The girls with turbans

Text: Ricador Voltolini
Fotos: Associação Sarapo

        In the country that takes the unenviable 69 th position in the IHD (Index of Human Development) ranking, and the sixth rank among the most unequal nations on the planet, what they don't really lack are social problems; what they do really lack are the search for creative, original and economically viable solutions to such problems. Social problems of all sorts exist everywhere but some of them, unusually or surprisingly – at least – are confined to particular regions, far from the eyes of the media, from the attention of the governors and even more from the generous hearts of those who live in the South and Southeast.

        This is the case of the “girls with turbans”, from the Amazon region, victims of a fatality at the same time brutal and lucky, whose scars could have been avoided with preventive education, good will of the public authorities and a technical solution embarrassingly cheap.

        The girls with turban are born in Belem, in Brazil, live next to the rivers in Altamira, Barcarena, Cametá and Santarém; and, as with all small riverside dwellers, have the boat as their main means of transportation – they estimate there are, in that region, around 50 thousand precarious boats, known by the name “popopô”, in reference to the noise of the engines, that carry people daily to their jobs, school, leisure and church. The same boat that is responsible for the transportation of the people who live by the small rivers, is also responsible for a tragedy with nothing similar in the world, that since the 60's, has already happened to hundreds of children: at brief moments of carelessness, the Amazonian girls see their long hair twist in the uncovered axle of the boat engines and become victims of an instantaneous scalping.

        It is not necessarily a great effort of our imagination to evaluate what this hard blow represents for the children and their family. Some of them do not escape with life from the violence of the accident. The great majority, however, survive and lots of them suffer for all their lives physical and psychological consequences, wounds that do not heal even after years of laborious, traumatic and expensive treatment; a great strain for their families and the public health system.

        To mask the loss of the hair and eyebrow, they cover themselves with handkerchiefs; but these wounds cause pain, corrode self-esteem, compromise the so feminine right to vanity and socially exclude children who are thus deprived of the right of a happy childhood and adolescence. The "girls of turban" lose the will of feeding, going to school, going out and interacting with friends.

        They are never included in the statistics of the EAP (economically active population), nor contribute to the growth of the national GIP; ashamed, they hide their pain from society and start to live in the economic dependence on their parents.

        During the long period of rehabilitation, marked with successive surgeries, their parents are forced to abandon the activities of subsistence to follow the treatment, which compromises the domestic budget and extends even more the familiar drama of extreme poverty. The axle of the cockle-boats does not destroy only the life of children. About 35% of the accidents involve the adult population. The majority (80%) of victims are the women, whose hair is kept long because of religious beliefs.

         It was thinking about ending the tragic situation of these people that, in 2001, the Sarapó Association was born, thanks to an initiative of Cláudio Britto.

        Tired of taking care of the scalped girls, the plastic surgeon joined medical friends, social nurses, psychologists and assistants and created an ONG to act in the prevention of the problem and the medical and psychological assistance of the victims and their relatives. What moves Britto and his colleagues is, beyond solidarity, a justifiable feeling of indignation. The solution for the drama of the "girls of turban" costs little, more exactly R$ 115,00, the accurate value of an axle protector for the boat, especially created by Albrás - Alumínio Brasileiro S.A. The introduction of this protection, of simple manufacture, would reduce to zero the risk of accident in the Amazonian popopôs, obviating the waste of lives, that are hugely missed.

         As they know that this cost cannot be afforded by the majority of the marginal boatmen, the proud militants of the Sarapó - the name is a homage to a fish of the region - work hard to get the deep financing cost of the project with the international banks and organizations. And while the resources do not arrive, from one side they dedicate themselves to educate the women to keep their hair held during the trips, and from another, to improve the treatment resources in order to support the affected families. Sarapó is one of the innumerable examples of militant citizens who work anonymously in the embroidering frames of Brazil.

        In assisting the "girls of turban", that in fact represent a small but illustrative figure of exclusion in a country that is accustomed to dealing with its poor children as second class citizens, Brito and his friends have some qualities that they give from body and soul to the third sector and transform it into the most involving field of experimentation of social solutions in contemporary Brazil: the indignation in the face of the suffering of the community, the initiative to decide the social problems without sitting and waiting for the delayed answers of the State, the creativity to find solutions that not only attack the causes but also reduce the effects thereof, flexibility to search economically viable alternatives and, above all, the necessary persistence to forge ahead against all sorts of obstacles. Sarapó is a species of Brazil that Brazil does not know. But would be proud to know