At Compassiva, in 2014, we started to offer free Portuguese classes to Syrian and Palestinian refugees at our headquarters – we started with a very small class of six people.
As time passed, the class grew. The classes reached new frontiers of Arabic culture: Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, etc., as well as benefitting up to 80 students every week.
In 2015, when one of our volunteer teachers, Camila Suemi Tardin, was talking to a student, she discovered that they were trying to revalidate their degree, but were facing immense difficulties in understanding the process due to the bureaucracy. Being a lawyer, she offered help; so, Compassiva noticed that we could contribute to the process of revalidating the degrees of other refugees.
Since then, we have sealed a partnership with UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency) and were able to start the project of degree revalidation for refugees recognised by CONARE in a structured way, which allows us to interfile the applications with public universities all over Brazil, for free.
Starting over isn’t easy! It involves physical losses, but also emotional ones. And degree revalidation is often a breath of fresh air in the midst of so much change – a breath of integration and belonging.
‘It’s not just a piece of paper’, says André Leitão, the executive president of Compassiva. ‘Revalidating one’s degree is the first step towards these people recuperating their dignity, their identity’.
Currently, Compassiva has started more than 100 revalidation processes, and has revalidated around 30 degrees belonging to refugees from various countries, including Syria, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, Colombia, Mozambique, Iran, and Stateless.
In April, Rede Globo (a major Brazilian TV channel) started to show the soap Orfãos da Terra (Orphans of the Earth). The plot tells the story of people who fled the Syrian conflict, which has already lasted 8 years (see our first post talking about the conflict here).
Essa é a realidade do refugiado que tenta revalidar seu diploma no Brasil!! Linda cena! Muito orgulho desta novela! ✊🏽🌹 pic.twitter.com/MfZfCEUwLv
— Renato Góes (@renatogoess) April 15, 2019
On the 15th April, the plot started with the saga of the doctor Faruq Murad (played by Eduardo Mossri) who seeks to revalidate his Medicine degree in Brazil, and begins to face various obstacles.
Eduardo Mossri with part of the Compassiva team
We work so that, in this case, fiction does not become reality, since we have already started three processes for the revalidation of Medicine degrees belonging to one Cuban and two Venezuelans. There is a lot of demand for the revalidation of Medicine degrees in Brazil; we’re working with at least ten people of different nationalities who are interested in starting the process.
The revalidation of any degree is a very bureaucratic and onerous process, and it is particularly difficult to revalidate Medicine degrees. We therefore have a legal team which can relieve the burden, seeking to help people in need of this service. In 2019, also in partnership with UNHCR, we started to help specifically with the process of revalidating Medicine degrees.
INEP’s revalidation system, Revalidate, takes place through the publication of an invitation for those interested to sign up, who then have to pass an objective and practical test as a condition of revalidating their Medicine degrees. However, in 2018 there was no invitation published, and there are no signs of one being published in 2019. Moreover, most universities use the Revalidate system – the two which decided to continue using their own administrative process have a waiting list of around 300 people.
This reality doesn’t just affect refugees; it also affects asylum seekers, stateless people, temporary residents, immigrants in situations of severe vulnerability, as well as Brazilians who studied abroad – even in renowned universities such as Harvard or Oxford – and want to return to Brazil to practice their profession, but cannot work doing what they have been trained to do.
Camila Suemi Tardin, a lawyer at Compassiva, states: “I believe that the Brazilian country and population have a lot to gain from the work of these doctors, and that it’s bad for Brazil to be missing out on this potential, both in medical practice and in research.”
Camila Suemi Tardin working at Compassiva. Photo by UNHCR, 2018.
May we be able to reverse the unhappy reality that inspired the fiction of the soap Orfãos da terra, making medical practice possible for refugee doctors, as well as all the other professions.
May Brazil be a more welcoming country to these medical professionals, and may these people be able to serve Brazilian society with their skills.
Join us; you too can be an agent of welcome to refugees on Brazilian soil by donating here.
