Enforcing Education

Mendes knew the importance of education and experienced first-hand on how education had changed his life and way of thinking. He wanted to empower the rubber tappers with the knowledge and the consciousness that something had to done to stop the exploitation. Before education was given to training the rubber tappers, they have a slave mentality and did not want to involve themselves in the fight for social justice (Gross, 1989). Mendes and the Xapuri Union wanted to change this mentality and initiated several programmes to teach reading and writing. The ultimate goal was to get rubber tappers to think more about what was going on around them.

One famous programme was the Projeto Seringuerio (the Rubber Tapper Project) which began in 1980. The aim of the program was to encourage the rubber tappers to identify themselves with the forest, learn about it and defend it. This literacy programme was at first catered to adults. However, as a long term solution to change the mentality and improved the literacy rate of the rubber tappers, the programme was also opened to children. The programme was also to train potential literacy teachers in the communities to improve their literacy skills and in turn, go back to their communities to teach the people.