[1/23/05]: MST Update #82: Inaguration of Florestan Fernandes National School

Dear Friends,

We would like to let you know about yet another victory of solidarity between Brazilians and the peoples of the world: the inauguration of the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), on January 23, 2005. Built in Guararema (60 km/36 miles from São Paulo) by 1,115 rural landless workers, the School is the valuable fruit of our struggle. It represents four and a half years of work by volunteers from the settlements and encampments across the country. A work realized by many hands already calloused by the hoe.

After many years of collective discussions in the various levels of the MST, the School comes with the purpose of promoting the thinking, planning, and organizing of the activists and directors of the Movement, and developing their political, technical, and ideological learning. Born out of the goal of capacitating rural youth, women and men for production, commerce, and management in the encampments and settlements, the ENFF will have a pedagogy and methodology adapted to the reality of the workers in the countryside.

On a plot of 30,000 square meters (300,000 square feet). Structures were built of soil-cement bricks produced at the site itself. The technique is agro-ecological, eliminating plaster, reducing the amount of iron, steel and cement in the project; the bricks are more resistant and easier to lay. In all there are three classrooms – which together hold up to 200 people – an auditorium, and two amphitheatres. The resources for the construction of the School were collected through the sale of the book Terra (“Land