On Thursday I said goodbye to
Buenos Aires, and boarded a plane bound for
São Paulo, Brazil. Sitting in the airport, I realized I was suffering an anxiety I hadn't felt since I first arrived in Bolivia. Then I realized that my nervousness stemmed from the unconscious knowledge that I was leaving a lot of my comfort zones: speaking in Portuguese, for example, is outside of my comfort zone - pretty much my knowledge of the language is that some of my Spanish words will be the same in Portuguese, but that Brazilian Spanish is impossible to understand. Likewise, boats - which will be a large part of my life in the Amazon - are also out of my comfort zone (I've always had an
inexplicable uneasiness around boats. I guess because my balance isn't very good and I've never liked the water much). And then there's the jungle, the beach, or any other hot, sunny environment (read: Brazil), which are all outside my comfort zone. My ancestors grew up in caves in Ireland, and I grew up in the pseudo-sun of Alaska. I am white. I burn easy. I don't easily
tolerate heat. But, I was buoyed by the idea that the Spanish countries I visited were out of my comfort zone when I first arrived in South America, and now they are firmly within comfortable boundaries. Besides, don't we travel to experience new things?
On arrival in my new host country, several things became apparent, the most obvious of which was that my Spanish
wasn’t going to take me nearly as far as I had hoped. A lot of the words are the same, and on the printed page the languages look tantalizingly similar. But there are a lot of words that are subtly different, just enough to make communication difficult to impossible, and of course there are many words that are altogether different. And then there’s the cadence: the way Brazilians speak Portuguese is so radically different than the way any of the countries I’
ve been to speak Spanish, that even when they use words I know I can miss them. The accents are placed totally differently, and oftentimes the Brazilians stretch out their syllables to the point where it sounds as if they’re adding new ones. In all, it sounds to me as if they’re speech has been recorded in some strange language and then played backwards, the stress is so far off from Spanish or English. And the sound is a lot softer than Spanish, and even softer when compared to English. In many cases, sounds from Spanish that are hard become soft in Portuguese; for example
once (
ohn-say, or eleven) becomes
onze, and
frente (front) becomes
frenshe (I don’t know if that’s spelled right, but that’s how it sounds).
Ll seems to be pronounced “sh,” like in Argentine Spanish, so I try and use my Argentine-style Spanish, which helps some but not much. Mostly, I just have no idea what’s going on, like when I got to the airport in
Sao Paulo there were several important looking signs, signs that looked as if the officials really wanted or expected me to know what was being said, but they were only in Portuguese and I really
didn’t have a clue as to their contents (something ominous?). Pictures would have helped, but I guess the notices
weren’t meant for the illiterate. I remember having a similar problem when I first arrived in South America, but the Spanish signs have a lot more cognates and so are a lot easier to muddle through.
And when you do find a Brazilian who speaks Spanish, which happens occasionally but so far not nearly as much as I’d been told to expect, oftentimes they can understand me marginally and I can’t understand them at all – their accent is just too thick (in fact, I think Portuguese lends a strangely funny accent to other languages; if you want a cheap laugh, call up the TAM airline 800 number and listen to the recorded instructions in English – it sounds exactly like the liner from the
Beastie Boys
Paul's Boutique album).
Speaking of TAM airlines, who will be my carrier through the majority if not all of my Brazilian air travel (and there will be a lot – Brazil is so big that buses become expensive and impractical - or impossible, in the case of travel to
Manaus), I’
ve had two flights with them so far and I’m already a little nervous – they were both late. On my flight to
Manaus they boarded us and then we sat on the plane for 45 minutes. To be fair, all flights were delayed out of
Sao Paulo, and I suspect the airport employees had more to do with delays than TAM (there is
understaffing due to labor unrest), but regardless my 5 hour wait in the
Sao Paulo airport became a 7 hour one (not an exciting airport, even by airport standards. But it did have
internet access for US$12 an hour, which was interesting inasmuch as it’s extortionately high price). So I got a good deal of people-watching done. After I got past the 50-odd year old woman who was talking loudly into her cell and sounded exactly like Tom Waits, and the screaming baby (both of witch seemed oddly appropriate for an airport full of delayed flights), I noticed several trends: first, that there is an obvious African influence in the bloodlines here, much more so than any of the other countries I have visited (certainly more-so than ultra-white Argentina and Chile – at the Cuban bar in Valparaiso, Jason joked that the expats running the place were the only black people I would see in the country). Second, that regardless of age or size, Brazilian women wear skin-tight shirts and short-shorts. Third, that Brazilian men would be considered shabby, pauper-like dressers in
Buenos Aires, and maybe in much of the Spanish-speaking world – shorts, t-shirts, and old tennis shoes are all much more commonplace here. I saw nuns in a greater concentration than I have up to now, and even some monks – one with a Ferrari backpack, tags still attached, which I thought would have made a cute picture if I had had the prescience to dig out my camera and play tourist.
Eventually, I got on the plane, and (eventually) the plane took off. I had a seat next to a Brazilian woman of about 30, who immediately started flirting with me; later she began squeezing my leg, and nuzzling my face. This continued for a bit, but once we finally got off the ground she said very matter of
factly “OK, I’m going to sleep.” It was like some switch had been flipped. This process was repeated, only more intensely and over a longer period of time, on my boat ride up the Amazon, so I think maybe that’s just how the people are here – Brazil has been called the “sexiest country on Earth,” and my guidebook says that Brazilians “know how to flirt, flaunt, and have fun.” It was fun, but also a little confusing. But I guess flirting can be an entertaining way to kill time on a plane or a 3 day boat ride. I suppose it's CONCEIVABLE that there's a country that is more playfully sexual than the US.
Arriving in
Manaus, there was a small contingent from the Amazon Association (the
NGO I’m filming about here - more below) waiting for me, with a sign inscribed with my name. It’s not the first time I’
ve had this happen, but it’s still kind of a cool feeling. Like maybe other people will think I’m on my way to the UN on official business or something. It was a cooler feeling than when I got dropped at the hotel where I was to spend the night and meet my contact in the morning; think
afore-mentioned language problems combined with a hotel that came off as being primarily for by-the-hour guests: the first room they gave me a key for had not been cleaned, and it looked like people had gotten pretty wild in the beds. The second room was just a small cell with a bed and a fan; both rooms had prominent signs reading “protect yourself from AIDS and STD’s – use protection.”
Eww. Maybe the Brazilians are just really, really aggressive about the AIDS problem? At least the sheets were clean, unlike the pubic hair-filled sheets that seemed to be the norm in the budget hotels of Peru and Bolivia.
In the morning, I met Chris Clark, head of the Brazilian chapter of the Amazon Association (which is the one that does the work on the ground; the other branches do fund raising for Chris). The Amazon Association is a partnership between Chris and the local residents; they paired in 1992 to form the only privately owned nature reserve in Brazil (Chris is also a permanent resident here). The
Xixuau-
Xiparina nature reserve is situated to the East of the Brazilian state of
Roraima, deep in the north-east of the country. The reserve was started basically as an intentional community, Amazon style: the people here came together to form a reserve with the purpose of keeping the forest as intact as possible, and there is no private property - although the formation of the reserve brought in funds to finance projects such as a school and a health clinic. But everything is owned communally, which means the community as a whole makes decisions about who can join, who has to leave, and how the land is used. This seems to make a profound difference, since communities around the
Xixuau have, with the help of
Xixuaua residents, experimented with community-owned projects to better their villages - but these have been thwarted by individual ambition and corruption within those communities. Also, from what Chris tells me, the surrounding communities fish the crap out of the rivers and cut down trees as fast as they can (although having international donors and a steady stream of tourists probably helps the people of
Xixuau avoid some of the economic realities faced by their neighbors).
In 2002, the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) came to the
Xixuau to install a photovoltaic power source in the reserve, along with a solar powered satellite
internet connection (which I'm using now), and that is what brought me here. Remember the
WWU Green Tag program that I criticized earlier (sometime in December, I believe)? I think a good potential alternative for the program
WWU uses now would be to spend that money on global renewable energy projects, like the one SELF implemented in the
Xixuau. The projects replace dirty diesel generators with clean solar power, while at the same time helping some of the poorest people on the planet by removing the need to purchase diesel fuel - which can be a significant expense for people with little in the way of cash income. So, to learn about the project first hand, and to produce a short video spot on the solar project and the reserve for folks back home, I endured the 28 hour boat ride from
Manaus into the heart of the Amazon. But it's hot as hell, and the black flies are eating me alive, so the rest will have to come later. I'm going
pirhana fishing (a main source of protein here).
