Apprenticeship, the position of an apprentice,studentship, initiation, trial period, different dictionary definitions. And we may say it's a kind of a volunteer work we are doing abroad, and it will in some way impact us and the community we are. Sometimes is not what we wanted, which makes it more interesting I think, because life is not always about choice so, it's about opportunity. I consider it an apprenticeship, when I consider myself an apprentice makes me vulnerable to knowledge and that is good.
Brazil has been good, one of the reasons of spending my bridge year here was because of the Biodiversity of Brazil, biodiversity that can make make anyone fall in love with it. I am a Biology lover and my passion will always influence my choices/decisions.
I wanted my apprenticeship to be something relate to…Biology, such as animal rescue, marine conservation, or even working in a park as a tour guide, or anything that is related to Biology. I never looked at the full concept of biology, I knew it then, but never stopped to look at it, in a broader perspective. My apprenticeship is in a Cultural Center(CC).
Slave Anastacia Cultural Center, iis the name, and here we work with teenagers and young adults, ranging from 14 to 21 years old, where most of them are given the basic tools to join the job market. All the participants of about 400 people are from the favelas, where about 250 are teens that in a Passage Rite, two months long, It consists on offering a complimentary training process, educational, with theoretical and practical activities aimed at professional development, citizenship actions, which awaken ethics and social transformation. As the CC is linked to the Ministry of Labor, it has more flexibility to work with the topics, the other part is composed by
Young apprentice program, two year long, is a project developed through the National Learning Law, which was conceived to solve an important social issue: to provide a safer way for young people to enter the labor market and to combat child labor,and they also get tools to get in the job market, they get bus tickets, they get meals, there is a clothes shop in here where they can take the clothes for free.
I used to look at Biology and think about plants, the environment, diseases, and all the problems caused by human, but I forgot the actual human, we work with people that come from less favorable conditions, so working with these people shows me that there is no better place to be if not here, and that here is where I can apply my Biology skills, here is where Bio=Life, is needed and I am at the right place.
The system here is different and effective, most places people work on solutions, but here is different. The Cultural Center its a place where people feel the sense of belonging, there are all genders, all races, believes, shapes. The main goal of the CC is working with these teens in order to make them stay away from drugs. Most of these teens they come from areas where drug use and trafficking happens, some of them even in the point where, their parents are drug trafficker or drug users, in the modern world I would be working on drug rehabilitation, and that is what I thought I would be doing, and see how people behave when they are not receiving the drug they are addicted to, and that would be interesting to see, because there would be the psychological part of it, the physical response of the drug restrain, and it would also be horrible so see someone suffer, but it's for their own good, I think that could have been a hard thing to see, but its life, here in my Apprenticeship is not about rehabilitation/solution it is about prevention, teens are given tools and they are shown how bad trafficking is, and the tools they get are essential, and some of them are for instance ethic, behavior, simulation of interviews, support in getting a job, and that happens at the time where they are not going to school and they consolidate both.
What is awesome is that last year almost 150 young apprentices got job after the two year participating from the Young Apprentice Project. And when you hear someone saying what they want to become in life, it's fulfilling because they know they can do anything they want and that keep their hearts close, close and full of hope. And so they make their dreams come true.
