.    

If you could communicate only one message to the international audience about Pastoral, what would it be? 

I would say this: Pastoral is a sign of hope for all families, and especially the poor. Despite the fact that material conditions in Brazil are improving, poor families still find themselves in a very delicate situation.

Is there anything else that you would like to share with me?

Sometimes we expect solutions around the problems in child development to come from ultra-specialized medicines or something of that nature, but what we see in reality is that strengthening of the family is what is going to make the difference for a child. That role of strengthening families is one of the strongest effects of Pastoral, and it is through this strengthening that our children will be able to grow in abundance and with life.