arrival and first meeting with Equip

Dom Helder Camara
Archbishop of Olinda and Recife from 1964 to 1985

Our group has arrived in Olinda, the historical capital of Pernambuco, and have settled into our hotel. On our first afternoon in Brazil, we had the pleasure of meeting with two members of Equip, a partner of D and P based in the northeast of Brazil. We will visit their office on Thursday and will be able to give a fuller picture of the work of Equip then. In our first meeting we went through our itinerary and also received a general overview of the history of Pernambuco. Two staff from Equip, Caja (he is our trip coordinator and works out of the Equip office in Recife) and Cledei (she is formation director of Equip in the city of Fortaleza) led us through the orientation. Caja also spoke to us about the great friend of the poor Dom Heldar Camara who as bishop of the diocese of Olinda and Recife transformed the role of the church in the diocese. Dom Helder embraced liberation theology and during his time as bishop in the 1970s and 80s he implemented a program of base ecclesial communities that brought church and comunity together to interpret the bible and their own social and economic reality through the eyes of the poor. The government of Brazil, a military dictatorship, did much to disrupt Dom Helders work once the people began to insist that they had human rights and their poverty was not an accident but a result of a corrupt system. To this Dom Helder responded "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist".