A 109-year-old Brazilian grandmother has finally been able to claim her pension after being issued her first-ever birth certificate so she can open a bank account and collect the money.
Francisca Antonia de Jesus, who never learned to read, was born in 1916 in a rural settlement near Fronteiras, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Piaui, and now lives in Tocantins, in the country's north.
Francisca's illiteracy hampered her attempts to chase up the missing birth certificate over the years, but she said she had never forgotten what her mother told her about the morning she was born, even after more than a century had passed.
She said: "Francisca Antonia de Jesus. I was born in the countryside. I was born at 6am in 1916. My mother told me and I never forgot."
The 109-year-old grew up as the eldest of four children in a family of poor farmers and spent her childhood working in the countryside.
None of the children went to school, although Francisca said her siblings later managed to learn to read while she never did.
She said: "They learned to read, but I didn't."
Francisca said there was no teacher available to poor families in the area and education was effectively reserved for those wealthy enough to arrange private tuition.
She recalled: "They didn't even send us to school because there was no teacher. The teacher had to be taken home. Only rich people could take one home and have them look after them."
Francisca went on to spend decades working in agriculture, planting and harvesting cotton, beans and maize despite having no civil birth registration.
She said: "The document was only to say the name and that's it. I worked in the countryside, picking cotton, beans, maize... I did all of that, thank God."
Francisca later married and had four children, although her family life was marked by separation when the father of her two eldest children took them away.
She did not see the two children again until they were already adults.
In 1986, Francisca moved to Mato Grosso with her eldest son, where a baptism record was used to help her obtain her first official document, a work card.
The document allowed her working history to be recognised and enabled her to begin receiving a retirement pension. But it was then cancelled when she was told she needed to start receiving it into a bank account.
The missing birth certificate became a serious problem when the pension Francisca had been receiving was blocked after the bank stopped accepting the magnetic card she had previously used to collect the money.
Her family was told she needed to open a current account, but the bank required an identity card, while obtaining the identity card itself required a birth certificate.
Maria said: "That was when our saga for documents began."
The granddaughter searched registry offices across the north-east for records relating to Francisca and her parents, but the family could not find enough information to establish that her birth had ever been officially registered.
After the conventional searches failed, Maria sought help from the Public Defender's Office in Tocantins.
Maria said: "We went to the Public Defender's Office just looking for information, without taking any documents. The service was very quick. They referred us to the public defender, who contacted the relevant bodies and made the request."
The family had expected to attend a court hearing on 16th May, but received the news beforehand that Francisca's birth certificate had already been prepared at the registry office.
The document finally allowed her to begin obtaining the identity card she had wanted for years and meant she could open the bank account needed to access her pension.
Maria said: "It is very good because today she has documents, she is someone before the law. She really wanted to have one, especially the identity card, because she saw that everyone had one and she didn't."
Public defender Fabio Monteiro said the case involved extensive work to gather information from identification institutes and public bodies before the matter was taken to court.
He said: "There was a great deal of diligence and care with her situation. We worked intensively to search for information and contact identification institutes and public bodies to gather the necessary answers and take the case to court."
A judge then granted an urgent order allowing the registration process to move forward.
Fabio said: "For the Public Defender's Office, guaranteeing this person's right was fundamental and decisive."
He added: "It is a huge feeling of professional fulfilment. You could see the satisfaction of the entire team when the injunction was granted. We realised that our work had truly reached the hands of someone who needed it most."
Francisca's case is classed as a late birth registration, a legal procedure for people whose births were not officially registered during childhood.
The Public Defender's Office of Tocantins handled 22 cases specifically involving late birth certificates between January and June this year, while 183 cases involving delayed personal documentation were recorded during the same period.
(Marija Stojkoska/Newsflash)
