Silver Lining In The Airport City

Airports. Whether you’re in Atlanta or Paris, Rio or Cairo... the feeling is somehow always the same: a feeling of temporality, impermanence and artificiality. You are there, obviously en route to somewhere else, it is not a place to lay roots or experience the intricacies of the city at hand, but a place to get in and get out, a contradiction of infinite cultures and just as many languages, somehow devoid of feeling.

Brasilia is an airport city, the type of city that somehow makes your feel like you could be anywhere in the world, but certainly not in the heart of Brazil... a country dripping with vitality, sweating samba and sex from every one of its pours. Brazil teases and whispers, “Você está no brasil agora gringa”.. but Brasilia is flaccid, unassuming, and altogether monotonous.  

So, why is the alleged heart of this country nearly opposite in every way possible of its vivid surroundings? Well, for one thing… it has only existed for 53 years. From 1763-1960, my beloved Rio was the capital of Brazil... but then the country decided that a more neutral, more geographically central, less resource-rich location was infinitely more appropriate for the nation’s capital. Ipso-facto, they designed Brasilia and called it “Plano Piloto” The pilot plan... as if they knew this was a precarious experiment. “They” being Lúcio Costa as the principal urban planner, and  Oscar Niemeyer as the lead designer.

            

             

53 years later, the result is a city-sized-airport. The streets have no names but instead or carved out in series of rigid letters and numbers spread amongst such rigid zoning, that the coffee shops are afraid to be caught in the ministerial blocks. The buildings are a Pleasantville pattern of one cookie cutter office after another, with the occasional eerie post-modern monster of a national monument awkwardly crouching between them. And the beige paper flowers sold on the street corners are little more than scentless metaphors for the city that silently hawks them.

Critics of the city (and there are MANY) say that the city went awry when Costa and Niemeyer designed for space rather than humanity…what is a city if not designed for humanity?

Robert Hughes, put it bluntly when he said, “Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future. This is what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens. This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind. The utopian buck stops here.”

Luckily, the “utopian buck” can stop wherever the hell it wants because I found a slice of heaven 20 minutes outside the vast expanse of identical ministries and whitewash pavement. I found Kantunta, or so the mansion is called by the 8 fabulous people whom live there. In a stroke of sorte, my Amazonian roommate told me of a friend she had in Brasilia who somehow always had a spare bedroom. Not so surprising when you live in a house of 12 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, painted perfectly on the north side of Brasilia’s largest body of water. To make the situation even sillier, more than half of the house’s inhabitants are incredible 20-30 something’s who happen to work in my field of research, and those that don’t     are making documentaries about indigenous livelihoods and social unrest in the north. The conversation, needless to say, is both useful and fascinating.

While Brasilia may be an empty space of Niemeyer’s Utopian fantasies, the mansion is a tangible version of my Brazilian fantasy. It is young people, dripping with the vitality that their county exudes, filling each room with the aroma of delicious Portuguese banter. It is a house full of energy and light, complimented by the constant pulse of samba drums and the positive ions of Lago Norte.

 Thanks universe.

To the Firth

It is not the first time that my culture shock has been triggered by familiarity; that onslaught of white people, cleanliness, and English. It is far more often this reverse culture shock that sends me into a tailspin than say… a cow shitting on my foot in an Indian spice market. And so, when I flew from the Amazon sauna to the highlands of Scotland, the case was no different. It was a sensory overload of perfectly ordered cobblestone streets, of white people talking quietly in flawless guttural Scottish melodies, toilet paper that could be flushed, and water that could be drank, sweet Jesus, STRAIGHT from the tap. But adjusting was simple, and I easily fell into the UK pace and the sweet smells of Scottish breakfasts alongside the (long overdue) company of my American boyfriend and his Chicagoan family. 

But, this post isn’t about me; it’s about LV (the bride) and the family responsible for my 10-day stint in the land of Scots. Evidence of their awesomeness provided below. <3

There were castles and cows. There were mountains and ten-
mile trail runs, but through it all, there was food. Scottish breakfasts from the expert kitchens of B&B owners like James the Great and David the Moose, which held enough food on one plate for a small family. And afternoons were capped off with pints of Guinness and Arran ale, snacks of fresh cheese and oatcakes, and always Scottish shortbread. The nights were filled with fried fish and haggis (a type of meat I still do not fully understand nor am I capable of explaining), and wine sipped in cottage armchairs while the days were dotted with epic hikes and castle tours, or soft trails leading to ancient graves and white waterfalls. 

But the highlight, was a wedding, more intimate than any I’ve ever experienced. It was what a wedding should be, the complete image of the couple’s wishes. Lauren and Mike, more prone to chatting up the bartender at their local dive bar than sipping high ballers at some acquaintance’s cocktail party, wanted their wedding to reflect their relationship. And so, at 5:00 on a crisp Scottish day they were joined as husband and wife on a small beach with 18 of their family members looking on (and one photographer practically orgasming at the ridiculously vivid photographic opportunity that would inevitably blow up his portfolio).

The lighting was sunset perfect, not in the way that we know sunsets but in the way that only the eerie long-way-north of-the-equator light can create. In place of standard sapphires, the sky was a perplexing cascade of blue and gray, a type of constant dusk that plays in continuous mockery of the unaccustomed eye. 

There was no music or pageantry as Lauren walked down the sand aisle, held on each side by her mother and brother. The silence seemed awkward at first, but once it settled, you realized that the music accompanying the ceremony was the lapping of the waves of the Firth of Clyde on the stony shore of the Isle of Arran. 

Mike dropped the rings, Lauren teared while reciting her vows, and in under 15 minutes, they were kissing as man and wife. There were no bagpipes or kilts in the ceremony, white horses or lavish string quartets; the only thing cliché about this wedding was the absurd rainbow that appeared over the beach during dinner. Lauren dropped her bite of smoked salmon, made eye contact with Mike and the photographer and within seconds they were in the sand beneath the now Double rainbow that conveniently adorned the already picturesque ceremony.

Fully fed, toasted, and photographed, the wedding moved to dancing, and the dancing moved to a slow rhythmic wind down.  The whole thing made me think of the elaborate weddings that have become definitions of acceptable in the States. Perfectly coordinated, yawn evoking church ceremonies, and hour-long bridesmaids speeches...when did we decide that self-designed menus and paper napkins weren’t acceptable? Who made it law that a slick wooden floor was more appropriate than a makeshift living room dance floor? This wedding was personal, and not just for the bride and groom, but for each guest who undoubtedly felt like part of the union, rather than simply another place setting. 

On Being… “less white” : A week with the Suruí Tribe of Rondônia

Last I wrote I was “waiting at the jump off”, but the theme of the Amazon seems now to be less waiting and more jumping. Last Thursday I walked into a planning meeting with my advisor expecting to talk logistics for the long tedious process of getting permission to enter indigenous territory. Two hours later I walked out with a round-trip flight and permission to enter the Suruí territory of Rondônia (an Amazonian state of Brazil on the border of Bolivia). My only instructions were… “Pretend you’re our intern, don’t do any interviews until you’ve won over the chief.. and ya know… just be like… less white”

One week later, I coincidentally am far less white than I was when I entered. The combination of scorching sun and tribal paint has left my body a mix of red, brown, and patterned black dots from the seed of the jinny pappou. I carried the team camera and pretended to take orders from my make-believe bosses to successfully play the part of an Idesam intern, and received an impromptu marriage offer from the chief within five days, which I’m pretty sure counts as “winning him over” soooo Mission complete? Details below.

The point of this jump off was a carbon verification. Idesam and a few other partner organizations created a carbon credit project with the Suruí back in 2006.  Seven years later, the day of verifying the credits in order to sell them to interested buyers finally came, and I just happened to arrive at the perfect time to get a front seat to the entire process. What this basically means is that The Suruí have a huge swath of amazon jungle that has been demarcated by the government as theirs and theirs only. But over the past years, timber gangs and gemstone whores have been lynching into their territory and in many cases, paying the poorer Surui’s to deforest their own land. This was happening at such a break-neck pace that calculations showed the territory would be completely deforested within 50 years if nothing was done. For a tribe who depends solely on the life of their forest, this was a death sentence. So chief Almir did something no tribal leader had ever done… he googled.

                                                 

Chief Almir was the first indigenous chief to form a partnership with google, to make his territory and its deforestation trackable by the general public and his own people. Now, his is the first tribe with a fully certified REDD+ carbon credit project meaning interested buyers can offset their emissions by buying the carbon credits generated by Suruí standing forests. Almir has been revered as a fearless leader even in the face of two years of record-breaking assassination threats from nearby timber gangs. He picked up four armed guards from the National Police Force and never skipped a beat in protecting the territory

                                       

Pretty incredible stuff to say the least but what struck me most was the fact that this tribe only made contact with the outside world 44 years ago. This moment which they still refer to as “o contato” was with a Brazilian government official of FUNAI (The National Indian Foundation of Brazil). One of the greatest ironies in Brazilian history is that it was a member of Funai, the government arm created to protect Brazil’s indigenous population, that nearly killed off an entire tribe when he gave one Suruí the flu in 1969. Within a few years of contact, the Suruí tribe had dwindled from 5000 people to less than 250 from the flu contracted by foreigners. Yet today, they are actively including the outside world in their fight to rebuild themselves and their territory.Theirs is a trust, and a drive, and an intelligence that absolutely blew me away.

To date it was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in all my wanderings, hiking into the Amazon with the technical carbon team to plot key forest and crop points on their GPS data map, tagging along on the cultural team’s risk assessment interviews, and, conducting my own set of interviews with all of the clan heads and various Suruí villagers to gauge their perceptions on the project for my own research.

I still don’t know how to be “less white” or “less gringa” or “less American”, or whatever it was my boss meant for me to be, but after a week with the Suruí, I’m not sure “being less white” was ever actually necessary. The Suruí were just as curious about me as I was about them. After I’d ask a clan leader what he hoped to gain from the carbon project, he asked me what life was like in New York. I asked him if the majority of Suruí supported the project, and he asked if the majority of Americans preferred baseball or football. I asked him about which village he was from, and he asked me if this placed called “Brooklyn” that he read about was a real thing. I failed at translating the idea of a hipster in Portuguese but the conversation would continue on like this for hours in a mutual curiosity swap.

Vilifying the Deforester: 9 days with Amazonian Cowboys

Jump-off 2 was a 9-day stint into the Apuí territory of the eastern Amazon, an ironic trade of Suruí Indians and tribal tattoos for Apuí cowboys and cattle ranchers. There were lassos and cattle stampedes, electric eels and waterfalls, tarantulas and pick-up trucks, and as always lessons learned from the ground up.

I set out at 5 am with two other researchers on the two day trek from Manaus to Apuí. The first step is a ten hour boat ride down the Amazon River, which fulfilled just about every childhood fantasy I’ve had about researching in the Amazon. Boarding an old boat at sunrise and swiftly cruising down the black glass river, with absolutely nothing but jungle and canopy rushing to the banks to watch you pass. The red river dolphins rushed out of the water, flipped and dived back in every few meters, and florescent birds landed on the deck for a brief second before hopping back into their canopies.

Unfortunately, the river dream, only gets you half way there. It pulls up unceremoniously to a small town called Nova Apuana where there is one hotel with ten beds, and a juice stand to hold you over until day 2 of the journey.  The only way out to Apuí from here is by dirt road, with a local named Jaime who has conveniently monopolized the “transit system” with his crap-mobile (a bright green 1990 Ford pick-up truck, complete with orange fur seats and an engine held together by duck tape.)

The road took 9 hours (complete with surprise tarantulas that crawled out from beneath the seats within the first hour). First we lost the muffler and exhaust, then went the clutch (we drove six hours in one gear), then a gasoline leak, then the breaks burst, and finally, a solid 2 hours stuck in a muddy red ditch. The only good thing to come out of the crap-mobile was a marked increase in my Portuguese profanity prowess.

Pulling into Apuí was like pulling into an alternate Amazonian universe. The Green canopies and jaguar filled forests were long abandoned for the dirt roads and scorched earth which stretched on for miles, all cleared for the thousands of cattle that roamed lazily about in every direction.

As it turns out, Apuí, is an example of completely perverse government policies. In the 70’s Brazil decided it wanted to settle the Amazon, but the only way to get people up there was the promise of free land and prosperity. So they said, “Hey kids, if you head north we’ll give you a ton of land ‘FO free” and all you have to do to earn the land title is deforest as much as you can every year and start some “productive agriculture”. Yea yeah, don’t worry we’ll give you roads and schools and doctors and stuff too.. all in good time.” And so an exodus of land grabbers started north and formed municipalities like that of Apuí with the hope of a bright new future as farmers of the North.

Thirty yeas later, there is ONE horrendous road, with ONE horrendous driver (Jaime and the Crap-mobile). There is a makeshift hospital somewhere that people are afraid to use because it is so poorly staffed and equipped. Most people drop out of school at age 13, and the agriculture was replaced within seconds by cattle when everyone realized that Amazonian soil is too acidic to grow anything on. But the deforestation continues at breakneck pace by the local inhabitants and their families because at the very least the people there want to maintain legal rights to their land, in hopes that they’ll at least have legal land and lots of cows to pass onto their kids.

Seeing all of this I couldn’t help wonder where it was I got my image of what deforestation really is. I think immediately of a brilliant friend of mine who once jokingly said, “Most all of my moral values came from Fern Gully,” and she’s pretty much right. When we were young, we learned that all deforesters were evil lumber jacks with bad morals and no teeth, when we got older we learned that the evil toothless lumberjacks were actually foreign corporations fueling the illegal timber trade and THAT seemed like a bad guy worth fighting. Somewhere along the line though, we successfully vilified ALL deforesters based on Robin Williams and the batty rap.

But last week, I sat in the middle of the Amazon, at a local birthday party, with a three-year-old child bouncing on my lap. The birthday boy, turning 20, wore a cowboy hat and Gaucho’s and a gold belt buckle in the shape of bullhorns. He passed me his second daughter as well (she was five), and told me about his most recent job.  He had been paid 500 bucks to go out and deforest 20 hectares for some rich cattle rancher that wanted to illegally expand his territory. And so under the cover of night, a group of six or seven 20-yr-olds, rushed into the forest with chainsaws to earn next month’s rent.

“What would you do?” he asked me. “There’s no other option out here, I’m 20 with two kids, and no other form of income, and nobody’s gonna come help now…”

With at least twenty new questions, I am no closer to closing my research, but am taking a welcome reprieve from cobras and tarantulas to head northeast… way northeast, like Scotland northeast! After a quick pit stop in Rio I am off to the land of whisky and kilts to celebrate the wedding of the one and only Lauren Valenta, and share a week of fabulousness with Team Valenta before jumping back into research at the government level in Brazil’s capital.