Foi na ora que eu chegei...

So. I was thinking how to start this little report, this first piece of the puzzle of the travel around Brazil. To be honest the ideas that I have are unwritable now, are really diffuse, but at the same time that's the magic part, to understand what I think writing it down. So, I'm learning how to let go my feelings and thoughts in English, its not easy when my mind is learning Portuguese and my blood runs in Spanish. So may be the result will be funky, but that's me today, a funky Mexican traveling around Brazil.


The Travel started last Wednesday, from IICD to Detroit airport to Miami to Manaus, the biggest city in the state of Amazonas in Brazil. When I think in the amazonas I think in animals and plants, but now I also think in big factories, in pollution, in poverty, expensive transportation, crazy traffic, and rivers, amazing rivers. During the two days in Manaus we visit the permaculture project of the amazonas and a museum that show the way that the with slaves where living inside the amazonas.

The visit to the permaculture project was really amazing, Im still impress about it and Im really willing to know more about it, because the system that we saw there is ... like a dream, a really autosustentable environment. They have 35 pigs that produce the methanol gas for the kitchen, they have a completely functional dry bathroom where all the human feces work as compost for the big gardens and the amazing fruit trees. They have chickens, hens, and ducks that are part of the system giving eggs and organic material for the pesticides and the compost. The water system is unreal, all the waters comes from the roofs and is filtrated by different thanks with different natural filters. Everything there is cyclic and reusable. The next team needs to go there and... DRH should have a place like this. The pictures will come later because know I'm using an other computer just to take all of this out of me.

The visit to the Museum was interesting because we met a lot of local people that is passionate about the indigenous of amazonas. We had a little adventure to get there because we needed to take a little boat, and of course that all of them wanted us to pay a lot of money to takes us to every place but the one that we wanted to go. At the end we found a public transport to go there, we lost a lot of time but was worth it. The Museum is really small and the idea is to recreate the old Ceringeiros (may be that's not the right spelling). The men from the Northeast of Brazil use to go there to work in the jungle taking the rubber (borracha in Portuguese) of the trees. It was a slavery work, a really crazy system. The cool part of the museum was the lady that works there, she took us to the places and did a representation of everything, she took out the rubber from a tree and show us how they make the product. We talk with this lady and at the end she was really interesting about our project so she didn-t ask for money, she said from volunteer to volunteer.

Now... the magic part of this is to understand that the investigation period is every day in every little second of the life. To be honest I cannot place the deep thougths that I have about people, judgement, talking, identity, nationality, food, money, racism, fear... but everything is around that, around the point of who we are and who we want to be... we travel to know something, to meet somebody, so we cannot wait to that moment, we have to go for it, and be really awake to not miss it... is so easy to get lost. I'm sure that I will not be the same after this, after every single step in my life. After this lady in Fortaleza who is in love of her volunteer daughter... who kiss me like kissing her.

People is people and we will never be perfect, so why to ask the others to be who we want them to be? why to talk about somebody as if we knew him or her? nobody is their nationality or their color or their social class... nobody is their language or their look... nobody is everybody.

Lola Diaz Barriga
11 April 2010