Changing Lifestyles : Street Kids Run Away to a Circus of Opportunity : An innovative project in Brazil lets impoverished children design their own educational programs.

The billowing green and yellow tent hardly looks like a place of books and letters. It is, after all, a circus tent, a child’s paradise, the place where youngsters like Marcelo Silva Cardoso, 14, work on their trapeze and high-wire acts; where tiny Iramaia Riberio, 6, dons makeup to practice her clown and contortionist routines, and where Eleida Gois, 12, studies juggling and acrobatics.

But it is definitely school, and much more, say the children. For these youngsters, a handful of the thousands of street children whose dirt-smudged, unkempt faces have become synonymous with this vast nation, the circus is a refuge from a life of prostitution, crime, drug addiction, brutality, hate, fear and confusion.

It is a bridge back to humanity from places that no child should ever have to visit. In some cases, it is life itself.

“If it weren’t for this, I’d still be on the street . . . or dead,” said Rosana Seana Nogueira, who at 14 drifted into prostitution and drugs after her mother died.

The circus is but one of a score of innovative programs developed by an educational project that in the past five years has rescued thousands of children from the streets of the port city of Salvador--and whose techniques are attracting educators and public officials from throughout Brazil and the world to a converted house not far from the beach.

The project is called AXE (pronounced ah-SHAY), a Yoruba word from Africa that means “positive energy that permits all things to exist.”

Makers of public policy and educators from Colombia, Angola, Mozambique, Italy, Cape Verde and towns and municipalities throughout Brazil have journeyed to the AXE headquarters to learn about things such as the “educational flirt” and “desire education.”

What they ultimately want to know is how an Italian attorney who came to Brazil for three weeks and stayed for 27 years has created a program that at low cost turns children without dreams into dreamers and instills in their once-empty souls a yearning for education.

They hope that perhaps they can transplant those seeds of aspiration in “at risk” children in other places.

“In this area, it is by far the most interesting project in Latin America,” said Enza Bosetti, program officer with UNESCO in Brazil.

What AXE has done, say observers, is to create a unique outreach and educational approach for disadvantaged children, combine that with top-flight instruction and staff and place the two under a cheerful umbrella of Afro-Brazilian culture.

At the center of the project is founder and director Cesare La Rocca, 57, who arrived in Brazil from Milan in 1968 on an excursion with a Roman Catholic Church organization and spent the next 22 years working with various children’s programs in Brazil before becoming the No. 2 official in Brazil for UNICEF. He left UNICEF five years ago because, he says, its programs targeted primarily children younger than 6--which excludes most of Brazil’s street children.

*

La Rocca says the formula for AXE in some ways was given to him by the children he was trying to help. While developing a grant proposal for the project, La Rocca explained, he had first suggested that street children could be funneled into educational programs that would prepare them for the hotel and food industries. “I noticed that they would always hang around hotels or restaurants, talking to foreigners and picking up bits of different languages,” he recalled.

But when he approached street children, they had no interest. Instead, they told him that they would be more intrigued with a project that would take paper from the streets and transform it into something useful.

“I couldn’t see it, but that was their world,” he said with a smile. “All around them, they saw paper thrown on the street. . . . So I took what they said, and the first thing we did was start a paper recycling center. It was their idea. And every program ever since has been a suggestion of children.”

But developing the programs is never a simple process.

The first contact with street children is through AXE’s “street educators,” instructors who enter their dangerous world of violence and despair. There are an estimated 1 million so-called street children in Brazil--12,000 of them in Salvador--but very few actually make their homes in the streets.

Instead, most work the streets by day, begging or selling candy and cleaning car windshields for small change. They return every night to grinding poverty--and often abuse--at home.

Most eventually drift into prostitution, crime and sniffing glue. They are hunted by killers hired by merchants whose stores have been robbed. They are constantly beaten and abused.

AXE instructors must win the children’s confidence, which can take two months or more. The process usually involves developing an educational program with the children that begins on the streets. It is what AXE calls the “educational flirt.”

Intrigued, the children often warily enter one of AXE’s many educational activities--like the circus, a metal-furniture manufacturing facility, a fashion design center, a dance troupe, a silk-screen facility, a martial arts troupe and musical groups--all of which are used to teach life lessons and create curiosity.

*

“It sounds strange,” said Ana Boursechied, the circus education director, “but the circus is a great educational tool. . . . .The circus teaches them that they have to work together, trust each other--because if they don’t, they will both fall [from the high wire].”

But the biggest accomplishment of the programs is to encourage the children to see a future and ask if they can start formal education. It is what AXE calls “desire education.”

“If a kid says, ‘I want to leave the street. What can AXE do for me?’ we say that AXE can do nothing,” explained La Rocca. “Without the will, we cannot do anything. We create the will in the child to learn, and then the teacher and the child work out an educational program. But first the child has to have a dream.”

And that may be the hardest part of the process for his students.

“All children have dreams and wishes,” La Rocca said, “but not street children. Street children don’t dream; they don’t wish. They cannot. They don’t believe the future is possible because they are living with death, not life.”

So far, AXE has gotten 7,000 street children to develop a dream, including Nogueira, who is now married and has a 1-year-old daughter.

Public officials in Salvador and elsewhere in Brazil hail the program.

But not La Rocca.

“AXE is not designed to be the answer to street children,” he said. “AXE is designed to demonstrate to the government that they need to change their policies. The problem is not the child, but the policies that make his father poor.

“I can’t say AXE is a success. AXE will only be a success when there is no more AXE.”