The Community

We are involved with 40 low-income families in Lençóis, as well as 2 municipal public schools in the urban zone and 22 schools in the rural zone that work with more 1000 children and adolescents. The economic profile survey of our public in the urban zone provided the data below. However, in the rural zone the data is much more alarming:

• 92.4% of the families have a monthly income per person of less than R$70.00;

• 21% of the families do not own their homes;

• 91.7% of the families have 5 or more people living in their homes, and 49% have 8 or more members;

• 77.4% have a more than 4 people in each bedroom. 56% of the children and adolescents do not live with their fathers and 34% do not live with their mothers;

• 92% of the children and adolescents come from families with a black racial background.
   

      

The city of Lençóis is located 410 kilometers from the capital city of Salvador, in the State of Bahia, and has a population of approximately 9,000 inhabitants. It is situated in the Chapada Diamantina in the Alto do Paraguaçu River Basin one of the main water basins in the state. It has an extremely rich ecosystem in terms of biodiversity and minerals, having species unique only to this area of the world. All of these characteristics justified the inauguration of the Chapada Diamantina National Park in September of 1985, which is considered to be one of the largest environmental reserves in Brazil.

Considered to be a National Historical Heritage Area since 1974, the economy of the city of Lençóis was based on diamond mining up to the 1980’s. Scarcity of diamonds, which began in the middle of the century, resulted in an economic and social crisis that intensified with the legal closing of mining activities.
Investments in tourism as an economic activity re-ignited the local economy, but on the other hand it intensified problems such as:

• Degradation of the environment and local culture
• Increased number of teenage pregnancies (with cases of prostitution)
• Annual increase in violence against children and adolescents
• Increase in child labor and illegally and underemployed adolescents
• Increase in teenage drug use
• Degradation of the principles of education and the social fabric.
   

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