- To spread the reading habit, as an enjoyable and stimulating activity, among children, youth and adults;
- To supply literary texts and school books, aiding classwork and university access tests preparation;
- To help children, youth and adults approach computers, offering a basic computer science formation, which is nowadays necessary to everyone;
- To equip a good number of PCs, so that users can be independent in doing homework and Internet research;
- To help children and adolescents develop their curiosity, imagination and creativity through computer science;
- To reveal the emotion of cinema to whom never had this possibility before, due to economical and geographical factors;
- To send important social messages to different communities, using a video-projector;
- To offer a good choice of lessons (at this time: computer science, English, Italian, philosophy, signs language) to raise the community cultural level;
- To supply technological and informatical aid for realization of social events in town;
- To build, with children especially, a new mentality: respecting rules, being quiet, waiting calmly inside a public service area.
The Digital Culture Circle (CDIC) is a CDCA project born in January 2006, taking advantage of unused rooms in the "Lar Amizade" House (which is the place where italian volunteers are accomodated), in the outskirt of Barreiras town, Vila Rica district; as its name points out, this project's developing process envolves community people as much as possible (this is the meaning of the word "circle"), and helps them have a better approach to culture, especially in the new digital technologies point of view.
It's an ambitious project, born in an environment which shows a total lack of adequate technology structures; nonetheless, since its beginnings it awoke a great interest among people: not only children and kids' curiosity, but also immediate and active participation of youth and adults, parents and sons (it's not so rare, for example, to meet young mothers trying to learn computer science basics while carrying a little sleeping child!).
At present (September 2006), after a preliminary experimental stage during the second half of year 2005 and a substantial reform in January 2006, we can alredy count with 750 registered users, most of which regularly renew their participation every month. Every user pays a symbolic quantity of 50 centavos a month (more or less corresponding to 20 euro cents!) to have access to the library, the computer science laboratory and the periodical cinema sessions.
A small team of tutors (with a great helping hand from "Lar" House Paola girls!) grants the normal course of activities in the library and computer science laboratory, during two distinct day periods (morning and afternoon), while volunteers offer different kinds of lessons during the afternoon and the evening.
We acknowledge a growing interest among youth towards reading activities; the same thing happens about using informatical means, Internet in the first place. We believe it's a great victory to manage widening many people's horizons, little by little; children and youth above all, whose existence is strongly connected to outskirt districts stereotypes, which are mostly negative. Shall many young people have the opportunity to spend part of their time reading, doing Internet research or watching a good cinema movie, less and less new recruits will choose to walk along the dangerous path of the always crueler youth gangs.
Our job is done trying to directly envolve other CDCA projects' boys and girls, as the ones from Cata-Ventos, "Lar" House Paola and "Fabinho and Marcone" Workshop, not only as formation activities subjects, but also as precious active CDIC functionaries.
Besides our most obvious objectives, in terms of reading activities, computer science and school aid, we're also following another important goal: to teach our district's children, most of which don't recognize almost any limit in their day-to-day behaviour, a new ethic made of silence, of patience, of peace and order; all these characteristics will help them make their way through life, in future times.
We're also creating strong connections with the neighbourhood and the users' families, so that we are receiving book donations (mostly school texts) every week or so; otherwise, all those books would be simply thrown away. This way we manage to increase our book supply without additional costs, and distributing material in excess to the Cata-Vento projects.
In parallel to daily user attending activities, the CDIC is technologically supporting social events taking place in town, supplying equipment (laptop PC, video-projector) and informatical means (slides, Internet sites) to envolved institutions; this way, we're building a profile of great respectability in the social field, through active collaboration with relevant organizations such as the Human Rights Centre, social pastorals, syndicates, and so on.