The DIRT (Dismantle, Immerse, Reflect, Transform) team is returning to the Amazon for the ninth time! 16 of us are returning to our SMC home away from home in the Brazilian Amazon for Jan Term 2020. This page helps us to tell our story and -- even more importantly -- helps us to tell the stories of our friends and hosts in the Amazon . . .
We showed six of our finals at our on-campus presentation. They are here, in the order in which they were shown.
From Team Lulas (Jaron, Lauren, Max, Nina + Scott)
DIRT overview
Sustainability as a Way of Life:
From Team Comemos (Gui, Malia, Mylan, Rylee)
What has DIRT done?
The Language Barrier
From Team Girassol (Boo, Katie, Lauren, Maya)
Living Pharmacy
Mending Wall
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Our 12-year-old colleague Gui made a video for his classmates back home. Here it is, with some of the best explanations of Anã that we've ever managed to commit to video.
And here is a video focusing on hands, from Team Lulas:
And one on Sustainability from Comemos:
And our two students who had to leave early, Nina and Malia, made a video to learn more about what happened after they left:
And finally, our "Warm and Fuzzy" video from Girassol:
Please check back here on Monday, February 17, before 7pm to find a link to our YouTube livestream of our presentation night. Or, even better, join us in Galileo 201 on the SMC campus!
Our flights are all thrown off by a delayed departure from Manaus, but we have made the most of our time here by taking a quick tour. First, we hit our hotel rooms and slept HARD for as long as we could. For some of us, that was about eight hours, even though those hours were in the daytime.
Whether we slept or not, we hustled downstairs at 3pm to start a city tour. Because we hadn't had legitimate meals all day, we at some snacks at the little concession area of the hotel lobby, then set out for the famous Manaus opera house, which is a wonder.
It is utterly European in almost every way, though there are a few nods to the context of the Amazon in the art and in some of the figures that are represented there. Our guide Deangelo told us a quick history of Brazil in general and Manaus in particular to help us set the scene, then talked about how the rubber boom led to the creation of this fish-out-of-water opera house in the middle of the rainforest.
We got to sit in the seats (made from local jacaranda trees, now an endangered species) and test the acoustics of the space, and we also checked out the special box seats, the ballroom, and the glorious balcony, all on a private tour with our guide.
We wandered around the square near the opera house and found a wonderful community-based arts gallery that featured some of the work of Turiarte (the collective that includes our Anã friends) and Tucumarte (the basketmakers from Urucureá). Each of us fell in love with some item (or items) there, so that random stop was very satisfying.
We then went to a riverwalk area that was hopping with walkers, joggers, rollerbladers, Zumba people, and snackers who were going from food truck to food truck tasting local foods. It seemed like it could be easy to spend a whole evening on that little stretch of pavement along the river, but we were on a quest to get a real meal for today so we headed on out to our planned meal at a churrascaria.
There is a great salad/side bar that has a wide range of items but most of us were focused on the specialty of the house: meat. This particular restaurant doesn't slice the meat directly from skewers onto your plate right at the table, as you have to walk up to a counter to get whatever loads of meat you want. We were hungry and tired so we made quite good use of the offerings of the churrasco cooks.
And now we are back at the hotel, expecting to leave in less than three hours to get to our flight from Manaus to Miami. We'll travel all day tomorrow and get back to the Bay around 7. Apologies to anyone who was counting on our schedule holding as planned.
We'll be in a computer lab for a few days but we invite you to join us and see some of our final projects on Monday, February 17, at 7pm in Galileo 201 on the Saint Mary's College campus.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
Inside of the Manaus Opera House, the DIRTies learned about its history and key ties to European interior design and architecture.
The DIRTies taking in the view of the buildings surrounding the opera house.
On the DIRTies' final day in Brazil, they were able to visit the world renowned Manaus Opera House.
A view of the Monumento a Abertura dos Portos as Nacoes Amigas.
The DIRTies got to explore Manuas at night just before visiting a Brazilian Steak House and leaving for the US.
We are getting notices that our flight out of Manaus will be delayed, which is going to throw off our connections and make us five hours late getting back to SFO. We'll try to keep you posted.
[SPECIAL NOTE: Reminder -- our final video presentation night will be Monday, February 17th at 7pm in Galileo 201 on the Saint Mary's campus. Please join us if you can. We will be happy to be together again and we would love to show you what we've learned. We will try to livestream for those who are out of range . . .]
We're winding up our time in the state of Pará. We are strangely comfortable here and keep remarking about how familiar everything seems/feels, even in the city, where we only spent a few days on the front end of our trip.
Shawny and Jesse got together with community partners from years gone by all the way back to 2009 last night, and some of them also came for breakfast this morning. So we got a chance to see Ingrid, Ailson, and Odila from this trip and we also had a visit from Jaime, who worked with the 2009 and 2010 groups here in Santarém (though, unbeknownst to us, he was born in Anã and his mother -- Odila's sister -- still lives there). Monica, who had traveled with the groups in 2014 and 2015 also joined us, and as a result of reconnecting with the folks from Anã, might rejoin the tourism group now. Yay!
We hustled out in the late morning to make some important purchases: machetes! We had to search for them in a few places, especially because some of us wanted little leather sleeves to hold them too. We found everything we had in mind. We also got hooks for our beloved hammocks, so be ready for us to be drilling holes in places that you hadn't previously considered "hammock-friendly."
Speaking of hammocks, we got more of those too. And we had limited success in our quest for Brasil soccer jerseys, though we might find those in Manaus if we didn't find our sizes here. We mostly find that we don't care that much about traditional souvenirs, which we take to be a good sign that we did things in the way we intended to do them here.
We decided to gorge on some of our favorite local foods, including Louro's fried chicken, local ice cream (again), and açaí. On our ice cream stop, we found one that was the flavor of creamed corn, along with some new local fruits that we hadn't tried before. We ate a lot of ice cream, then made another stop for bowls of pure açaí. Louro had made some fabulous local fish for dinner, but we weren't very good eaters when it came to actual meal time. Oops.
On the way home, the song from "A Star is Born" called "Shallow" came on the radio in the van and for some reason we all just paused and sang at the top of our lungs. Not all of the lyrics apply perfectly to us, but a lot of them are spot on. Maybe that's "our song."
Tonight we are doing some photo and video work before our driver picks us up at midnight for our 4am flight. Our things are spread everywhere, but if recent experience tells us anything, when the time comes, we will be neatly packed up and ready to roll just on time.
We will see some sights in Manaus so maybe we will post some pics then. Or maybe not. But either way, we will be back in California on Thursday, where we will hole up in a computer lab for a few days to finish our final projects. We'll see you later in the weekend (perhaps for the Super Bowl?).
Again, our dirty laundry STINKS! And we have forgotten how to worry about our hair or what our feet look like (because they are always covered in dust, sand, or dirt). We are maybe a bit tougher than we were when we left, but we are also full of more love than we thought possible, both for each other and for the "strangers" we met far away, for whom we now have deep affection that we imagine will last a lifetime. We're glad you could join us through this blog (and our all-too-infrequent phone calls) and we hope you got some hints of what a wonderful experience we have had. We look forward to seeing you soon!
Back in Santarem we went souvenir shopping so that we all could have our own machetes to take home.
Jaron is enjoying Louro’s famous frango frito (fried chicken).
Ice cream, the perfect Brazilian delicacy on a pouring day.
The beautiful Miss Jennifer “Boo” Laird enjoys authentic açaí loaded with sugar and tapioca.
The sign and açaí fruits in front of the açaí shop.
Lorena, Boo and Rylee in a braiding train before a long travel adventure
Downpour of rain while exploring Santarem.
Unha de Gato, used to make tea to cure a variety of aches, pains and illnesses
Once our meal was finished at the steakhouse, we given these cards to show that we had paid and could then leave the restaurant.
We had great ice cream. Boo had milho verde (corn) and açaí.
We are back in Santarém, after our teary goodbye in Anã. As predicted, we lost the soccer game, in a decisive 3-0 loss. We got in a few good shots on goal, but clearly they got more and were more successful with them. And only our women played, because their men's team didn't show up.
Our women are the reigning champs, as we won our one and only game (in about 36 or so over the years) on our last visit in 2017. So we showed up with a big flashy trophy and put it on the line, with the clear assumption that we would be leaving it behind. We left it behind. The whole trophy ceremony and photo shoot was more fulfilling than the game was for us. But we had fun trying to play, and connecting with kids on the sidelines, and being the butt of some of the locals' jokes.
A lot of our main friends came over to the guest area after the game and joined us for a "cultural night," which was mostly a lot of music (from our sources and from theirs) and a lot of dancing. All of us danced and we danced a lot with our hosts and co-workers from our various jobs. We were drenched with sweat at the end of it all so we took our inflatable solar lanterns down to the river to cool off. It was a beautiful (but very dark!) night and our lanterns glowed against the water to give it and us an ethereal aura. We made our way into our hammocks just after midnight even though we knew we were waking up at 5:30am.
5:30 was early and dark, but we hopped up and cleared the ôca, brought down our many clotheslines, and cleared out the bathrooms in time for an on-time departure at 7am. We didn't quite keep our schedule, though, as our farewell ceremony took us awhile.
We gathered in a circle on the beach by the boat holding hands with the locals and each of us spoke our hopes and dreams for the community and the projects we had worked on during these weeks. Maya then took some sage and cedar that she had brought from the U.S. and offered it to them as a joining our our lands; she burned one bunch of sage and blessed each of the people in the circle. Mylan spoke for us and tearfully expressed our happiness at their warm welcome, the progress of the projects, and their tendency to make us the objects of their ridicule, because we have all learned that Brazilians only roast the ones they love.
Our hosts spoke too, telling us how much they appreciated us and would miss us. The president of the community, Ailson, told us he hoped our ways of commitment and unity would rub off on the community members who didn't always participate. We think they are doing pretty well on the unity front but were flattered that he thought we had done anything that was worth emulating.
When it was finally time to get on the boat, we watched tears flowing in every direction as we hugged our hosts again and again, thanking them in Portuguese for all that we have experienced. We ate breakfast as we motored out of the Arapiuns and into the Tapajós. The winds were strong and the waves were choppier than we have felt so far, and a couple of us (who shall remain unnamed) got enough motion sickness to send their breakfasts off the back of the boat.
We made our way to Alter do Chão, a nearby beach community that has a quasi-resort feel, including some stores, groceries, and restaurants. Shawny and Katie left us wandering in Alter do Chão (with Jesse) as they headed to the airport so Katie can make her way back alone to attend some of the Ph.D. program interviews to which she has been invited. Everything went smoothly getting Katie to the airport so once Shawny returned we headed back to our Santarém home from earlier in the trip.
We ate lunch and went to a local zoo hospital for injured wild animals. We saw manatees and big cats and monkeys and lots of amazing birds and a bunch of other animals that only exist in the Amazon. We also saw a HUGE alligator, that was fortunately very calm and quiet today.
We went from the zoo to a self service ice cream shop, where we loaded up on flavors that are largely based in local fruits. We decided that the selection wasn't diverse enough, so we set out to find another ice cream shop to supplement our first run. Most of the other places that we checked out were closed, so we gave up and went souvenir shopping instead. Almost everyone found what they needed, though we have a few more items on our wishlists so we will do some more shopping tomorrow.
We are all quite tired tonight so we are going to try to sleep in and take it easy in the morning. We might not go to sleep at all tomorrow night, as we have to go to the airport at about 1am to make our 4am flight. And we have a 22-hour layover in Manaus, so our travel odyssey will still continue for quite awhile.
We have one more day in our little part of the Amazon, then another in a bigger Amazon city. Our upcoming posts will probably brief if we manage to post at all. And in case you are wondering, our ill teammates seem to be pretty fully recovered, though a couple of new patients are feeling a bit under the weather. We'll keep an eye on things and get everyone back in one piece. Thanks for your care and concern as we find our way home!
Alter do Chão—the DIRTies' final boat stop—featured a wide variety of tourist attractions.
The DIRTies found their way to the Santarém Zoo featuring Macaws, which excited the group.
Spider Monkeys were a highlight of the Animal Sanctuary.
The Spotted Leopard relaxed while the fearful DIRTies stared in wonder.
After a long day of acting like tourists, the DIRTies got to get a sneak peek of Santarém at night.
We had a lovely visit to beautiful Vila Franca yesterday, getting a new view of a similar community on a different part of the adjoining rivers here. It had a huge 180 degree view from the bank across the river to Alter do Chão, the quasi-resort beach area where we will re-enter urban society tomorrow. Like everywhere, the river is huge and wide here (this particular river is the Tapajós), so you can't see very much but the topography. The sky, though, is huge, as are the clouds, and the whole place is just calming and beautiful.
The context was not calm, though, as the reason for the gathering was a regional kicking contest (like a penalty kick competition), where pairs of people pay to compete for the regional championship. There was also a live band playing (loudly and constantly, with no breaks) and some people were dancing. There was food and drink available (even ice!) but most people were just sitting and waiting for their area's turn to kick. Lots of folks from Anã were there, so we joined them. Scott and Max signed up to compete and did not advance but did not totally embarrass the United States either. That's about the most we could hope for.
We walked a bit along the river and took in the sky and then got back on our boat right at dusk to head home for dinner. Lightning was flashing in the sky far away so a lot of us just stared off the deck of the boat hoping not to miss a big bolt or a big orange flash. We saw plenty.
We headed for bed early because we needed to do a lot today even before the big Brazil v. USA soccer matches. We started packing in the morning, even though we planned to do it after lunch. We discovered that some of our little cubbies had developed mold under our bags and backpacks, so we had to do some major cleanups on those. We also discovered a little marsupial animal that had nested in one of our cabinets to have its little babies. Neither the mother nor the babies seemed to hurt anything. There were spiders aplenty, but Scott ran around with a leather glove and took care of them one by one.
We then hit our worksites to do some last minute jobs, though the entire jobs will remain unfinished even when we leave. The roof on the viveiro should be half done, but the fence for the living pharmacy will be complete. A subset of us went to the fish food factory to help in producing three new sacks of fish food. A few of us managed our leftover food and safety equipment so that we can leave those things here to benefit the community rather than carrying them home with us.
We will have a late lunch and then rest up for our soccer games around 4pm here this afternoon. We can probably predict the outcome here now, but we'll let you know tomorrow how it all turned out.
We're not ready to leave our little paradise here, but we will get that way. We think some tears await us over the next 20 hours or so. We think we can hold each other together enough to get on the boat and get on our way.
We have a few errands to run in the city when we get there and then we leave for Manaus at 4am Wednesday morning. We're going to be tired. Our laundry is going to stink. We are going to feel funny whenever we sleep in a bed again. And we are going to miss this place.
More soon.
Gui and Katie walking to their final day of work at the fish food factory!
Dona Odila, Tonico, and others hard at work grinding up manioc, a potato-like vegetable that is used for a multitude of different things here in Brazil. Here, it is the main base of the fish food.
Gui, Jaron, and Scott take a football break (American style) after lunch.
Max warming up for our last day playing soccer.
The large, beautiful trophy that went to the Brazilian women who beat us 3-0. It was quite a tough game, but we played hard and still had a lot of fun. The other trophy (front) is in a mango – this was the guys’ 1st place trophy after the men of Anã decided not to show up to the game. Go Gaels!
Katie sifting food at the fish food factory.
A beast that recently had given birth on top of Shawny’s bags when the DIRTies were packing up to leave Anã.
After a hard fought game, the women of DIRT lost 3-0 in the final championship, losing the recently acquired trophy.
After a hard fought warm up, the men of DIRT won the final championship when the men of Anã didn’t show up.
After a night of dancing, our new family had to prepare to say their final goodbye.
[Special Note: Still trying to get small versions of the videos to load. It’s happening, just slowly. Keep scrolling back to see what’s there. Everything we have up to 1/21 is posted in some form now. New videos from 1/22 on will post tomorrow or after.]
Beach parties are beautiful no matter what, but it’s particularly lovely when a patch of beach that is very familiar becomes a lighted zone with a food table, a cake table, a woven palha Happy Birthday sign (in English!), a cooler full of fresh water and juice, and a grill for roasting a whole pig. In one of the trees where we sometimes hang our towels and flashlights for evening swims, there were bottles hanging on strings filled with water and blooms from all of the plants around the camp. They had even stretched wires from pole to pole to get electric lights to illuminate everything. And, of course, there was a sound system so that Junio could perform little comedy routines in English and different folks could deliver short speeches when there wasn’t music playing.
We got enormous expressions of gratitude from various community leaders and Jesse gave an overview of the relationship between DIRT and Anã that had people from the community shouting out other anecdotes to add to the ones that he was recounting. They talked about the impact of the DIRT projects on their lives, their excitement that we have returned, and their hope that we will be back. No doubt we will.
We danced a little and talked a little and ate a lot, then headed back up to get a good night’s sleep before our last push in the garden to get up a new fence for the living pharmacy and as much of the roof as we can get done. We are having to use natural resources to compensate for the fact that we don’t have all of the materials we need and we don’t have a hardware store to help us solve our problems. We are using the fibers from a reed-like plant to tie things off, so you might see pictures or videos of us softening the fibers by scraping them on posts to make them easier to curve and tie.
The fence for the living pharmacy is definitely needed, as the neighbor’s chickens have gotten very accustomed to using the garden in general as their main feeding ground. We don’t want the precious starts that we collected to become chicken feed in the next week.
This afternoon we are invited to join the community in its trek to another nearby community, Vila Franca, to watch a penalty kick competition and then join in a party. There will be live music and lots of dancing. The locals are all really excited about this day of relaxation, so we are ready to get in the spirit.
Our medicine is helping us all to recover (we have three more people on it now, so our patients are Scott, Katie, Jaron, Boo, Lauren Soares, and Mylan, with Megan considering joining them today). Boo has been through a whole course of meds and it perhaps more pumped up than she was before this all began. The others are all mobile and happy, just a little busier in the bathroom than they would like to be. We suspect our bathroom needs are going to be burdensome in our trip to Vila Franca today but we will figure it out, as we do most things.
We’ll tell you tomorrow how our excursion works out. We’ll also give a report of the REAL (no longer “friendly”) soccer games. We bought a big trophy in the city and have every expectation that it will rightly remain here in the community after our games are over. We might as well wave white flags right as the games begin, as surrender is probably our best option. We’ll give it a try no matter what, and our Brazilian friends who will play with us will maybe save us from utter humiliation. We’ll see!
Romario holding a beautiful neon butterfly.
View from our boat on our way to Villa Franca to enjoy a festa. We got to watch Scott and Max join in on their penalty kick tournament. (they lost…)
The hulk (aka Boo) holding a tree above her head. It was cleared to allow space for a new fence.
Little pathways in Anã.
Scott and Shawny working together to build the new fence for the living pharmacy.
Katie, Lauren Smith, and Mylan being excited on the boat ride to the festa… then there’s Scott.
We kept calling this walk to the festa “The Tunnel of Trees” – no matter what the name is, we know that Vila Franca was an absolutely beautiful community.
A moment in time at Vila Franca’s festa, which is a neighboring town throwing a penalty kick contest alongside dancing and live music.
Mylan found a great dance partner!
Max and Scott courageously entered the penalty kick contest – here you can see Max shooting the ball. They did great (even though they got kicked out the first round)!
[SPECIAL NOTE: We had to move our presentation night to Monday, February 17. Too many conflicts with student schedules on the 18th. Sorry for the inconvenience. Still 7:00pm, room still to be announced.]
[SPECIAL NOTE #2: Go back to 1/13 and 1/14 and we finally got videos to post for those days. The others are all loading and it depends on whether our skitchy internet connection holds up whether they appear today or tomorrow. We are trying!!!]
Our evening was a small celebration of Jesse’s birthday, because the big party will be on Friday night. We had gifts for Jesse, including lots of things from the year (even the day!) of his birth. We had radio playlists, a TV guide, some magazines, a Brazilian coin, a vintage t-shirt from Brazil’s 1970 World Cup championship (starring Pelé), and a Folio Society book about the Amazon. They were hidden around the camp and Gui created clues to help him find them one by one. He exclaimed over all of them and wanted to talk through each of them.
While he was searching, we had a conversation about what we still want to achieve in our last few days here in the community. We talked about connections we still want to make, projects we still want to finish, and things we still want to learn. We also started thinking about our reentry when we return to California and realized that we are going to have a very hard time expressing what has happened for us here, especially just in the last few days.
We recognize that parts of it sound horrible: “it was hot!,” “some of us got sick!,” “we hauled tons of rock and sand by hand!” But we also realize that we have loved it. Almost every minute of it. And we have changed and grown so much that we can’t even figure out how to express it. Maybe some of it will be obvious but a lot of it probably won’t be.
We took the time to honor our alum teammates, Megan and Scott, with their third purple bikes. These two are great vets to have along, as they fit into our group easily but also serve as role models that show us how to keep our attitudes going in the right direction and how to solve dilemmas that arise. They are both hilarious and are incredibly patient with us as they help to bridge the gaps between Shawny and Jesse and the rest of the students. They traveled to Tanzania and to Puerto Rico on prior DIRT trips. All of the parents, friends, and family members out there should really appreciate them, as they are helping all of us all day every day!
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We returned to the garden today and got the thrill of raising a new roof. It started with a trip the beach to pick up all of our drying palhas to carry them to the garden. It took a lot of trips with them slung over our shoulders, where we looked like a strange camel train trudging through the sand. We gathered some of the palhas in bunches of five and learned that these are called “cabezas” (or heads). Others stayed loose from the bunches and were carefully arrayed by our local experts as we handed up sticks to hold them in place, vines to bind them, and singles or cabezas to fill out the roof. We were all busy and it felt great. Of course, we were playing music and dancing like maniacs.
We did some finish work on the chicken coop, where the floor is complete and dry and now easier to clean than it used to be. Someone had advised the community to put down a cement floor and now we’ve helped them to reach that step. We also got some sawdust to add to the floor to make it less harsh on the chickens’ little feet.
We are ramping up for a party on the beach tonight in honor of Jesse’s birthday. They seem to have some special plans but we don’t know yet what they are. We’ll let you know once we find out!
Some locals working on the roof of the viveiro.
Katie carrying multiple dry palhas on her shoulder. We carried them from the beach to the viveiro
IT WAS A ~HOT~ ONE. Sweat stains galore.
Romario putting in work, getting the support beams for the roof ready.
A walk through town (Lauren is carrying a lot of palhas).
Sororoca, a material found around the local Anã area, is used as a rope like material when roofing most buildings in the community.
Maya easily has the most skill with creating the material needed to bind the palha.
The DIRTies and our local counterparts attempt to put up as much palha as they can in their final days of work.
We had a very special celebration this year—celebrating Jesse’s 50th Birthday—just before the DIRTies depart Anã.
Jesse and Gui finally get a father-son picture after a long night of celebrations.
