SMC Amazon: A Moment of Transition

What a day! Huge transitions happened for everyone today, which we’ll tell more about after we introduce our newest purple bikers. Our Monday night induction ceremony brought in two new members: Rylee and Lauren Soares.

We acknowledged that Rylee is a destructive force in all of the best ways. She is a beast with the machete, as you have already seen, but she has similar skills with sledgehammers and pickaxes. In our first retreat together, she stood out as a leader, not only of her group’s portion of the project, but also in taking seriously our whole undertaking even by practicing being quiet like our Brazilian hosts are.

On the worksite, Rylee never rests. She is taking in the whole project at all times and jumping in wherever her hands will make a difference. She worked with Jaron to improve the pier by replacing loose and broken boards that were catching the feet of the brothers that Jaron befriended a couple of days ago. Rylee is also crazily organized, so when her team is on camp, all of the sand is where it belongs (NOT on the floor of our sleeping area!) and the bathrooms are properly stocked with wipes and paper and poo-pourri. Her team is always up-to-date with its pictures and videos, which is tough to make happen here. In Portuguese, her name would be pronounced almost exactly like the word “highly.” So we get to pile on the adjectives every day to praise her as a great teammate: highly motivated, highly curious, highly productive, highly interested, highly effective, highly entertaining, and on and on and on . . .

Lauren Soares was our second inductee. She has probably done more work than anyone else on behalf of all of us. Lauren is the #1 keeper of our stuff. She knows every one of our “school bags” better than any of the rest of us (but no one could possibly really know all of the junk we are carrying around). She is always checking in on everyone to learn how they are feeling at different points in the day and she is one of our most ardent advocates of “processing” and “venting” as needed.

On her team, Lauren is quick to move toward the dishes when it’s her team's turn to do that task and she is clearly the queen of the kitchen, having detected where everything belongs and making sure things stay in the right places. She is wise beyond her years and serves as a “mama” of sorts for all of us. We are lucky that Lauren returned to the DIRT world this year (having gone to Puerto Rico last January) and it seems like she will be a DIRT legend in the history books!

And now on with our update!

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Tuesday was a day of major transition, as stated above. The huge transition for all of us was that two of our members packed up their things and headed back to the US to make it home in time for the memorial service for their dear friend Todd, who died suddenly and tragically last week. Nina has known Todd for at least eight years and Malia, because she is Nina’s roommate, also became close friends with him in the last year or so. They consider the friend group they shared with Todd as a “chosen family” and decided to be with that group to work through their grief.

Leaving here, though, is not as easy as it might sound. Without even considering the emotional factors involved in departing from this group, the logistics of getting away at a time other than when the community boat is moving are quite daunting. There is an ambulance boat that we can call in an emergency (there’s even a special hotline in the community to reach that boat) that can move someone from here to the city in the fastest possible way. We contemplated whether there was any way to justify calling the ambulance boat (and bearing the enormous cost of doing so), but thought better of that plan.

So instead, we hired the one and only car in town, which is typically only used to move students to and from nearby schools. It is either a VW van or something very similar. We loaded it up with Nina and Malia’s luggage, Nina and Malia themselves, and Shawny, Odila, and Reginalva, along with the driver and his young daughter Victoria. The van stopped by the garden to bid farewell to our working team, then headed down the forest path toward a distant bank of the river.

The “road” was clearly just a product of this exact van having driven on it enough times to make room for itself. The forest reached into the open windows and scraped along the roof a few times because the clearance was so low. The back window popped open a couple of times due to the bumpy road, but the driver just walked around and secured it again and then went on. We encountered two felled trees, but the driver had a machete on the dash and made quick work of these obstacles to our progress. When we got to the other end, a “speedboat” was waiting for us. All of the van passengers (minus the driver and his daughter) walked out into the water and then climbed onto the boat with our teammates’ luggage in tow.

That group rode across the glassy water to a beachfront called Alter do Chão, which is more of a touristy pseudo-resort area than anything else we’ve seen so far. There our boat driver had a truck parked and we transferred the luggage into the truck and kept on going toward the airport. Once at the airport, we learned that rather than making a jaunt to Brasilia and then on to Manaus, the airline was willing to transfer our passengers onto a direct flight. Of course, we said yes. So they moved quickly through security and were on their way. We wish them well though we will miss them (especially at chore time!) and we hope they find some peace through this journey of vans, boats, trucks, planes, and more.

The rest of the passengers went into the city to acquire some more supplies, including a huge pile of snack food (meat-flavored potato chips, wafer cookies, and some artificial form of M&Ms that were pretty legit). They got some tools and some supplies for the garden and then started the odyssey of returning to Anã with a direct reversal of the journey out. The one difference was that only Shawny and Dona Odila returned on Tuesday night, so rather than the VW van, they got motorcycles to come pick them up where the boat dropped them off.

The motorcycles didn’t use the same wide road that the van used, as there is an alternate path that is just more than the width of a motorcycle. Part of the path is covered in deep sand, which had them fishtailing through the forest in the dark, but all turned out well and they returned to us about nine hours after they left. The locals were amazed that our group had pulled off a round trip to Santarém in just over nine hours, taking that to be very quick. Whew.

As for the DIRTies who stayed put, that group had a couple of options about how to respond to the transition we were all experiencing. We easily could have gotten quiet, felt the loss of our two teammates, and carried on in a sullen way. That’s not the way we went.

For whatever reason (maybe because they are DIRTies?), the group that stayed kicked things into overdrive and had probably the most productive working day by far than any we have experienced yet. Everything just kind of clicked into place, and not only were the DIRTies showing prime efficiency and maximum impact, but also the locals turned out in much higher numbers to collaborate on the projects.

We added some big loud speakers into the mix to blast music over the worksite(s) and the music seemed to help bring our two groups together into an even stronger bond. We danced and sang and laughed more today than all of the other days put together. And we made HUGE progress. The roof structure for the shelter in the viveiro is complete and ready for palhas (thatch). The flat areas where the main structure of the garden was are all cleared. The chicken coop is almost ready for its new concrete floor to be poured.

We all went to the river (locals included) and had a blast continuing to sing and dance together in the water and on the beach. It just seemed like we had reached a new level of bliss, though we thought we were pretty blissful already. How nice!

After dinner, we discussed the fact that the locals are asking us to stay as long as we possibly can, so we are rethinking our departure date from here so we can maximize our impact. (Don’t worry: we are still flying to California on the same day as planned!) We come here to participate in what we call “conscientious collaboration” and it seems that we reached that state today and can maintain it for the duration of our stay from this point forward. So it’s worth stretching our stay in this community as long as we possibly can to reach our highest potential.

We awarded one more purple bike at the end of the day, this time to Katie. Katie has been a little under the weather for the past few days, though not actively ill – more like ache-y and worn out, but not throwing up or anything like that. So we waited until she got back to her bubbly happy self to honor her. She has gotten up and stayed on it every day even though she wasn’t operating at 100%, and took care of her team duties and group responsibilities like a champ. She has also shown great compassion toward all of us, checking in on how we are doing/feeling, and taking care of us in any way she can.

Further, we are celebrating her because she will return from this trip to face four (4!) interviews for Ph.D. programs. One of them means that she, too, is going to leave us just a bit early to make it to the full agenda for one of the programs she is pursuing. We’ve noticed her exceptional insights and are pleased to learn that graduate programs are noticing too. We’ve already taken to calling her “Dr. Katia” and it seems to fit. Now we just have to wait to see how all of these interviews pan out. We have no doubt that she will have many choices! Welcome, Katie, to the Order of the Purple Bike!

We feel the momentum really picking up over here and we are ready to keep it up. We'll be moving earlier than usual to get as much done as possible. We are PUMPED!