ATD's streetwise librarians

UNESCO Courier, March, 1999 by Martine Jacot

An NGO that uses culture as a weapon against poverty and exclusion but doesn't always get a friendly welcome from the hungry

When Hurricane Mitch hit Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, in the evening of 28 October 1998, the first thing Carlos, Mauricio and Jaime did was to persuade families in the Nueva Suyapa neighbourhood to quit their corrugated iron and brick shacks.

As the rain fell in torrents they took the stricken slum-dwellers to improvised shelters in schools and churches. Then the three volunteer workers with ATD Fourth World, a non-governmental humanitarian organization, went back to rescue their street library. They collected the children's books, crayons, sheets of paper, scissors and modeling clay displayed on the green plastic sheet that for some years they had regularly been taking to the city's poorest districts, and returned with their precious cargo to the refugee shelters. Along with some 160,000 other ATD Fourth World volunteers and 300 paid staff members in 30 countries, they have been waging a "war on poverty through culture" - at the risk of shocking the very poor whose other needs are much more glaring.

Not by bread alone

Reinforcements soon reached them from neighbouring Guatemala and from France, where ATD Fourth World is based. The newcomers brought puppets with them as well as shovels to clear the rubble. In the end the shovels were hardly used, but the puppets worked overtime. While rescue workers gave emergency assistance, ATD Fourth World's "cultural activists" helped the hurricane victims keep their spirits up by lending them books and performing sketches.

"Everybody, especially society's poorest members, needs culture as much as bread. Not before or after bread, but at the same time." That is the basic tenet of ATD (Aid in Total Distress), which was founded in 1957 in a camp for homeless families in the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Grand by Father Joseph Wresinski. First the priest invited actors to perform Sophocles' Antigone in the muddy, ramshackle settlement. Then he laid on an exhibition of original works by Picasso, Braque, Miro and Leger. "Culture is a fundamental right," said Father Wresinski, "but the shame the poorest people have to endure cuts them off from that right." He wanted culture "to cease to be a privilege" and to help people outside mainstream society "believe in their own culture and in their intelligence."

ATD Fourth World began working in Central America in 1979. On the edge of Tegucigalpa's huge city dump, needy people of all ages jostle for position whenever a garbage truck arrives. They eke out a meagre living by scavenging through the rubbish. ATD Fourth World volunteer Regis De Muylder has not always been given a warm welcome when he has turned up with his green plastic sheet. "We don't want your books," he was often told. "Here we have to fight to eat. Our children are dying of hunger." But De Muylder refused to give up, and today adults and children stop work when he and other volunteers arrive. "Leave them alone," says veteran garbage picker Don Antonio. "They're here to help us, not to judge us." Don Antonio has himself learned how to write in order to describe "what he has gone through" to his children. He finds it too hard to tell them about such grim experiences.

Street libraries have been set up in 25 countries in the North and the South. Their main aim is to encourage children of school age to enrol in school, or if they have dropped out to go back to the classroom. ATD Fourth World says that unless people learn how to read or write they cannot hope to escape from poverty. Volunteers familiarize the most disadvantaged young people with a variety of teaching materials in order to persuade them that ignorance is not inevitable and that they can go to school without feeling ashamed. Parents are patiently handled so as to get them used to the idea of sending their children to school.

Another objective is to bring children, teenagers and adults together and encourage them to respect each other and get on together. "We're not trying to entertain the poorest people or organize neighbourhood events," says Jean-Marie Anglade, a onetime chemical engineer who is now an ATD Fourth World staff member. "Our goal is to build self-confidence in people who are outside the mainstream and to help them see their strengths," so that they can recover their human dignity, make their voices heard and assert their rights.