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“Estrela do Mar” means starfish in Portuguese, and so Escola Estrela do Mar is the story of the Starfish School…Amidst the sea of hope and confusion that is modern Brazil, the school could not have a more apt name. The ‘starfish’ story is used as a modern metaphor of hope in a wide range of cases around the world. There are different variants of the story, but it goes something like this:

One sunny morning, countless starfish had been washed up on a beach. A man who regularly walked along the beach noticed a boy busily working on some strange task. As he curiously approached the boy, he noticed that thousands of starfish had been washed up onto the sand and the boy was quickly throwing them back into the sea. Thinking the boys actions were futile, he asked him “Why are you throwing the starfish back into the ocean?” The boy replied, “The Starfish will die out of the water. I must hurry to save them”. The man cynically replied, “Little boy, dont you see that this beach is completely covered in starfish. There are thousands of them – you cant possibly save them all!”.

With that, the boy picked up yet another starfish, threw it into the sea and explained “Well for that starfish I made a difference”.

The name and attitude of the school totally embody this story. And in some sense, that attitude drew me here, to help in a way that I could.

I am a firm believer in this approach to life. Even when we are faced with problems of an insurmountable scale, the starfish story reminds us that our actions do make a difference.