A visit to Boca by Valeria at Amazon Primitive characters
With the expansion of the hydraulic steering Princess Royal offers boarding ramp on Deck 3, several wooden canoes just large enough for families and children to support the city and then the middle of the muddy Amazon, the water level is parallel to the side and scratching constantly turning red in the watch pocket monster, gawk, touch and "civilization," a lifestyle unknown to them and then something like a visitor spaceground. Although the passengers of the ship had diligently a taste of local life, which was expected, the first meeting indicated that the experience that only the mutual and if not for their benign curiosity has been interpreted as "invaders".
Located at the confluence of the Amazon and Rio Boca when Valeria by Valeria rivers, translated as "mouth of the river, Valeria," is representative of thousands of small, isolatedcommunities in the Amazon, where the basic, almost primitive "All riberinhos" or "river people" living in the river and rainforest in a dozen houses supported by wooden stilts, their 75 residents often a number of schools and church and part of a cassava farm and produce common area. This can be any measure, regarded as the "real Brazil".
Within a few steps from the Princess Royal at the beach in half water dolphin romance genre, my offer of thickness penetratedmarshy, molasses, with the bottom two-boat, preventing two rivers before reaching wooden ships stop supporting thatched cottages and cabins labeling of Boca Valeria "man bag" that could also be regarded as a "bag of (stopped) time." For the inhabitants of the river, it was "home." It 'was all I knew. We brought preconceived "ideas in house, which was all he knew. We have been similar or even remotely close. Maybe I shouldwould be some elements of commonality between the two during my visit.
As I downloaded the little tree, floating dock, although little more than a boat, I heard the words: "Welcome to the jungle!" The last and deposit only in English, on track for dirt that was brought to many residents and indigenous children, and quickly realized that the same desire to know and experience different lifestyles shared another. I, inProcess has functioned as a bridge between my world and theirs.
The dirt road that leads beyond the line of cabins of straw that could be considered as the city market and see what their local handicrafts, an 'economic activity is primarily targeted tourists in the village hall. The entrepreneurial process purchases, sales and profits were brand new.
The plaster "Escola Municipal São Francisco" or "Municipal School of San Francisco" with a yellowcruelty and blue outside and wood windows without glass, which is characterized by a Spartan furnishings of chairs and tables, a world and a card, in particular to have hung a banner in four examples of mathematical functions such as adicao "or "Continue" and "multiplicaco" or "propagation", among others. Single room school was clearly the core or heart of the community and channels of knowledge and pride of learning and a high degree drew was hereand proven by homework and drawings hung on the wall, the tension of human emotions from my home in the United States in this small village in the Amazon.
Chased and surrounded by hordes of children, which I did and moved from class notes, it seems that their interest and curiosity, but not my interest or business but the perception I brought them gifts and worn hanging in bag from my hand. We all likepotential tourist objects brought to them by the modern world unknown to the primitive jungle bites to enhance their curiosity, but that simply were curious and wanted to know if I brought something that had not but when I, as a small child in a Bag peeped a relative visiting, and hopefully asked, "Do you have something in there for me?
City only "road" standing before me, rock and dirt road, fueled by a handfulstop supporting structures such as wooden houses, each with a miniature boat as with my boat for fishing and short distances in brown water behind them. she's the city's idea of "a machine in Every Garage "even if" car has for their lives.
One of the local women invited me to his house. Locks and police stations have been replaced with confidence here, or maybe the order was reversedin my community. Greed and materialism can also significantly increased the comforts of life, but these "primitive" people have the virtues, and then maintain their relationship with God, whose performance is required for these luxury occur unless and until they were faced with temptation. Unfortunately, we, as tourists, they represent.
The house is visited by three tables of rough wood to make the stage and divided into three rooms stank of scarcity: a kitchen with little more than atable, living room with a chair and a bedroom only be identified as such by his murals and hammocks, but a piece of contemporary civilization, seemingly far out of place, attacked my eyes and ears and decadence that I was the image mental life here: a great, albeit very old black and white TV. Because the world I come from, could earn as a welcome sight, touch, because it served only to ruin. I went to learn and experiencewas new, "to see what we already knew, and my eyes quickly turned away.
Home in "street" has played a hammock between two poles where, of course, was the floor, and one of them an advantage pork, there would have been the family pet or dinner, while the steam from a stove crumbling support outside on the terrace behind it.
An upright, well supported the production of the municipal area of the city and cassava farmtwo questions of principle, food sources other than the river itself. The road then disappeared into the rainforest.
Amazon rain forest itself, the largest tropical rainforest in the world, bounded by the Guiana Highlands to the north, the plateau of central Brazil to the south, the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Andes to the west is the city 'garden' , and maintain discharge of the Amazon river and its tributaries that have four million square milesnine countries: Brazil, French Guyana, Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. The covers 40 percent of Brazil alone. Its existence is a result of a high temperature and stable humidity and precipitation.
Rainforest, which covers more than two thirds of the Amazon, is an extension of dry forests and savannah in the north and south and the mountain forest to the west, in the Andes. The dense vegetation, the formation of numerous obstacles to be near the level ofall but ten percent of the sunlight reaching the ground and extending upward from 150 feet and supports more plant life between these levels and the earth itself. The global flora, with an average of over 250 species of trees per hectare, usually rosewood, mahogany, wood, rubber and Brazil nuts.
Several million species of insects, birds and other life forms, some studies failed to register even alligators, anacondas, pythons, boas, manatees, freshwater dolphinsPiranhas, electric eels, catfish, and the turtle world's largest freshwater head yellow sideneck 150-pound whose only other habitats of Madagascar. domestic mammals including the jaguar, tapir, sloth, deer, and monkey.
Of the 16 million people, the basin of more than half live in rural settlements, which as Boca Valeria living along the river that can not offer food, water, soil for sowing and transport.
Well completionthe city's main artery that some grass is overgrown and has played a large structure on strike, I realized that my time and the chain of temporary culture suddenly broken like driving a car collided with a wall suddenly smoother when cleaning showed that the color of tea water known as "Amazon" in support of high growth city-lined balconies named Princess Royal. The break was more to my emotions than anything else, myPrimitive feelings of loneliness, innocence, simplicity and imprudence, which my soul to break with the ease of glass attached. This city could float in a few hours, take me away, away from both geographical and emotional simplicity, the latter somehow promotes spirituality, and the tone of my physical comfort and plenty, where all my desires and wants are met instantaneously. I'm feeling down and shame and overwhelmingdisappointed with myself.
A villager who lives with his boat, he invited me to his house, where I later met his wife. Large, deep, wooden staircase leads to a balcony just wide open spaces. "Inside" were only divided into two spaces: the kitchen and bedroom.
Communication with his wife in Spanish, which responded in Portuguese, I learned that the kitchen, good overall performance of this visit in other houses in the village center with a covered picnic tableclothtable, an assortment of hanging aluminum pots and pans and an oven old but still working, match-lit, it was the position of the small kitchen, with most of the finished product off from the heat inside the structure Wood, despite all the windows were paneless.
The bedroom outsize, received the fresh cross ventilation throughout the night by the river because of its opposite window and door (nota glass panel or a panel folding real) has read almost like a home and a hammock. However, what most clearly occurred and somehow hit out of place in this primitive village where the reading seems to belong to the list of necessary survival of fish, plants, books and food has been shelved.
"Wow, look at all the books!" I cried after the village in Spanish. "Why do you do?" , I wantedfamily.
"I was the teacher of the village," he said in Portuguese, which refers to the school house in the street and it was good that somehow a person of such importance, he has done, has served an important role model, it would most homes. This man, the city manager and a link to knowledge.
We spend a lot of time to review the books of lessons, each at different levels and printed in Portuguese, and divided into subjects such as reading,mathematics and language. It 's also a chapter in the Spanish vocabulary.
During the course later, the rock and dirt from deep red to give the finger was a little 'surprising to discover that the ship would be visible from this point of view has disappeared, not because I was ignorant or mentally wiped out in my thoughts in my search for my image of the primitive reality of late, but as an element of flash floods have made Amazonvisibility, and all things in it, not existence, and the land was converted into a series of lakes of different sizes.
Remove the village in the notice, I always thought the child to adult, child, or belongs to villagers or else in the world, the future of the heap, but the whole experience, from the hands of gifts and money looking for me and all the other passengers that the shiprepresents many years of regular visits of Santa Claus.
As people are residents of the river had the same basic qualities or characteristics as the rest of us: identity, personality, talents, hopes, contributions to the world, hopes, dreams, and finalization of footprints in the mud when they were at the end of their lifestyles. The village has a state of raw, primitive, wooden structures called houses where families Bound smallest market, municipalfood for food from the river and land, a home school to learn, exchange ideas, promote and grow a church to join and worship a higher power, and of role models for older people to learn and lead pastor, inspire and follow, fully shows that, despite geographic differentiation and differences in lifestyle that we all come from the same source.
But I am happy to concentrate on the extended hands and can not remember wondering ifwe have a way or another as visiting tourists who are free and have come to expect free, begin to corrupt and ruining their primitive, pristine, innocent, non-materialistic pocket of time. But I knew that we had somehow …
I myself have given the city a great teacher peak one week, if not monthly salary Boca da Valeria, who is well justified a salary, but as an investment in education.
Somewhere in the sequence after conversionmodernity and materialism was irrevocable, I should look for a new Boca Valeria. The journey, I learn and enrich it. The trip there, I would again be partly responsible for the inevitable changes.
As the Princess Royal slowly withdrawn its hydraulic steering offers boarding ramp on Deck 3, which dominates the city and "All riberinhos" gradually dropped to the large steel door closed with a heavy decisionBang!
I hope I never lose what you taught me today, I thought …