Minha primeira semana - My first week in the Amazon

June 6-13
Arriving to the Amazonian metropolis of Manaus by airplane , one cant help but feel like a fraud. A city of 2 million dropped smack dab in the middle of a 7 million square kilometer tropical jungle, the only true and genuine way of arriving to Manaus is by river. There are no roads connecting the city to the rest of Brasil, thus everyone and everything arrived by boat…until the airport was built.
As I gazed down from above the clouds, I was immediately confronted with the sheer magnitude of the Amazon river. From the sky its massive reach is truly humbling, the river swirls and weaves its way through lush jungle as far as the eye can see. It is hard to fathom the enormity of this river until you hover above it, feeling like a fish in the sea… or in this case, a fish in a river. In the horizon signs of civilization begin to rear its ugly face as buildings, bridges and a river port come into view. Held speechless by the vast expanse of the dense jungle I couldn’t help but think; all our skyscrapers, telephone towers and highways are nothing. We are but a mere inconvenience to mothernature, a bunch of pesky renters who party all night and certainly will not be getting our security deposit back. We seem to be over staying our welcome and Nature can’t wait to chew us up and spit us out. The Amazon river has an average water discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined, and that’s not including the massive Amazonian rivers Rio Negro and Madeira. I flew over one part of the river that seemed more like an ocean, no shores in site.
I arrive to Manaus and immediately felt at home. Manaus is steeped in history. The colonial powers of Portugal and Spain quickly killed off or enslave the many local indigenous communities along the river, which were soon turned into bioextractive operations due initially to the emergence of the rubber (borracha) trade. Seringais, or rubber production sites, became the norm and regatões, river merchants, made sure that communities received just enough food and supplies to remain endebted and therefore forced to keep working.
My work here with an environmental ngo (Fundação Vitoria Amazonica) will take me West along Rio Negro toward Rio Unini. After a 10hour ferry ride upriver I will be living in a city/community of about 15000 called Novo Airão helping develop the ngo’s youth outreach efforts (called AJURI). There exist many negative connotations associated with ngos and many regional conflicts between indigenous communities, governments, and ngos. During the Brasilian dictatorship the government decided to draw lines on a map defining national reserves, never considering that thousands of people lived within the regions. Now communities are being forced to adapt to new laws which limit the amount of bio resources they can use, forcing many to abandon their communities for unknown and difficult lives in the city of Manaus. Among many other initiatives, FVA works closely with the indigenous communities to help them manage resources, produce sustainable products (Brasil Nuts, açai, mandioca, arts n crafts, etc), and teach a younger generation to continue growing while coping with increasing government environmental regulations. One of the main programs we’ll be focusing on is a Brasil Nut factory FVA has built deep in the jungle (Unini) which should help a community remain where they are without surrendering to urbanization and fleeing their land to find work in the city.
Adventures lie around every river bend, up every tree and at the pit of every new and exotic fruit. . Até logo. Valeu!!



June 16th
I board an old 3 story barge-like boat to make the overnight treck to Novo Airao, the Amazonian community where I will be living and working. I get there early to find a good spot to hang my hammock. A few hours later the entire boat will become a web of hammocks stuffed with slumbering bodies, as the boat chugs at a snail’s pace upriver. It is a full moon tonight and the night sky it lit up by its shimmering glow. I am to meet my coordinator, Lenne, at 7am the next morning at the Novo Airao port. I doze in and out of sleep, comforted by the purr of the engine and the sound of its wake crashing on shore. I wake momentarily, forgetting for an instant where I am, and only snap back to reality when I try to move and realize I am surrounded by people wrapped in hammock-cocoons.
Its 5am and Im at the hul of the boat watching the sun peak through the clouds. Novo Airão is a sleepy Amazonian city, all of its movement and traffic is concentrated on an L-shaped main drag, or `Avenida Principal.´ Lenne, my coordinator, has her husband pick me up on his motorcycle and I am wisked away to meet my new home, the FVA office and research center. The city is surprisingly developed, a few hostals, mom-n-pop restaurants and juice stands speckle la Avenida Principal. There is a huge plaza central which has sand soccer fields, volleyball courts, and for some reason a huge replica of a brontosorous dinasour. Apparently, a while back they found some fossils around here and some politician thought it would be a good idea to ship in this giant, ugly, out of place replica. Ive asked around, no one really knows what the heck its doing there. I am given the keys to my new home, a sizeable wooden house, which doubles as an office. I am told a woman is staying here for the week caring for 2 infants. In a horrible explosion, a familys house burned to the ground, with members being badly burned. The sister is here caring for the infant while the family relocates to Manaus to seek treatment and aid. FVA, like many NGOs operating in underdeveloped regions, inevitably becomes a human aid service when called upon. NGOs often do this because they are the only ones with cars, boats, health supplies and spare housing. During hurricane Felix in 2005, OYE in Honduras became a search and rescue operation as our Mitsubishi truck was called upon to deliver supplies to churches and rescue families trapped up on the mountain side.
My first day was a dose of Amazonian ngo reality. Coming from the Columbia grad school world where every single minute of everyday MUST be taken advantage of, life here moves at a drastically different pace. To my delight, I was given a bike for transport, great for my recovering knee injury and essential to my mental sanity. I spent the entire afternoon chatting or ´batendo um papo´ with Erivaldo, director of AANA (Asociação dos Artesinatos do Novo Airão). AANA supports all the local indigenous communities by selling their art work, bags, hats, rugs, lamps and more made from reeds and seeds.
Erivaldo is my age and we got along famously. While we traded stories and talked about how we can begin growing the program Im here for (AJURI) I basically met every other NGO director in the community. Since his warehouse/art and craft headquarters is located on the Avenida Principal, everyone stops by to say hi, ´dar um oizinho.´ There is much to be done, fortunantely I am surrounded here by ppl with big hearts and a passion for what they do. More good things to come.