We are always encouraged to showcase our talents whenever possible. But what happens when there is an abundance of talent but no opportunity to showcase it? It was this crucial question that moved Nalini Elvino de Souza, Manager, Communicare Trust, to try and provide an outlet for children who are may not be lucky to get chances to express their creativeness.
“ I went to Portugal in May 2017 and met a teacher from the Alberta Menéres School who asked me if we could develop a project with a school in India. Immediately I thought that a book made in partnership with both schools (one in Portugal and another in Goa) could be a wonderful project,” she says.
Nalini then got in touch with Cabeçudos, a publisher in Portugal which works with schools and develops books within the school and was pretty impressed.
“I though that we should create the same kind of movement in Goa,” she says. And so in 2017, Communicare Trust first teamed up with Santo Miguel School for a book project on the theme of waste management. The book titled Kalakriti which means ‘When Stories Come to Life’ saw students writing four stories on the theme following which the book was published in English and Hindi.
For the Portuguese and Goa collaboration project, however, she chose to work with Auxilium school, Caranzalem.
“We chose Auxilium School because most of the children from that school come from a poor background. Many don’t even have the basic life conditions at home like running water or light. We strongly believe that these kids have a lot of creativity but do not have an opportunity to express they creativeness,” says Nalini.
The Portuguese school Alberta Menéneres, was similarly chosen because there are a lot of migrant children in that school who sometimes don’t have similar opportunities like other schools.
The project saw Goan students working on one story while the Portuguese students wrote another. These were then interchanged so that the Goan children illustrated the Portuguese story and vice versa.
Aira Mirchandani helped the children in the writing of the story and she came away amazed at the talent and imagination of the kids.
“It was very interesting to see how the story developed and the enthusiasm of the students while piecing the story together since it was a collaborative story. At times they would be bursting with ideas on what should be happening next; for example, in the story Um a Aventura Subaquática which means ‘The Underwater Adventure’, the students though of Jack filming the cleaning up of the river which was then uploaded on YouTube and got a million hits!” says Mirchandani.
She adds that they also discovered some children who were exceptionally gifted in drawing, a sentiment supported by illustrator Danica Da Silva Pereira, who helped guide the children to illustrate.
Talking about the process, Danica elaborates that she first began by explaining the story to them. She then proceeded to draw a rough storyboard of the book, composing of all the pages. These pages were then accordingly distributed based on which kids were interested in sketching on that particular theme.
“There was one girl that was really good at characters and so we let her draw the main character Amália for all the spreads in different positions. One boy liked drawing the ships and so he focused on the ships . A few others liked working on the backgrounds,” she says.
Once the rough sketches were done, these were then finalised and they got together to work on the final spreads. These were then scanned and put together.
To help them illustrate, the Goan kids were also taken to Fundacao Oriente where a permanent exhibit of Antonio Xavier Trinidade’s paintings are on display.
“Nalini created quizes for them about the paintings and some games and then I explained the different properties of an artwork like colour scheme, what colours depict what, depth and contrast etc,” says Danica. Apart from the book, the children also worked on a stop box animation around the story.
In fact stop box animation is a common medium of instruction used at Communicare Trust which has developed a project called Magic Box where they teach waste management through stop-motion videos.
The final book, which took six months to create and is titled Histórias Daqui e Dali – Stories from Here and Beyond will have a soft launch on March 20 at Fundação Oriente in the presence of the delegate of Fundação Oriente, the publisher from Portugal and the Consul General of Portugal in Goa, Dr. Francisco de Azevedo, amongst other guests.
This will be followed by another launch on March 24 at Auxilium School with all the 220 children who participated in the project. The Portuguese launch will be held on May 14 in the presence of the Embassador of India in Portugal – K. Nandini Singla as well as a representative of UNESCO.
One of the students from Auxilium will be present at the launch as well. The team is also planning on coming out withan e-version of the book.
