Jornal Estado de Minas publishes an article by Rosara Maneira about a Portuguese-Brazilian book project

In an article published in the newspaper Estado de Minas, the lawyer Rosara de Oliveira Maneira, partner of Maneira Advogados and niece of ambassador José Aparecido de Oliveira (1929-2007) — one of the founders of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) —, talks about the book project “Letters from there and here”, which features the exchange of correspondence between 450 Portuguese-Brazilian students aged 7 to 14.

We postpone our Portuguese-speaking dreams

For six months, teachers, writers and principals talked about the spelling agreement, which regulates 98% of words in the Portuguese language

16/10/2021

Rosara de Oliveira Maneira
Lawyer, master in constitutional law, teacher of general state theory, creator and volunteer of the Cartas de Lá e Cá project

With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have time again to write letters! I associated the idea of ​​time with something that had been inscribed as a concept in the creation of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), which this year celebrates 25 years and which had, among its founders, ambassador José Aparecido de Oliveira (1929-2007). He and the former president of Portugal Mário Soares, Angola's Agostinho Neto, and representatives from Guinea Bisau, Cape Verde, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor created the CPLP 25 years ago, on the foundations of fraternity.

I also started to analyze when we replaced exchanges of letters with email. And how can we reconcile agile communication, which is lost due to this imposition of speed in “space-time”? The time in which children send information and it is received and the next minute, it disappears! Time is a construction in existence and if not understood it is a threat of emptying meaning and fueling hopelessness.

Letters take time to write, to post, and to wait for a response. And that was my inspiration to create the book “Letters from there and here”, an exchange of correspondence between 450 Portuguese-Brazilian students aged between 7 and 14, 200 from Escola Básica de Óbidos – a medieval village that was taken over by the Moors in 1148 – and 250 students from the historic city of Conceição do Mato Dentro, founded in 1842, in Minas Gerais.

The book, published to be distributed free of charge, brings together the content of hundreds of letters, which began to be written in February 2019, as a classroom activity. For six months, teachers, writers and directors talked about the spelling agreement, which regulates 98% of words in the Portuguese language. Through the letters, they were even able to find those who are part of the 2% group.

As a volunteer, I was in Óbidos, at the end of 2019, to take the books and I was moved by the kids' request to meet their new Brazilian friends. I made a commitment to organize a virtual meeting on May 5, 2020 – the date that marked the first edition of World Portuguese Language Day – established by UNESCO. The idea was to promote a conversation through a big screen. But since then, the world has been surprised by the spread of the pandemic in several waves and has closed down. We were forced to cancel, but we just postponed the children's dreams until after we beat the virus.

https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/opiniao/2021/10/16/interna_opiniao,1314311/adiamos-os-sonhos-lusofonos.shtml