The Art of Service

Silvia Marcela de Freitas is a student in Compassion’s Leadership Development Programme which supports exceptional young people through university education. It’s a transformational course that also provides Christian leadership training, preparing the selected students to go back and positively impact their own communities.

Early years with Compassion

Silvia grew up in a very poor neighbourhood in Brazil, an area notorious for violence, gang fights and armed robbery. She has never met her father but thankfully Silvia received all the love and encouragement she needed at the Compassion project she attended as a child. "I always knew that what the project did was to love children. I could feel they cared and worked hard fighting for lives," recalls Silvia.

Her life was also shaped by the letters she received from her sponsor: "I was still a child and I kept thinking, 'How can someone who has never seen me in his entire life care for me and insist on helping me?’ It seems that the whole world conspires against us...but if someone believes in us, this is very important. My sponsor believed in me.”

Freely receive, freely to give

In fact, Silvia was so influenced by the love of her sponsor that she now wants to do exactly the same for others. “A human being needs to have someone who believes and invests in her life and I want to do it also," says Silvia. But the question remained: how would she fulfill this God-given desire to serve others?

Although Silvia grew up knowing only extreme poverty which is usually characterised by an absence of opportunity, she is now spoiled for choice! She has so many talents and interests which have been nurtured through the Compassion programmes. Perhaps her greatest passion is ballet which she first began learning at the project. As well as serving in her church, Silvia now teaches ballet classes at schools in her community, using the classes to teach the girls to believe in their own potential, just as she was encouraged to do.

Here she is dancing (third from the left)...

Silvia is also a very outgoing person who naturally attracts people through her creativity and vivacious personality. It was because of her exceptional communication skills that she was guided to study journalism as a degree through the LDP programme. "I fell in love with journalism at the first lesson," she enthuses. Her favourite class is called ‘Community Communication’ which focuses on not-for-profit communication that helps local people and offers opportunities for them to express themselves.

A creative solution

Through the LDP course, Silvia has now realised that her journalism studies and her passion for dancing can be brought together in one defined vision: to set up a School of Arts in her neighbourhood. "People do not believe that good things can come out of my community – people there are not valued," Silvia explains. “The children grow up believing that violence and crime are the only way and there are many deaths due to gang fights.”

For Silvia, a School of Arts will help to encourage children that there is hope beyond the poverty and crime they see every day. "Art generates dreams," Silvia says. "I want a full-time school for children so they can dedicate themselves to something they like. The project gave me this dream of helping people. I want to pass it on. I started like them and today I'm an LDP student."