São Paulo – Last year, history student Bárbara Lauxen, 25 years of age, spent two days at a school in the city of São Leopoldo speaking to children in primary education about Egypt. Bárbara spoke, the small ones inquired, issued their opinions and the result was the assembly of a mini Egyptian museum to be shown to their colleagues. Early this month, she and another two colleagues, Calane Tavares, 25 years of age, and Camila Barbosa, 18 years of age, also History students, promoted a workshop on the matter, about the same theme, with a pedagcial and also interactive proposal, at Mario Quintana Cultural House, in Porto Alegre.
Now, the three factories from Rio Grande do Sul aim to transform the experience of the cultural workshops about Egypt into a greater project and to offer it to children in Rio Grande do Sul. The youths are students of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Ufrgs) and the first initiative, at school, arose at Bárbara’s initiative, after a social educator course at a nongovernmental organisation (NGO). “I always liked Egypt much, read about it and at the end of my course, I needed to develop a project. So I decide to work in Egypt in a different way," said the researcher.
Bárbara then set up a workshop in a voluntary way and applied it to students from the first to the fourth year of grade school at Professor Otília Carvalho Seth Primary School, in São Leopoldo, a city located 30 kilometres away from Rio Grande do Sul state capital Porto Alegre. “I told them the story of Egypt, about the gods, and they interpreted the gods. I took pictures of Egypt, maps," she said. The Egyptian Adel Shalabi also spoke to the children about his country. The objective was to show that life there, currently, is similar to that in Brazil and in any other part of the world, and no longer has, for example, pharaohs or things like that.
As a result of the work, children established a kind of mini museum in a classroom, with pictures of the Arab country and sarcophagi made out of shoe boxes. The children made themselves up as the pharaohs and the space was visited by the remaining students at the school.
At Mario Quintana Culture House, in turn, the work of Bárbara, Calane and Camila was part of a project named Oficina de Arte Sapato Florido (Flowery Shoe Art Workshop). There the three spent a day with children aged from six to 13 years, and showed them movie “Cadê a Minha Múmia” (Where’s my Mummy). After speaking to the historians about Egypt, the children made amulets, scarabs (which represented divinity in Ancient Egypt) and papyruses.
The objective of the workshops, according to Bárbara, is to bring the past and the present together, creating a parallel between the child’s reality and the theme studied. "I showed the kids a picture of a stream full of garlic and asked them where they thought it was. They answered "Brazil". I then told them that it was a picture of Egypt. I am sure that in Egypt, children also think that Brazilians wear Indian headgear," said Bárbara.
The students chose Egypt as it is the crib of humanity. “I love Egyptian culture, it is our past, it is part of humanity," said Barbara. The three history students would like to offer free workshops to school children and at Mario Quintana Culture House, but the study of the economic viability of the project is still being developed. Bárbara recalls that the children who cannot pay are the ones that need this cultural baggage the most. An alternative, however, in case they do not manage to collect the necessary funds to offer the workshops for free, will be to charge. The idea is for the project to include several areas, like the art of mummification, mythology and theory applied to art.
Contact
Discovering Egypt Workshop
Contact: (+55 51) 8553-8412 (Calane) or (+55 51) 9378-4826 (Bárbara)
E-mail: barbara.lauxen@terra.com.br
*Translated by Mark Ament
