and welcome to reality.

Hey guys, it’s been awhile I know but there’s been so much going on that I decided to give it all to you in one big burst of extreme amazingness…

I believe we left off right after the 2.5-week boat trip:
After this I had 2 weeks back in Belem, which included the very important (at least for Brazilians) 4-day holiday of Easter where there wasn’t a church that didn’t have at least 20 people in it and nothing was open and I didn’t have school (the actual important part). I spent the holiday with a few of my friends from the program, wandering around the deserted streets, avoiding eating fish (another very important thing for Brazilians during this holiday, EVERYTHING had fish in it)…and then accidentally taking a huge bite of fish cake (yes this exists), getting lost on busses (twice in the same day), getting soaked when the streets flooded during a torrential downpour, discovering really delicious ice cream, traipsing through some urban forest with birks on and no repellente (not the best idea by the way) and most of all telling some good hilarious stories. It was a weekend well spent.
But of course all good weekends have to come to an end and then it was back to school where the reality check of Portuguese tests and research papers hit me in the face really hard. Eu tive estado praticando meu portugues muito mas Eu fui ainda mas melhor as escrevendo entao fui falando (I had been practicing my Portuguese a lot but I was still much better at writing than speaking) so when I was told that the midterm was an oral prova (test) I was a little nervous especially since we weren’t allowed to write anything, we kinda just had to wing it. We had to tell the professor what our favorite part of the boat trip was…so of course I thought in English and then tried to translate it on the spot, which turned out to be this combination of Spanish and Portuguese…opa. But I think I managed to pull it together regardless and everyone understood me. That day, my Portuguese class discovered that our Portuguese professor also taught another class for two American students studying at UFPA (universidade federal do para) and we got to meet them on a class field trip to the zoo, which was pretty cool because up until then we had—egocentrically—thought that our full group of 23 were the only Americans in the city. The two boys we met are studying engineering until the end of June and have all their classes in Portuguese…which almost makes me never want to complain about school here again because 75% of my classes are in English. I couldn’t even imagine taking engineering in another language, I would probably cry.
I was extremely excited when I was told we were going to the zoo until we actually got there and all of the animals (with the exception of a few birds, a lizard, some mouse deer, and a couple sloths) were in straight up cages…. which looked surprisingly similar to jail cells. There was not much of an attempt to make the animals comfortable and they were all just pacing about their cages looking miserable. I’ve desensitized myself from many things while here (you have to in order to deal with everything) but for some reason that just got to me. The only thing that really managed to cheer me up was the prospect of going to Cairu (one of the most amazing food places on earth), where they have not only sorvete (ice cream) but also sandwiches and freshly squeezed juice; the best part? They are completely vegetarian friendly, I got an avacado, tomato, lettuce, egg, and cheese sandwich (AMAZING), oh and you can try as many sorvete flavors as you want before you actually buy anything. After Cairu, I hopped on a bus and went to UFPA to start worrying about my ISP…
The gleaming gem of all SIT study abroad programs is their independent study project, or ISP, which is a month long process in which the student (me) gets to do their own research and present it in paper and presentation format the last week of the program. The topic can be anything as long as it’s related to the program theme (natural resource management and human ecology) and the research can be thoroughly done in the amount of time given. I have decided to focus on sustainable community development and what it means for the Amazon region. There are many communities living in and around the forest using traditional methods to survive (as I described a little bit in my last entry). There are many organizations from corporate to NGOs that work with these communities doing some sort of development projects; often the word “sustainable” is tacked on to it and the organizations win all sorts of awards for environmental excellence and they take a lot of pretty pictures and all is well with the world…except not really. Many projects fail because the organizations neglected to take into account what the communities actually want and think that they need. They don’t work with the communities; instead they throw a bunch of money in their face and think that they know best about how to develop the place. I want to research what exactly “sustainable” means to all these different development actors and hopefully start to learn how exactly sustainable development can be better integrated into this region.
At UFPA there is one such development organization called POEMA (poverty and the environment in Amazonia), and I’m hoping to work with them as a starting point for my project. A couple weeks ago I went there hoping to speak with one of the professors working at the organization; the first time I went he had decided to leave early…because he could and the second day I waited nearly 3 hours to see him (because he decided to take a 3 hour lunch break)…and talk for 5 minutes. If this were America I would have called and made an appointment and not wasted that time; but Brazil doesn’t really do appointments or phones or email. I mean they do but nothing is ever kept, people are always late and it’s just extremely frustrating. They base whether they’ll work with you on whether or not they like you enough, so persistence is key. In those 5 minutes I managed to make a good enough impression that the professor said he could work with me, I just had to get an official document from SIT explaining who I was and what the hell I was doing in Brazil (even though I had explained this all to him); so basically Brazilians do whatever they feel like AND they get involved with bureaucratic red tape. It’s really…awesome. But anyway, hopefully that will work out.
On a better note, I’ve started making more Brazilian friends, which is helping me with my Portuguese a ton and I’m getting to discover the city more. I went to a couple reggae concerts, to see Thor (thank goodness not dubbed but with subtitles), discovered that the river is gorgeous at night and that walking around doesn’t actually have to be all that scary (despite the fact that my host mom loves to put the fear of God in me any time I go anywhere, no matter the time of day). I’m starting to get super attached to the city I was once kind of weary about.
After the 2 weeks were over, it was on to a 10-day excursion to the South of Para (the state I’m living in). There is so much that I could say about this trip but I will try and condense it. Our first stop was the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world…it was insane, we received a presentation where of course the company bragged on and on about how awesome they were and it’s totally fine that they flooded a ton of communities around the dam because electricity is development and development is good. Fun fact: before 2002, the only people that were receiving this electricity were the two big iron smelting operations in the area…which destroyed some more communities and deforested a ton more land. Now, some towns and communities receive electricity from the dam but a lot of it also goes to Sao Paulo and Rio where they also receive the tax money that the citizens of Para pay for that electricity. Screwed up? Oh there’s more…since the dam was built in the late 70’s during the military government when environmental licensing didn’t exist; any new additions they make to the dam still don’t have to go through an environmental licensing process even though all other dam projects built after the end of the military government do. That was just the beginning.
Also on this trip, we learned a lot about the MST (the landless peoples movement). This organization was formed to deal with the HUGE problem of agrarian reform in Brazil. They started during the 70s in the south of Brazil, where it was discovered that there is this really old law on the books that says if someone has a title to a piece of land but never actually use that land for a certain amount of time, the title is void. Of course this law…like most laws in Brazil… was never followed and really rich people just kept buying tons of land and passing it on to family members who never even knew that it existed and the land just sat there while small family farmers were getting kicked off land they couldn’t pay for because the government purposely made the prices insanely high. The founders of MST were really fed up with this so they started occupying abandoned land and slowly but surely the movement grew (eventually into the Amazon) and became extremely politically active until people started to notice and try to kick them off the land by simply killing them. In 1994 the police shot 18 people dead in the streets in front of some of that abandoned land (in the south of Para) because they were blocking the street and the police wanted them to move. Today still, that surrounding area is one of the most dangerous areas in Brazil because of the continuous struggle for land rights. For 4 days I stayed in an MST settlement where not only MST people lived but also colonos (farmers that moved to the Amazon because of the government push for development of the area by making the land absurdly cheap). I ended up living with a fairly wealthy colono family, who didn’t particularly like MST because they were of the opinion that they steal land while the colonos have to pay for their land. It was interesting seeing both sides of the issue. Plus I got to milk some cows, eat too much food, and play with animals for 4 days. It was pretty cool.
On the last day of the excursion, we visited the 2nd largest iron mine in the world, owned by Vale (in my opinion an evil, evil company); which was an obnoxiously huge open pit mine. It was kind of like getting a really hard reality slap in the face, the mine was just there, there was not too much growing around it and it was just so BIG. I couldn’t even process thoughts in that moment because I refused to believe that the mine even existed. It was a definite mental block.
But anyway, here I am now back in Belem for assumingly about the next 6 weeks, then maybe another week in the South of Brazil and then back to America! Life moves fast.

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