Mba’éichapa means hello in the Guarani indigenous language. It was this simple greeting that inspired the Illustrative Indigenous Dictionary project: rescuing the Ofaié and Guarani languages.
Students in the 6th year of elementary school at the Antônio Henrique Filho Municipal School, in Brasilândia (MS) produced a dictionary with their own illustrations in both languages. The book was even distributed to schools in the municipality and to the city's library.
The Illustrative Indigenous Dictionary is one of the winners in the Desafio Criativos da Escola. According to the students, there are only five speakers of the Ofaie language.
The younger ones didn't get to learn the language. The project began when the school's history teacher, Marciana Santiago de Oliveira, heard two indigenous students greeting each other.
“Indigenous students study in the afternoon, due to the difficulty in getting to school. I always taught in the morning, when I moved to the afternoon, their presence was new to me. They spoke that word and I found it interesting”, she said.
She approached the group and started talking about the language. The subject was also new for non-indigenous students, who already lived with their colleagues, but who did not know their culture.
The idea of creating a language dictionary was built together with the students, based on their reports.
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Tânia Rodrigues da Silva Lins, 13, is one of the students who are part of the project. She is from the Ofaié ethnic group, but, like other young people, she never learned the language. “We don't have much opportunity to rescue the culture and take it abroad. I thought it was really cool”, she says. She conducted interviews with those who still speak the language in the village, one of those people, her own grandmother, Neuza da Silva, 57 years old.
“For me the language is difficult, I was born speaking Portuguese. My grandmother is the oldest in the village, sometimes she tries to teach us and sometimes we learn, but she's ashamed to talk”, she says.
The project involved both indigenous people with interviews and word choices, and non-indigenous people who were interested in learning a little of the two languages. Students also produced a video. Now, they intend to offer workshops in the city's schools on the material they produced. “The story, if it isn't to transform our reality, doesn't make sense”, says the teacher, who gets emotional when she tells about the activities.
award
The School's Creative Challenge celebrates and rewards projects carried out by children and young people from all over the a country that, supported by their educators, are transforming schools, communities and counties.
The winning teams receive R$1,500 and the educators responsible for the team, R$500. The award is part of the Criativos na Escola program of the non-governmental organization Instituto Alana.
“The award is a strategy for us to value not only the 11 selected projects, but especially this movement of children and young people who are thinking critically their realities and developing projects of social transformation”, says one of the coordinators of the program Criativos da Escola Gabriel Maia Salgado.
“Even in adverse political and social contexts, students have been building transformations and even putting pressure on schools, communities and the public administration to work together”. The information is from Agência Brasil.
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