|
Brazil's Ministry of Education is calling up trained Brazilian teachers with teaching experience to sign up for the Training Program for Teachers and Portuguese Language Instructors in East Timor.
Fifty teachers will be chosen. They will each receive a monthly subsidy of US$ 1.1 thousand. Their contracts will last 12 months renewable for another 12.
The teachers chosen for the program will conduct research and train teachers in East Timor, in addition to giving Portuguese classes in local schools.
The Coordination for the Training of University Personnel (Capes), the foundation in charge of the Ministry of Education's program, is accepting candidates from various academic fields - mathematics, Portuguese, physics, chemistry, biology, and administration.
According to Maria Luiza Carvalho, an analyst in the Capes general coordination office for international cooperation, one of the aims of the program is to expand cooperation in the educational area between Brazil and East Timor, as well as to train teachers and administer Portuguese classes in that country.
Carvalho explained that this is a priority program of the Brazilian government, since Brazil has decided to provide support to Portuguese-speaking countries.
"At present, Brazil has as one of its goals to back Portuguese-speaking countries, and Timor chose Portuguese as the country's official language. This program will fortify and spread the mother tongue."
Carvalho also explained that East Timor is having considerable difficulties in expanding the country's school system, due to the lack of resources and teachers trained to do their job.
For this reason, she contends, the recipients of the grants will work at various levels of the educational system - in the university, in the Institute of Adult Education, and in the interior of the country - to carry out these training activities.
Besides the monthly grant, the teachers who are selected will receive health insurance, a moving subsidy, plane fare, and training. More information about the program is available at the site www.capes.gov.br.
East Timor is currently considered one of the world's poorest countries. There are over 30 dialects. The country's official languages are Portuguese and Tetum, which is spoken by a large part of the population.
According to Leonardo Sakamoto, a researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP), Portuguese became a symbol of the independence struggle, because it was the language used by the resistance movement and was proscribed by the Indonesian government.
Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.