DEVELOPMENT FROM THE INDIVIDUAL'S POINT OF VIEW
By Jessica Pires and Julia Bruce
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.
Tábata Lugão (34) was born and raised in São Gonçalo, a municipality in the state of Rio de Janeiro. She is a social worker and coordinator of the project 'Early Childhood in Maré: access to rights and care practices', since November 2020. By getting to know Redes da Maré in 2017, through a job interview, and becoming an employee the following year, she saw experiences that involved the mobilization and participation of residents in the very structure of the organization. It was in this way that Tábata found her professional purpose: to work on mobilization and social participation through the production of knowledge.
One of the first moments that Tábata began to look critically at the difficulty in accessing the rights of different groups was when she was 16 years old, in her first job with a social project in the region of São Gonçalo. She was interested in various degrees, such as Psychology, and even tried to enter the Biology course at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), but her trajectory and connection with social projects since her childhood led her to the path of Social Work, being accepted in the first classification for the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), in 2005. Tábata wondered about the cycle of difficulties faced by the lower classes: “many people find it difficult to access work due to lack of training. But, at the same time, while they do not have access to money, they cannot easily obtain the necessary training”.
Since always, Tábata has been involved in social activities. "It was always clear to me and my family the difference in our lives by the fact of having access to groups and activities. It was very important for me to train as a citizen, understand issues and have support", she highlights. She studied in a public school throughout regular education, in São Gonçalo, and when the entrance exam period arrived, Lugão reports that in her class there was no one trying to get into college, because they had no motivation.
The social worker had her first experience with favela territories when she began her internship at a Social Assistance Reference Center (CRAS), at favela Vila Ipiranga, in Niterói. She then wanted to work in the health field, where she worked in the emergency care sector at Antônio Pedro University Hospital, at UFF. But it was close to her graduation that she experienced a deeper dialogue with residents of São Gonçalo, during a water supply reform under the Federal Government's Growth Acceleration Program (PAC). “We did registration work and talked with families about what was happening, in addition to environmental education activities in public schools,” she explains.
After graduating, she worked with other projects with similar proposals and in other favelas in Rio, adding up more than 10 years of work dealing with community organizations. When she arrived at a non-profit organization, in her first experience as a researcher for the Morar Carioca project, she found herself doing what she most enjoys: mobilization and social participation through the production of knowledge. The research had the proposal of collective construction of this urban project together with the inhabitants of the territory. “I worked on projects with the perspective of social participation – how can everyone have what they want, how they want it and how they believe their spaces should be? What equipment is there and what is lacking in that favela? How to improve people's quality of life from their point of view?”, asks the social worker.
Upon arriving at Redes da Maré in 2018, through a selection process for the Normal Space, Tábata began to have contact with scenes of drug use, such as the one on Flávia Farnese street. She also participated in the service shifts of the Maré of Rights project, of the Public Security axis. “I got very involved with all of Redes' actions, despite the short time. Afterwards, I moved to Parque União, and stayed in this exchange between Maré and São Gonçalo, creating connections with the territory and the people who work there”. During the pandemic, she was part of the 'Maré says NO to coronavirus' campaign, where she carried out evaluations of socioeconomic interviews, home visits, in addition to remote care for families in Redes’ courses, in partnership with the Education axis.
At the beginning of November 2020, she was invited to participate in the project ‘Early Childhood’, which was still being consolidated. “I spent between November and January 2021 writing the research project, studying how it would be possible to carry out other actions, having meetings and conversations with other institutions to think about what we wanted. We hired a team and put other project actions into practice from the beginning of 2021”, says Tábata.
Lugão says that you don't think about Early Childhood almost anywhere else. “In everyday life, you don't think about whether the child participates, whether she likes it or not, if she is developing in that environment and how she accesses it, how she is developing there. The project understands that children experience according to what they access. There are lessons learned in the territory of Maré that children from other places do not have. When we bring this to Maré, it makes a difference, as it is believed that childhood does not exist in favelas, but it has a richness that we are not aware of”, she emphasizes.
Tábata comments that she also only understood what Early Childhood was when she had his first child, Glória (2), and by studying the development of this phase: “It was during my pregnancy that I began to understand the political complexity – where Early Childhood is seen and included in society?”
This deconstruction of believes also influenced the mother Tábata, now pregnant with her second child. She reflects that culturally and socially it was built that being a mother is beautiful, inspiring, but that it is also a place of many demands: “there is a place for the mother that only she can do that, we learn that it is like that. Motherhood transformed me, because I started to see the child as a human being in the process of development, and it is challenging for the adult, who grew up learning that we have power over them. It's important to deconstruct this and think that for me to convince her of something, I need to have a dialogue and bring knowledge, and not force her. This is too hard". To conclude the reflection on these trajectories, of Tábata and Redes da Maré, the social worker draws attention to the role of the organization in promoting access to rights in Maré through a collective construction of the diverse methodology of Redes da Maré, mainly through the production of knowledge.
