We are now on the banks of the Tabajos River where the natural beauty is as enchanting as the legend of its pink-river dolphins.
We arrived in Santarém at the end of August and we met up with a special guest helper from Sao Paulo: the 71-year-old Grete. Who besides being an excellent educator is someone whose presence alone teaches a life lesson. During the
15 days she was with us, we visited two riverside communities: Pajuçara on the Tabajos River and Urucureá on the Arapiuns.
Pajuçara is only 20 minutes from Santarém, but it feels like an isolated community in the middle of the jungle: straw houses, wood burning stoves, tarantulas in every corner and a river that doubles as the community bath. There, we met Iracema-a teacher that gave us a lesson in dedication and love for the art of education.
She single handedly fought with the local government for her community’s right to have an elementary school, a school that is a wall-less pavilion with two chalkboards, a concrete floor, and a grass hut in the back where the children eat their state-supplied snacks. With grades 1-5 all under the same roof, and sun that invades desk space, Iracema still finds spark to teach her students circle songs from her childhood. She was the first to sing us “Farinhada”- a regional circle game that invites the participants that know how to sift manioc flour to present their abilities.
To get to Urucureá, we caught a little diesel-powered fishing boat. The captain, Sr. Batista, confessed to us that his love for boats began as a child with the construction of miriti replicas.
Once in Urucureá, it was under cashew and rubber trees that games and stories really got animated. We met a percussion ensemble in the woods behind one house. No one was over 13 in the band and they played drums made
of rusty cans with latex stretched over them. Carved guava twigs served as
their drum sticks.
We found no store-bought or factory-made toys here; everything is arduously hand-crafted. One morning, we accompanied 15-year-old Rodrigo on his mission to make a wooden top. We followed him on a narrow path through dark and damp woods in search of Vassoura wood. As soon as he saw a tree, he veered off the path to begin chopping off one of its largest branches with his machete. My environmental conscious reasoned that it would have been possible to cut a much smaller piece to make a top, but Rodrigo’s top-making reason overrides that of any ecologist. “A fatter trunk makes a stronger top,” he informed. So just like that, we were dragging practically half a tree out of the intricacies of the forest. (Whatever he didn’t use would soon be firewood anyway.) Back at his house, machete in hand, and trunk on the ground, it took less than 20 minutes for the first top to be ready. Of course, with the first top ready, all the younger kids were asking Rodrigo to make them one too.
Around here, games just happen: someone learns from someone else, that person teaches us, and we teach whoever wants to play.
September 28, 2001
At the moment, we’re in Boa Vista, Roraima, waiting for transport to a Wapixana Indian community.
Taking advantage of this period that we’re not encircled by children, or our own cameras and camcorders, I’ve resolved to write about some interviews
I’ve done with riverside inhabitants concerning this pseudo-war that is on everyone’s mind.
Ever since hearing the news of the airplane attacks in the U.S. (from a television in a bakery), I’ve begun thinking of the residents in these small, riverside communities with bigger issues in my mind than those that originally brought me here. Besides being interested in their culture in general and in their children’s culture more specifically, I’ve also begun wondering what they think about this international climate of war.
Perhaps if the world had ears for such words like: “I don’t understand how so much hatred can exist amongst people,” or “ Why fight so much, where will it all bring us?”… we wouldn’t be dropping bombs daily. These words come from the little old men and women with their sunned-soft skin and long gazes, who lived their entire lives in wooden houses with straw roofs, always in front of wide rivers with little canoes docked close by.
These are the men and women that prevent us from losing our focus on reality, the ones that help intensify the Alberto Caeiro that lives in all of us: “The mystery of things? Who knows what mystery is? The only mystery is that there exists someone that thinks about mystery” or:
“The only deep meaning in things IS that they have no deep meaning at all.”
Each forest possesses its own feeling and set of symbols, and to be in intense contact with nature, eating fish with manioc flour, sleeping in hammocks, and walking under scalding sun could be a problem for some, but I can guarantee it has one thing the whole world is looking for: Peace.
A big kiss.
