Welcome to the Jungle?

Food in Brazil is amazing. Maybe in a few months time I will be tired of rice, beans, chicken, beef, FISH, farinha, and all the wonderful fruit. But I doubt it. Even the soft drinks are better: they use actual sugar, no high fructose corn syrup here. Perhaps that’s why I feel a little slimmer…Tonight, before I go back to mangrove forests and fish, Diego, Judah, and I went out to get some food after I returned from the office and got a shower (its common to shower 2-3 times a day here, at least). We went to a small restaurant where Judah and I each got a misto, and Diego wanted me to try a glass of cupuaçu juice. Um misto, apparently, is basically a kabab: beef, chicken, and pork sausage. But amazing. As for the cupuaçu, we don’t have it in the US, at all. It’s one of the many fruits I’m sure I’ll try that we don’t even have words for in English. Pretty cool. If I am correct, I think that cupuaçu is the cashew nut fruit, but I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it grows on you. Bitter, but its good. Afterwards, we went to get sorvete, ice cream. So, I got acai. Of course. It’s so good. Or, as everyone says in Pará, égua!

It’s now been about one full day with my host fam. It was fun talking to everyone today at class about their families and the awkward initial interaction. Everyone agreed though, once we all just got in the car, it seemed really normal. And good. Today I got to experience the 10 minute walk from the apartment building to the SIT office. On the way there we pass by the Bosque (apparently there is a manatee inside), and Léa was telling me that people often go running inside of it, or around it, or the like, so maybe some mornings I will look into that. I need to get a cheap pair of running shoes though. Speaking of shoes…I think my boots are totaled. I never want to wear them again, they still smell. Which brings me back to the mangroves and Orientation.

So. After the perilous drop off exercise we took the vans back out to go to an NGO called Instituto Peabiru; however, they are a little bit more than just an NGO, what is called here in Brasil a OSCIP (btw, Urso, the asthmatic family dog, says hi, super cute). An OSCIP is basically an NGO that has been recognized by the government as a civil society organization, and thus the government supports the NGO with public funds. In this case, Peabiru is mostly funded by BR Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company. Now, that sounds worse than it actually is. The government checks in with Peabiru once in a while to make sure things are going ok, but for the most part leaves them alone. After all, the government is doing it primarily for face value. Nothing looks better nowadays than to be supporting community based environmental movements. Anyway, Peabiru has 5 main programs in Curuca, Pará: environmental education and environmental management certification, tying community needs into the sustainability agenda, what Gustavo called an “ethnographic museum” project (a local history of the mangrove communities), an NGO clinic to help facilitate and guide local organizations, and a biosocial indicator program. The whole thing was pretty amazing. The next day, we got a chance to then go out to the mangrove forests by boat and visit one of the small fishing groups that work on the beach where the Espadarte port will be built.

The boat ride took about an hour and a half, but I really enjoyed it. Took a lot of pictures. However, I did not bring my camera into the magroves, seeing as we were going to be walking in THICK mud and up to our waists (and sometimes shoulders) in mangrove salt water. Not good for camera. My friend’s camera got a little wet, and now isn’t working. Sucks. But being in the mangrove was beautiful We got to learn a little bit about the ecology of this unique ecosystem. The mangrove tree species need to compensate for both the high salt content of the water and the low oxygen level of the soils, and thus is why the roots are the giant umbrella shape over the water that you can see in the picture. The roots not only filter out the salt, but also absorb the oxygen from the air. Although the whole system leads to less biodiversity as a whole, the quality of life for the few species that exist in the mangroves is plentiful. Small crabs and shrimp thrive there, and we saw a few small crabs (2-3 mm) crawling around on people’s shoulders. Likewise, the birds of the region, like flamingoes, develop their reddish tint from the amount of shrimp they eat. They are very red, and I mean crayon box/coloring marker red, so you can see that there’s no lack of shrimp or crab there. After listening to Gustavo and some members of Peabiru talk to us, we started to hike to the beach. Yes, the beach. It, too, was really great. After jumping in the water for a good hour or so, we ate sandwiches and kept walking until we got to the fishing hut.

Here, we listened to this fisherman talk to us about the port, about his life, about how the amount of fish has declines steadily over the 11 years he’s been fishing here, all while we snacked on the fish he cooked for us in the hut he built himself out of mangrove trees. Muito bom. The fish was probably the best fish I’ve ever had. Everyone agreed. Someone even asked him how he cooked it, and of course all he had to do was clean the fish and throw on some lemon and salt over the grill. It was really cool though. We then walked to where the boat picked us up and sailed back to town, where the vans were waiting for us, and we drove back to the sitio. The rest of orientation, although informative, wasn’t all that exciting. I did a lot of soduko, walked along the dirt roads talking with people, played some gin-rummy, and enjoyed my mosquito net.

Now, here I am, in Belém, enjoying the city. Below is a shot from my window view at sunrise. Pretty nice. It’s exciting that classes are starting to pick up this week. Portuguese class is going well, but just chatting with Diego and Judah is much more helpful than any class will be, I think. Especially because they both take English, so they can understand how boring learning verb tenses can be. On Monday, Gustavo, our AD, wants to meet with all of us to just have a quick 20 min chat about our ISP. The ISP, for those who don’t know, is a 28 day research project. We can pick any topic we like, as long as we can somehow tie it into of course the overall theme of Amazonian Resource Management and Human Ecology. Eventually we will all find and select a project advisor who can help to guide us and help us with research methods, and so forth. Although I don’t know where I want to do mine, I know I want to do something linking together ecosystem health and community public health services, and how people join/use social movements, community based development, or appropriate technology means/microfinance to combat the connected degradation of their community’s health and that of their ecosystem. For sure, that means my ISP will somehow involve aquatic ecology and river ecosystem health, perhaps combined with waterborne diseases, or the malnutrition that can come with non-sustainable means of agriculture, or something similar.

I have the weekend off, so I look forward to being able to sleep in a little bit tomorrow. I’m going to try to buy a cheap cell phone at the mall as well, and maybe try and meet up with some friends from SIT whose host families also live nearby and go visit the Bosque Zoo/Botanical Garden. Once we get our emails/internet/cell phones together we can actually all get together and relax, go to clubs, meet up to work on projects, that sort of thing. Today after our last lecture a bunch of us went over to the little bar across the street and were able split a beer or two to unwind a little.

Tchau! Saudades