Tag: Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes

"Comrades don't leave, we're about to start the mystique." Our little group of Canadian "Comrades" was headed to our dorms to receive our morning schedule after a delicious breakfast of organic honey, jelly, butter and freshly made white bread accompanied by hot coffee, or milk, and freshly picked oranges. For added flavour with the warm milk cocoa powder was provided. Everything (perhaps not the powder) was grown in the school or a cooperatives directed by the MST. Cooperatives are agricultural ventures managed collectively by MST members for the benefit of the community and its members. They are based on expropriated and divided land cultivated by former encamped families. In some settlements, once the land has been awarded the families begin building on their new piece of government land but work collective to produce the needed goods for the community. Nobody owns the land. The land is of the people "o povo." The government gives them the right to stay and live there indefinitely until they stop producing. The honey and jelly came from one of many of these cooperatives in Brazil.