Coming from Venezuela, siblings want to go back to school

When 30-year-old Venezuelan, Carmen Andreina, started looking for information on how to enroll her three children - who had recently arrived in Brazil - in a public school, she was immediately overcome by a feeling of hopelessness. At the school, the staff who tried to assist her did not speak Spanish. Carmen, herself, speaks very little Portuguese, even less when it comes to figuring out bureaucratic procedures and document requests. “All I could think was, ‘my God, my children are really going to miss the year’”, Carmen recalls. She and her family live in a shelter for refugees and migrants in Boa Vista, Roraima.

After only four months in the country, Carmen and her husband, Juan Diego Losada, were distressed: how could their dream of a better life in Brazil come true, if their children were out of school? Moreover, it was just the time for their 5-year-old daughter, Daymar, to join school for the first time.

With mild microcephaly, the girl – pampered by her parents and siblings – was the main reason for the family to decide to leave their own home, friends, and family behind. “It got to the point where it was either her medication or food, we couldn't afford both”, Daymar’s father tells us, recalling the social, political and economic crisis that his home country is going through.

It was with a feeling of relief and hope that Carmen and her husband, Juan, left their appointment with the Active School Search task force at the shelter where they live. The action took place in February and was realized by UNICEF in partnership with Instituto Pirilampos.

There, Daymar and her 8-year-old brother, Diego, have been pre-registered by telephone with the Municipal Department of Education and Culture of Boa Vista. And the referrals were given for the oldest, the 12-year-old Kairelis, to be enrolled in a state school.

With that, the family's top priority for 2022 began to be resolved. “This support was essential”, says the mother, who even managed to take a 3x4 photo of the children and make copies of the documents before sending them for placement tests and completion of enrollment.

The second priority is to focus on Daymar's healthcare, getting an appointment with a neurologist and an appointment for a cataract surgery on one of the girl's eyes – a surgery they had waited for years in their home country. “I have faith that with physiotherapy she will be able to walk. She is very smart and reactive, understands everything, applauds, and feels when someone leaves”, Carmen says, next to her daughter, who gets around in a wheelchair. She is also looking for physical therapy and other treatments before completing school enrollment.

It was Daymar who suffered the most on the way to Brazil. Very sensitive to external stimuli, the girl had three seizures in the two-week period, between leaving her hometown and arriving in Boa Vista, where things finally began to calm down. Since then, there have been no more crises.

Moreover, while their father is looking for a job and the family is waiting for the opportunity to move to another state – within the Internalization Strategy of Operation Welcome (Operação Acolhida), a response of the Brazilian Federal Government, the United Nations and the civil society to the migration flow from Venezuela – Kairelis and Diego continue to be Daymar's protective older siblings. They get angry when someone calls their sister names and, almost every day, they compete to see who will sleep in the same bed as the youngest. To avoid conflicts, however, the mother prefers to bring Daymar to sleep in her bed.