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A letter from Bob and Keiko Butterfield
in Brazil |
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June 3, 2004
Dear Friends and Supporters of ITEBA,
There is cause for rejoicing. After three months of gathering
documents and making the application and after another five weeks
of waiting, Keiko and I have finally received our visas for Brazil.
Our plans are to leave on or about July 8 and arrive in Salvador,
Bahia, the afternoon of July 9. The semester does not begin until
the first week in August, but we want to be there for the start
of Mutirão 2004, which runs July 11-25. A mutirão
is a joint effort, and in this case it means that a group of North
American supporters of ITEBA will engage in two weeks of fairly
intense work and study with people from ITEBA and from all over
Salvador. The work involves ongoing construction of the Quilombo
Zeferina (see box), and the study involves visits to historic,
cultural, and health- or church-related sites. |
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A "quilombo" is a fortified town or stronghold
built by runaway slaves as a refuge from slave traders. There
were many slave revolts in Brazil and many quilombos,
the most famous being Palmares. This particular quilombo
was named after Zeferina, the chieftain who was its leader. Of
course, it’s no longer a quilombo; it’s a
community center. But the name speaks volumes about the history
of Africans in Brazil.
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There will also be five major
panel discussions in the evening on subjects ranging from ITEBA
to the Northeast to Salvador to the current situation in Brazil
to women’s issues to Presbyterian spirituality in Salvador.
Most of the ITEBA faculty and administration will participate,
along with representatives from various Presbyterian bodies, labor
unions, women’s movements, Negro movements, and indigenous
groups. According to an email just received from ITEBA, I’m
going to be part of the program myself. Keiko and I look upon
the timing of this event, our arrival in Salvador, and our participation
in the mutirão as a blessed coincidence because
it immediately gets us involved and busy in the life of the institution
and provides the perfect vehicle for us to work with and get to
know the good people at ITEBA. We had been quite concerned about
just how we would integrate ourselves into the ITEBA community,
but this mutirão solves the problem in a marvelous
way.
Having just read a report on ITEBA in 2003, I must say that I
am really impressed by what went on there. So many good things
happened, in fact, that I can give you only the highlights. |
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First, ITEBA is making real progress
in the accreditation process with the Ministry of Education and
Culture (MEC). This progress is especially visible in the elaboration
of ITEBA’s institutional development project, a document required
for accreditation. ITEBA also added to its corps of qualified instructors,
enhanced the information management capabilities of its library,
had all its books cleaned and restored, and filled in some gaps
in the library’s collection. |
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Bob and Keiko Butterfield with their children Sarah, Kenji, and
Rachel.
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Communications with the ITEBA Network were also
improved in preparation for developing a project that will give
ITEBA its own building in 2005. ITEBA’s exchange has started
with EST, Escola Superior de Teologia, the Lutheran seminary in
the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul—ITEBA will send a
student there and receive an EST student in Salvador. |
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Besides all these signs of progress,
ITEBA conducted a whole array of exciting activities in 2003. What
follows is a partial list: a summer course for black and indigenous
women, a work study program to encourage enrollment by very needy
students, a course for feminist theologians in the north and northeast
(with the participation of Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza from
Harvard), a major symposium on interdisciplinary practice and theological
engagement, a conference on the black woman (with Emilie Townes
from Union Seminary in New York), a seminar focusing on the history
of the APN’s (Negro Pastoral Agents, a movement started by
ITEBA twenty years ago), a library series dealing with Brazil’s
history as seen through the arts, a march to support CESE (Ecumenical
Service Coordinating Council), a march on November 20 to celebrate
National Black Consciousness Day, and finally a highly inclusive
ecumenical campaign designed to give ITEBA the visibility it deserves
on the occasion of its 17th anniversary. Fully 45 percent of ITEBA
alumni were in attendance for this event and witnessed to their
experience at ITEBA. All of these activities, you understand, were
in addition to ITEBA’s regular work of classroom teaching. |
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As you can see, there is just a tremendous buzz
of activity at ITEBA, and the level of commitment and excitement
mounts as ITEBA gets closer and closer to being accredited by MEC
and getting its own building after all these years of sharing space
with a private high school. These two developments promise to take
place within the next year or year and a half and will usher in
a lot of positive changes, especially as prospective students realize
that they can get a university degree at ITEBA for a fraction of
what it would cost at any other university-level institution. |
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Bob and Keiko (center) with their Brazilian friends Vitor and Christiane
Westhelle. Vitor teaches systematic theology at the Lutheran School
of Theology in Chicago. Since 1984, Vitor has been urging Bob to
go teach in Brazil. |
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Another way of looking at that
phenomenon is to say that soon ITEBA’s ability to transform
the lives of needy students (and therefore their families and
communities too) will greatly increase.
This is an exciting time for Keiko and me to be involved with
ITEBA, and we thank God for the opportunity. It’s also a
time when your involvement with ITEBA could really make a difference.
United in prayer (em união de orações),
Bob
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