greener than paradise

I will not post until Monday considering the terror attacks in Bombay and the heavy rain in Santa Catarina which both has stolen too many peoples lives. My thoughts goes out to the victims, victims families, neighbours and all of you who for some reason will morn in the upcoming future.

Useful links in the bombay case can be found here.
BbC article on the Santa Catarina situation can be found here.

Schhh..

Name your baby after Benito Mussolini and get some dough.

It’s so tragicomic that I just had to post.

Is it dry season for good news in Europe or what? Laziness when making news is an awful shame. The link I posted is right now figuring in the international press. This when Bangkok seems to be a mess and nobody is telling me squat about the situation in Kongo.

Ciao // Smal Hox.

Kodak moments are not unusual around but it seems to be a universal law that when without a camera things really gets kodaky. Last friday happened to be just that way and I’ll try to pinpoint some of the most important moments I happened to miss.

1. We missed the only bus for Santarém with 5 minutes tops this Friday. We were, to say the least, desperate of getting there. At least some of us must have appeared as if, Linda, since a whole crew of moto-taxistas gathered up and convinced us that they were able to catch up with the bus in no time. The convincing part in my case was frankly just: “Jump on!”.

Going 100km/h without a helmet on half asphalted roads are probably a one timer. Having a photo of it would be priceless. Or at least worth ehh something to me.

2. After a couple of beers in different bars and some lame dancing in a discoteque me and Leo, classmate visiting, went on a beerhunt downtown. After a 10 minutes walk we almost found what we were looking for; 6 headbangers having cheap wine in a square next to the river. They were old school and were both having dope t-shirts and were parts of different bands.

Cheap wine + hard rock + probably all alcohol avaible (low diversity high quantity is what’s being offered in Santarém) = red stained white shirts on a hardrocking brazilian teenager with chinese descent. Probably picture of the century.

3. A brilliant sunset in Alter do Chao. HAHAHA I’m kidding I can’t stand those photos. Ehh, actually, I sort of understood why people are shooting so many pictures of sunsets after experiencing this one. Maybe I’m better off without them. Forget it. I just wanted to fill out the list. Damn this wasn’t even on friday.

Besides from the missed Kodak moments, things are really turning out good here. We’ve started with the work-shops and even though our first classes was kind of poor we do by now have a good group of teenagers excited about making small documentaries. Our groups are really fun to work with; the ages differs between 14-36, almost a 50/50 mix of gender and they’re all developing skills really fast.

Since I’m having a really hard time uploading pictures myself I’ll post a link to what’s been floating in cyberspace a couple of days already:

Paulo Lima is behind the photo and you can find his blog here. In case your curious I’m standing right next to the rooster, with it’s wing as hat.

So long // Max.

“Piu piu piu piu¨ a beige coloured hen lets off frighted whimpers while running for safety with an old cock right behind. The hen hids under a table, and for a couple of seconds I’m convinced that the mad chase is over and the cock was just showing off for the 31st time this morning. Power demonstrations are good when diversity’s involved. Chasing hens is a lotta fun but you can’t cut out the molesting part apparently. The cock begins the procedure by picking on the head of the hen. I don’t really know what the cock get’s out of doing this but he sure looks satisfied already. Besides that, when seeing this I really get the swedish expression “brain of a hen” (honshjarna), used as an insult, for indicating muddled-headedness or dumbness in a person. Anyway, the act is not over and the cock starts to hump the hen. Fortunatly the cock seems to be blind and puzzles his lower region under the wing of the hen. No chickens this time.

The act is over and everything get’s back to normal. The old cock is not only a wife-beating exhibitionistic prick he’s so badly in need of attention that he sets off, honestly about two minutes later on, for the other cock in our backyard. This one has been around for a while and is familiar with the expression “You can run, but you can’t hide.”. Cock #2, a younger and physically more developed lad, knows the backyard by heart and has no problem getting the old one of his tail. Young cocks are in general eager to spread their germs and the reality show keeps running in my backyard outconquering blockbusters such as Desperate housewives and Survivor. Fcuk, I hate cliffhangers.

Apart from the above everything is just fine here, except for the drunk 40 yr old who tried to get into our house the other day or the blood sucking bats who practically resides in our house every night. Did I mention that I’m not able to upload any pictures for a while!? Must be the worst.

The rain is falling and the mud is getting muddier. The ground is red and the sky is white.

On our backyard there’s a huge palmtree saluting the cars and the pedestriants passing by. They are both dirty; at least from bottom till knee, or bumper when not speaking of pedestriants, sprinkled with terracotta coloured spots. The combination of wearing flip-flops or just moving too fast and this condition equals muddy cars and muddy pedestriants. People already know and don’t really care. Everybody’s suffering or to tell the truth; experiencing it.

The lack of water is probably a more critical subject than the unwanted terracotta shower. Since the pipes in Belterra can’t handle either too much or too little of water they brake down every now and then. Our first days in Belterra has been pretty waterless except for the heavy rain.

No mineral water in the stores, a lack of it in bars, forget tap water; the pipes only get that pressure in March, let the watercar fill your bucket and use it carefully. Mud or dust? Lots of it! Orange, brown or red? It’s not thirst quenching so who bothers giving it a second look?

I participated in a circus last night dressed up as a clown. Since I came late for the preparations I sort of missed all the good costumes and ended up with a rooster wing serving as a hat. I didn´t really had the time to check which impression I gave to the kids but when looking on the rest of us it felt like we were doing just fine; a good clown is a bit funny, 50% scary and is constantly smelling gasoline. We cut out the gasoline part last night though, and still managed to both amuse and scare the kids.

The show was a blast, we improvised some dances and had a lot of fun. In between our dances three of us did theatre with prepared sketches. The themes in the theatre was diferrent health related questions such as hygiene and snake bites. The message really came out good and the kids learnt their lesson.

After the show the audience was able to come and see the boat of the project called Abaré. So when washing of the make-up there was a small sightseeing tour being guided by the medics in the corridor right next to me. Suddenly I felt as if someone was watching me and I tell you: When you have that feeling you´re almost always right, must be an instinct from way back. Obviously there was a small boy spying at me. I don´t know for how long he´d been there but it seemed to be a while.

The boy, about the age of 8, just stood and stared! He was staring as if I was peaceful alien. Which I probably was in his universe. I didn´t know what to do nor what to say and especially not what he´d expect me to do. After a second of immobility and lack of initiatives I figured out that, since he´s 8, I´d probably rock his world if I made a trick. Done and done. I managed to, at least for a few seconds, juggle with three glow-in-the-dark balls. They didn´t glew, but his eyes sparked. Applause!? Fool!Applause are just useless surplus for an audience without sense of showing appreciation or not sensible enough to appreicate. I kept on juggling for a while and handed over the balls to Linda and Fabienne who showed of some real juggling skills. The boy didn´t know what to believe, at least he looked like that, and quickly got bored of them. It was funnier to watch me tie a shoe.

Evidence is coming up when ever I get time for it. There a plenty of pictures and some video´s out there.

Take care and do some clowning!

Cargill is one of U.S.As largest corporations and you can find them on Forbes mags list of the top 20 biggest corporations. How did they got there? Well, it’ s definitely not an easy answered question. But if I sum it up I’d say by making sucessful business in areas such as agriculture. Or if you re-read my title for this post, “Nourishing ideas. Nourishing people“, you get the formula of sucess straight from the source since the quote is Cargills slogan.

Why am I even mentioning Cargill in my blog, a travel blog from my stay in Santarém, and what about the slogan!? When seeing the skyline of Santarém you are not, under any circumstances, able to miss the only 10 storey tall construction in the city. It’s a huge crane situated in the port right next to Tapajós. And that makes one curious. In a city almost without tall buildings you end up paying a lot more attention to the only crane around than, for example, when passing Empire state building in New York[1]. I asked some of my friends about the company and the purpose of the construction and what I got to know did certainly not satisfy my hunger for knowledge. Curiosity is what makes me go up in the morning so to say.

Allright, so with their slogan in mind let me take a local example of how Cargill’s nourishing people. Cargill owns large quantities of land here in Pará which they use to produce soy. Their plantages begins in the outskirts of Santarém and on my ride to Belterra I got to see their nourishing projects; on long distances of the ride there were no trees left and I got to see the beginning of what possibly would become a soy field. A catholic priest and founder of an educative radio station in the region called Edilberto Sena comments: “We´re not against soy itself; we´re against the methods Cargill uses when planting soy in our region.”. The effects of cutting down trees in this region, except for nourishing soy eaters, are hundreds (such as pigs in Europe which is the prime consumer). A couple worth mentioning are:

a). It’s ugly! Damn, you need to be a tasteless fool to consider trading rainforest for soya fields.

b). It has, and still is contaminating the river so that the fish and other creatures eventually dies. Nourish people point? At least I can’t see one here since the most eaten plate around is Tucunaré on of the local fishes.

c). The decrease of hunting possibilities for the locals due to less forest and, obviously therefore, less animals. It used to be common having meat every once in a while in the villages and now it’s rare. Damn, nourish people? Not in this neighbourhood.

d). Less abilities for small farms producing food people here actually eat since the soil get drained and it gets harder cultivating. Nourish point on this one? Sorry none.

e). F?*k it, i’m out. I blame it on my lack of alphabetical knowledge.

This is just the local effects of cutting down some rainforest. Add the global effects you’ve gotten showed down your throat since the age of 6 and you get the whole picture. The whole picture of how Cargill is nourishing ideas and nourishing people.

[1] Myself. If you’re digging the subject or get frustrated when reading check:
Wikipedia article on Cargill
Greenpeace report on the subject.
Check the word nourish in a dictionary and keep reading my blog.