In one of the favelas, outside of the city, one woman (Regina Silva Gomes) decided that she would collect local garbage and exchange it for food lead a project to clean up the community, where the streets were littered with trash and infested with rodents.
Lucia Regina da Silva, a mother of a fifth grader who survived the attack, said that her daughter told her that older students had covered the bodies of younger students for protection when they heard the gunfire across the hall.