Brazil: teaching in public schools

I've been teaching English for almost 10 years, and my most interesting experience was when I started teaching at a public school besides teaching at a language institute. This school was located in a very poor neighborhood, and there were all kinds of social problems surrounding it. My initial excitement was tested when I started to talk about what I was going to teach and the importance of learning English at school when a student raised his hand and said: "Teacher, why should we learn English if even don't know how to speak Portuguese very well?" My first reaction was saying that maybe he could learn English better than Portuguese and one day he could have a very good job, even travel abroad. And another student said: "Come on, teacher, we don't have money for the bus ticket to go downtown, how can we go abroad?"