Let me tell you how we got started….
20 years ago, I got to know and collaborated with Dona Eva’s food kitchen in the shanty town number 20 in Lugano. They provide meals on a daily basis to over 100 families. Speaking with Sandra, Dona Eva’s daughter who manages the food kitchen, she mentioned that she was extremely worried that the children in the neighborhood were hardly doing anything for school. As they don’t have computers or Ipads, only WhatsApp on their phones, there is very little they can do.
The Food Kitchen operates a Story Workshop that the mother of a friend started. Since 2001, Angela has been reading to children between 2 and 10 years old every Wednesday for 2 hours. Sandra told me, “20 years later, I can only tell you that of all the workshops that we give, the only one that I can measure the results from is the Story Workshop. Of the 100 families, the children that consistently finish school and become professionals or have stable jobs are those that passed through the Workshop.
So we came up with the idea to begin to read and tell stories. We recorded them on an audio from WhatsApp and we forwarded them to parents and children. Sandra is extremely adept at obtaining commitment from the community in which she works, so that the children pay attention, and are active. She sends the recorded readings to the community and asks that the children return to her a drawing of the part of the story that they most enjoyed. We started a pilot project with the story “The Mysterious Watering Can” by Maria Elena Walsh read by our friend Leila.
Immediately we knew that we had to find a way to incorporate all of the people who wanted to tell stories. We contacted Marga, our “Guinea Pig” to try out a diverse set technologies and logistics, and we received our first recorded poem, also by Maria Elena Walsh, “The Sick Donkey”. Afterwards came a story, but not really for children, and so we eventually created a special category for more sophisticated stories, Stories for Thought.
For now, the project has two main pillars (perhaps more in the future): Bringing the gift of a story, and stimulating the pleasure of telling a story. That’s how we got started, and.. away we go!
Carla Gimbatti
Who are we at TE CUENTO?
We are an impatient and dreamong threesome : Sandra Juarez, Luz Muniello, Carla Gimbatti and almost all of our family members! And Friends.
What have we achieved?
That Simon sent us an audio saying “I like a Band”
That Antonella asked us by WhatsApp “Do you like my watering can?”
That children are able to listen attentively and develop the sill to listen without needing images to stimulate them.
That children produce artwork and responses knowing that someone is waiting for their drawing. This sparked the idea to set up an Instagram account called TE CUENTO que ME GUSTO. (I liked it).
That children are having fun without watching TV or playing videogames.
That one of the mothers of the children, who gets up at 5 every morning for 2 jobs, has a daughter that asks her to share a story, and can see her happy when she hears one.
That we have built a network of friendly volunteers: women, men, children, writers, nursery school teachers, grandmothers, friends of Argentina living abroad, all recording stories and sharing them with friends and family.
That grandparents are both recording stories and asking for stories, leading to all sorts of new and unexpected situations.
A project that has just started and doesn’t stop growing and incorporating people who just want to help, be connected and share.
As my son Milo would say, Total Gracias!