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"There's only beauty if there is an interlocutor. The beauty of the lagoon is always someone" (Mãe, 2017, p.40). Valter Hugo Mãe expresses our desire in the making of this paper to share our experience of meeting refugee children, as part of an ongoing research project dedicated to exploring the conditions in which they live in Baixada Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the influences they bring with them from their birth countries. In the process of conducting this research, we were surprised by a group of children who belong to the Warao ethnic group, and who have been welcomed by the municipality of Nova Iguaçu, which is part of Baixada Fluminense. The Warao are indigenous peoples from the North of Venezuela and their name means "canoe," given their close relationship with water. A group of displaced Warao children and their families arrived in Nova Iguaçu after having "camped" out in the surroundings of Novo Rio bus station for a few weeks, followed by a sojourn in a public shelter, where the differences between them and the existing members of the institution led to conflict. Through a religious institution's initiative, the families then found shelter in a small farm in the city of Japeri. They stayed there for six months, but once again were threatened by the prospect of eviction, after which they were finally welcomed in the city of Nova Iguaçu. The families-five interconnected units-expressed the wish to remain together and a social service institution found them a closed school building, which was modified to accommodate the group. When the Covid pandemic struck, the research and study group GEPELID began following the daily routine of these children at the shelter school and at the Marambaia welfare center. In their meetings with the Warao, the researchers were struck by their references to the Buriti tree as the "tree of life," and the depths of its implications for their identity. In exploring this concept, the research group's experience of radical cultural difference revealed the extent to which research in the human sciences is always a meeting with the other, and the relation between researcher and subjects an occasion for dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an invitation to consider Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Question as a text that leads the reader to consider the possibilities offered by the post-Covid 19 resumption of daily school life with children as a political act. Based on a conversation that Freire had with Antônio Faundez in 1985, this text encourages researchers and educators to consider ways of returning to school life in ways that are welcoming, responsive and loving in the wake of the experience of "almost-exile" undergone during the covid-19 pandemic. It becomes necessary to think school life again from where the children truly are, restarting in full awareness of the adventures, the pains, the losses they have undergone, encouraging them to ask the questions that the pandemic experience has produced them, and to recognize the new forms of consciousness it has inaugurated. This paper explores the implications of the ideas found in the Freire-Faundez dialogue for this moment of reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]