Students at a Seventh-day Adventist elementary school in the Brazilian state of Paraná are looking beyond their own situation and reaching out to help others. Returning students have brought donations of diapers and diaper rash ointments to help new mothers at a local maternity hospital.
Glauber Souza was one of these students. Kept away from school due to the COVID-19 outbreak, he was thrilled to return to the school—if only to see teachers and classmates from a safe distance.
“The last day that I was here was March 17th,” he recalled. “Then everything closed because of the pandemic and I was homesick for school.”
The first day he returned to the Fazenda Rio Grande Adventist School , which opened in February of this year, was marked by solidarity. The students arrived in a drive-thru system with a dual purpose: to receive a gift in celebration of Student Day and deliver the infant supplies.
According to the school's director, Dolores Rosa, the objective of the campaign is to return the affection of the local farm population, who welcomed the new school with open arms. “This week we are completing a year of arrival here in the city of Fazenda Rio Grande. Here we were very well received, and we are still ‘newborns.’ Thinking about it, we remember motherhood, which is an entity here in the city that needs our donations,” she said.
For Anderson Voos, director of Adventist Education in southern Paraná, the new school’s success has reasons that go beyond the work and dedication of the team. “We had the dream of reaching just over 300 students here at Fazenda Rio Grande and God blessed us so much that we reached more than 530 students in the year 2020. This is a reason for much gratitude to God in the first year of existence of this school,” he said.
The initiative benefits the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Hospital and Maternity, which serves pregnant women in the municipality and performs about 90 deliveries per month. The donated items will be used in the first care of newborns.
“As a maternity hospital that serves only the Unified Health System (SUS), we always have a need to complement resources for the care of mothers who come here. Any kind of donation is always welcome,” said Marcilene de Paula, the hospital’s director.
This article was originally published on the South American Division’s Portuguese news site