São Paulo – A university from the state of São Paulo is going to help keep Arab children in school. The University Centre of the Ignatian Educational Foundation (FEI), of São Bernardo do Campo, in the state of São Paulo, is promoting a campaign to collect funds that should be sent to social projects in several parts of the world, among them schools for Arab children in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, in the Middle East. At the institution, called Holy Land, the students range from Catholic Orthodox and Protestant to Muslim.
The campaign by the university is part of a global action coordinated by Associazone di Voluntari per Il Servizio Ineternazionale (AVSI), a non-governmental organisation from Italy that promotes this kind of action every year. In each edition, the organisation chooses different projects. This year, for example, apart from the school in the Middle East, the institution should also help a hospital in Paraguay that is specialised in terminal patients, an education centre for teachers and students in Uganda and a school for boys in India.
Each institution or donor country chooses a form for fund collection. FEI elected the sale of ice cream. Since yesterday (10), students and professors have been mobilized, on the campus, for sale of the goods. According to Marli Pirozelli, a professor in the Social Science Department and coordinator of the University Pastoral, which is ahead of the activity, around twenty students and ten professors are involved in the campaign. Some participate in the University Pastoral at the organisation.
Last year, according to Marli, a total of 2,000 reals (US$ 856) were collected. "The objective is not only to collect funds, but to involve the students, it is an educational proposal for the students, donating part of their time, making them look outside their world, outside the college," said the professor. The teaching institution chose to work with the AVSI due to identification with its values. The Brazilian university belongs to Ignatian priests and operation of the Italian NGO, according to Marli, is answering to social problems.
The sale of ice cream was the idea of a student in the Engineering course at the university. Students in schools in the Middle East, according to information published on the site of the Italian organisation, face difficulties to maintain institutions due to the conflicts in the region, which left many families, mainly Arab and Palestinian, without income. For this reason, AVSI decided to elect the school as one of its target projects in the social campaign this year.
AVSI, according to Marli, despite not having chosen any Brazilian project for the campaign this year, also operates in Brazil. The organisation is helping reorganise Alagados Slum, in the state of Bahia, where around 150,000 people live. The FEI University Centre, which participates in the Italian NGO, was established in the 1940s and offers graduation, specialization, MBA and masters courses. The graduation courses offered are ten, eight of which in engineering. The other two are Business Administration and Computer Science.
*Translated by Mark Ament
