Boa Festa (and Stingray!)

January 10, 2026             

We aren’t quite in a full rhythm yet, but we’re getting pretty good. And we are either managing to sleep or managing to live without enough sleep. A few of us have felt slightly under the weather (nothing alarming), so we are more committed to sleeping than usual, perhaps. Some people awaken without any assistance, while some people need some real coaxing to come out from under their mosquito nets over their hammocks. We located some true hammock mosquito nets this time, rather than the “princess bed” style ones we have used before. Though we are certain they make us hotter than we need to be, we have all decided to use them, even inside our already-screened oca. 

We haven’t told you that one of our wake-up sounds in the morning is the zoguezogues that live out in the forest near here. We haven’t gotten audio of them yet, but it sounds like a big loud wheezing noise from the tops of the trees. And one day (not every day, unfortunately) there were howler monkeys out there too. They sound like a big machine humming out there. We haven’t seen them in the trees, even though they are clearly somewhere close by. There are obviously tons of bird and insect noises as well, but the monkey noises are the really striking sounds that regularly catch our ears. 

After another bountiful breakfast, we headed back to work. Some of us headed straight into the garden to work alongside Joelma, the local expert on medicinal plants. She is the wife of our dear friend Junio, with whom we work daily (and she, of course, is also a dear friend). She worked with the last DIRT group here to establish a “living pharmacy” in the garden, where she cultivated medicinal plants and taught others about their use. Since that time, she and Junio moved away from Anã for a few years, but they recently moved back. She was disappointed to see that the pharmacy area had become overgrown, but she was also heartened to see that some of the plants survived under all of those weeds. Joelma, along with the president of the community association, Lenivaldo, will oversee the return of the garden to its former glory. 

Several of us helped continue to weed and clear the garden space, re-establishing about twelve new beds for planting, while another set of us made a foray to another local friend’s house to pick up the roofing materials that didn’t come on the boat yesterday. That is, we learned that the stuff that we need was already right here in the community, with the intention of using it for a different purpose. But we got the go-ahead to use that material for our project and then use the material we ordered to replace what we are borrowing. The roof panels are made of some form of fiberglass-like material that is harder (and more brittle?) than most PVC or fiberglass panels that we’ve seen before. They are arguably heavier too. And there were 40 or so to move.

A group of us went with Junio to our other friend’s house with our newest labor-saving device, a rolling wagon we call “the oxcart.” Veterans of past trips definitely remember this vehicle. The one thing that is lacking in our oxcart is, of course, the ox. We have wheels and a platform and axles and a little pull bar across the front, but we don’t have an ox (or any other animal except ourselves). Junio thought that we should put about ten of the panels on the oxcart and move them to the garden, then do the same thing three more times. But we got it in our heads that it was possible to carry more of the pieces at one time. As we reflect on the experience now, we recognize that Junio had a pretty good sense of how the oxcart works, and we did not. 

We piled 22 tiles on the cart for the first load, which wouldn’t have been entirely crazy except that we had to steer the thing with our own brute force. Even with six or so of us giving it all we had, we just barely managed to get the cart where it was supposed to go.   But with some big wide turns and a few back-and-forths, we managed. It’s not entirely clear whether we would have used less effort just making two trips with smaller loads. Nonetheless, we picked up the rest of the tiles (18 more) in one more trip and used our lessons from the first trip to make it work. We didn’t start the roofing yet but we will get it going next week. The DIRTies from days gone by all worked with thatch as a roofing material (finding the palms shoots called “palhas” in the forest, drying them on the beach, folding/twisting them into big fans, then applying them in layers on the roofs). These manufactured tiles are signs of a new era; we can assess at a later time whether these days or the old days are “the good ones.” 

Lunch brought a special treat that we had heard might be on the menu at some point: stingray. All of the fish here are different than what gets served under that category in the U.S. and all are really good. Stingray is a step above. Past DIRTies have encountered stingray for lunch or dinner and Jesse had dropped the notion that we wanted to have it to our friend Tonico, who produced one by fishing for it, as far as we can tell. It is thicker than you might imagine and pretty solid (almost like the consistency of scallops?). It was breaded and fried and we had to be very careful in our portions to make sure that everyone got some and that everyone also got a relatively similar serving of seconds. We succeeded. But we also ate it all. 

After lunch, we knew that we were not going back to work because the entire community was waiting for a big festa (festival/party) that would attract boatloads of people from other communities as well. Of course we were invited, so we decided to go there at about the same time that we would normally go back to work. We slightly dolled up (but in the heat, it’s hard to tell) and ventured to the big community center with a stage. Things didn’t seem to be quite in full swing, but there were tables of people sitting in the open area of the room and there were three or so musicians playing songs that held a pretty similar beat and key. No one was really dancing, as we might have expected. 

We learned pretty quickly that we had a celebrity in our midst: Casey. The local teens (?) clearly see him as exceptionally appealing, apparently partially due to his resemblance to a character (or characters?) from the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters. The teenaged daughter of one of our friends begged her mother to secure a picture of herself with Casey and Casey immediately obliged. The girl practically swooned and might have been on the brink of hyperventilation. 

On the other side of the auditorium, people were having free kick contests that unfold kind of like pool games might. Little matches play out as new teams take on the reigning winners, so someone can hold the field for quite a while if things are going their way. Our teammate Guido (of course) signed up to kick, and we kept hearing that his match was only two matches away, but those two matches went on and on and on. He eventually got his chance (with Oscar as his second) and they managed to get a few goals past the expert Brazilian goalkeepers. In fact, we couldn’t quite tell how they lost the field, but they certainly did. Still, they made a more impressive showing than Jesse and Shawny can recall any of the DIRT teams ever making before. 

Many of us ran for home to take an evening swim and found exceptional joy in this particular dip into the river. There was a ton of laughter and just an overall feeling of comfort and ease that really overtook us there this time. In general, we are a tightknit group. For better or worse, there is very little dead air when any two of us are together. So standing in the warm clear water of the Arapiúns just brought out the joy in all of us and made us happy to be here, happy to be together, and happy to be able to notice how happy we were. 

We had a thick chicken stew for dinner and then did collective reflections about the things that help to boost our spirits. Having learned some of the things that buoy people’s attitudes, we then turned to the next inductee into the Order of the Purple Bike: Brendan!

Brendan is SUPER responsible, both in meeting his own obligations and in helping to read the needs of others in meeting theirs. He has this big ready smile that is always on display and that is very uplifting for all of us, virtually all the time. He works from beginning to end on each job, and does excellent work in all that he undertakes. Shawny dumped the water purification system on him two months ago and told him to learn how it works and be prepared to teach others. He excelled in this task (with quite a bit of support from another party) and has been our chief water advisor throughout our trip. He even filmed a tutorial for future DIRTies to be able to get the system up and running more easily. Shawny and Jesse tried to run some extra stores of water in the morning but found that the batteries were low due to insufficient solar generation up to that point. They got distracted and didn’t get back to the purifying task, but then when the group came back from the worksite, they realized that Brendan would just pick it up and finish the job. Brendan is also extremely curious and genuinely interested in the lives of those around him. Conversations with him are never boring and often make you realize things about your own positions that you didn’t even notice. We are fortunate to call Brendan a teammate and now to call him a member of the Order of the Purple Bike!