ADCAM's Founding Story

It all started when Ferial and her family moved to Manaus in the heart of the Amazon in 1985.  Ferial saw the abject poverty around her and decided to do something about it. Her first step was to pick up 5 abandoned toddlers off the street and bring them home with her. This is how the orphanage started.  By the time she was done, 300 abandoned children had been adopted into good families.  Then she decided that education was the only way to address the root cause of poverty and started an elementary school.  She added a classroom every year until the school offered a full K-12 curriculum.

Then she looked around and saw hundreds of street children, often with no clothes on and hungry, begging in the streets, so she decided to do something about that and started ADCAM’s Family Development Center.  This program offers free education to the street children, while providing parental support and training to the parents.

And then she saw the desperate plight of the elderly in the community. Often illiterate and unable to understand the complicated rules governing the meager stipend allotted to the elderly poor they were often homeless and without support, and so Ferial decided to help them.  She worked with numerous government agencies and community members and together they held a “Day of the Elderly” on ADCAM campus.  They advertised and brought in hundreds of the elderly in the community and signed them up for their government benefit of $10/month.   In addition they provided other nutritional and medical care services.   This is how the “Program for the Elderly” at ADCAM was born.   The Day of the Elderly is now an annual event, and the program now serves hundreds of elderly women and men every day.

After all this, Ferial decided that K-12 education was not sufficient and the graduating youth needed skills and training to find employment that paid a living wage.  She again sprung into action and wrote a grant to the government of Brazil, asking for a $1M grant to start a four year technical college.  This college is now in place, offering 17 different tracks of skills training including carpentry, refrigeration maintenance, computer technology and alike to the community. The Youth Apprenticeship program was later put in place to ensure placement of graduates in local companies.

In recognition of this significant accomplishment, the government of Brazil awarded Ferial with Brazil’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor for her outstanding services to the people of Brazil.