CHILDHOOD IN THE LIBRARY
This is the column Who Makes Redes, a compilation of the stories of people who build our organization and who work hard every day to do what we do best: actions and projects for residents of Maré. Learn about these stories, trajectories, experiences and the history of Redes da Maré itself - and how this work and the challenges faced since the pandemic have transformed them.
The young Lorena Froz (19) was born in Belém do Pará, and arrived at Maré as a baby. The family, born in the interior of Maranhão, sought better living conditions and job opportunities. For most of her childhood, she lived on Rua São Jorge, in Nova Holanda, and then on Rua Principal, both very close to the headquarters of Redes da Maré. “Most of my memories are with Redes,” she says.
The first contact that Lorena remembers having with the organization was at the age of 9. “I met Redes in the year that the Biblioteca Escritor Lima Barreto opened. At a time when there was not even a children's reading room yet”. The young woman tells about her passion for reading and the difficulty in accessing books, because besides the high cost, until then, there was no library in the territory: “I started to go to the library every day. At the time, I had already read almost all the books in the children's section”.
After this intense approach to the organization, she kept the link with us. She took the English, Spanish, graffiti and drawing courses. Lorena then decided to enroll in our Preparatory Course for High School, a decision that had positive impacts on her academic life: in 2017 she started the Technical Course in Environment at Pedro II School.
In recent years, Lorena has also participated in the WOW Festival - Women of the World, making artistic interventions; the CRIA Project, when she got to know EcoMaré and Muda Maré; and the Maré Sanitation Meeting, where she had the opportunity to meet professionals who worked with her favorite agenda. In 2020, she was invited to return to the preparatory spaces of Redes da Maré, but at this moment, as an Environmental Educator of the project: “It was very cool! I had a warm heart making this return.”
Right at the beginning of the ‘Maré says NO to Coronavirus’ campaign, Lorena also came along to give support: she worked on the distribution of basic food baskets and hygiene kits in the call center, collected information and kept in touch with residents. With the end of the campaign, she participated in the Environmental Memories Lab, an initiative that brought the important agenda to the context of young people from Maré, in addition to participating in the ‘ The Maré we want’ project.
Currently, Lorena is also part of the Green Maré team, a project by Redes da Maré that aims to contribute to the fight for environmental justice through different approaches. The young woman highlights how the precariousness of basic sanitation in Maré contributed negatively to the spread of the virus in this pandemic moment. “There are people here who still have no running water to this day. We are in 2021 and there are still people dying from diseases due to the lack of sanitation and we only realized this recently. I very much hope that in a post-pandemic people will continue to be concerned about the environment as they are now.”
