A Sama Book Launch on Kindle – Mbo' Agasi
For years now we have been creating children’s books for Sama that incorporate Sama culture and often Sama folktales into a children’s book format. Many of these books can be found on our subdomain Library Sinama. Every once in awhile we come across a really great story that we want to have a broader reach. For the first time we will attempt to publish a Sama story on Amazon Kindle as an E-book. The story is, Agasi Kidnaps Weensy. This is a story of Agasi, an ogre or giant-like creature that is talked about quite a bit in Sama & Tausug stories. The couple Teensy and Weensy find themselves in quite the predicament when Agasi runs off with Weensy. This 22 page picture book has been professionally illustrated by Vanjoy Sanchez in collaboration with Elmo Anggilan a Sama from Maasim, Sarangani. It is based off a story that was collected in the 1960s on Siasi island in the community of Musuꞌ Daggotan.
Kemp Pallesen the linguist who surveyed and did much of the classification work concerning the various Sama languages elicited the story and shared it with us for this work. We think you should buy this book. It is a funny story that should make your children laugh while at the same time also exposing them to other cultures in the world and their storytelling. At the same time, buying this book on Kindle will help us in our work of creating more culturally relevant stories for the Sama in the Sinama language. Proceeds from this book will go to the illustration of more Sama stories and these stories will be used in Sama communities and Sama classrooms to give grade school children more reading material in their mother tongue. Here is the link on Amazon to pre-order the book.
Agasi Kidnaps Weensy on Amazon Kindle
Giving this Filipino children’s book a 5-star rating will help give us exposure on Amazon and sharing this post to your Facebook and Twitter friends can go a long way too. We hope you enjoy this Sama story.
