The Meeting of the Waters

 Tuesday, January 6, 2026

The DIRT team is back in the Brazilian Amazon! After a 26 hour odyssey in which we picked up two extra teammates, we have finally arrived in Santarém, in the state of Pará in northern Brazil. Eleven Saint Mary's College students, two alums (DIRT vet Marlina Barnett-Crespo, of SMC Amazon and SMC Kilimanjaro fame, and Sofia Ahnen, a recent SMC grad who also happens to have dual citizenship in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese), and our Saint Mary's College-based co-leader, Shawny Anderson, made up the group of 14 travelers who converged in the capital city of Brasília to make the journey north into the Amazon. Once we connected at the end of our flights with long term DIRT co-leader Jesse Wheeler, our 15-person team was complete. 

For those unfamiliar with DIRT, it is a longstanding program that started in the SMC January Term program. DIRT stands for Dismantle, Immerse, Reflect, Transform. These concepts form the basis of our approach to entering communities that are not our own to participate in "conscientious collaboration" with those communities as they seek to improve their own quality of life on their own terms. To "dismantle," we carefully look at some of our own preconceptions and expectations about ourselves and the peoples of the communities with whom we partner. We do our best to dismantle concepts that create us/them or superior/subordinate relationships and almost reverse the question "aren't they lucky we came?" to say "aren't we lucky to have been welcomed into this community and these projects with such open arms?" 

As for "Immerse," we seek to live like our hosts live, as long as we are not threatening our own personal and collective safety. We live as they live, eat what they eat, travel as they travel, and approach our collaborative projects using the methods of their local professionals and practitioners. In the Amazon, that means that we travel by boat to a community with no paved roads and virtually no motorized vehicles, we sleep in hammocks every night, we eat amazing local fish and maybe-slightly-less amazing local vegetable (particular mandioca, or manioc), and we do most of our construction projects using hand tools rather than power tools (though we bring along a few battery-powered tools that sometimes come in handy). Our immersion helps us get as close to the community as possible in the short time that we are on site and keeps us from showing up as bossy U.S. Americans telling them how they should live their lives. 

As for "Reflection," students produce daily reflective journals that go beyond the status of diary entries by assessing their own affective/emotional responses to their experiences, the behavioral changes and commitments that might accompany these experiences, and the cognitive/intellectual impacts that they notice. Along with their journals they do daily group reflections, reflective daily blog entries, daily videos, and final short documentaries that also demonstrate their reflective insights. 

And when it comes to "Transformation," we clearly hope to make a positive contribution to the host community through our collaborative projects, (and have significant evidence that we have largely succeeded in this regard), but we also experience our own personal transformations, as we notice new things about our own values and priorities and make new commitments as we go forward in the wake of these undertakings. 

Our primary partner in this trip is the small river community of Anã, on the banks of the Arapiúns River, a beautiful feeder into the mighty Amazon River close by. DIRT groups in the past have participated in projects related to food sovereignty, reforestation, water/sanitation improvements, and contributions to their successful ecotourism program. Overall, this is the DIRT program's tenth trip to this area of the Brazilian Amazon. 

The students prep for their DIRT experience by holding three overnight retreats in the fall, where they participate in readings, seminars, and projects together while also practicing living together by cooking meals, cleaning up, and organizing their gear. They are occasionally joined by DIRT vets who help them learn the ropes and pick up the overall DIRT vibe. They also prepare book reports over Christmas break to teach each other about Brazilian history, politics, economics, and folklore, among other things. Having undergone all of this training, they are ready to depart. 

As of today, we have not yet arrived at our primary destination. Instead, we hit the ground in Santarém and immediately started running some important errands, including going to the open air market down in the city square overlooking two rivers (more on that issue below) to buy our personal hammocks that will be our beds for the duration of the trip. Our local friend Louro (one of the greatest cooks we will ever know) joined us and helped us negotiate prices on a range of different colors and patterns of hammocks. Everyone left with a hammock that makes them very happy already and we haven't even used them yet. 

We then went to a street vendor of agua de coco (coconut water), as he hacked off the ends of cold coconuts and poured out the water within to help us rehydrate after our long travel days. From there we went for local ice cream, sampling unusual flavors like corn, plum, guava, cashew fruit (not the nut), and many abundant local fruits whose names are hard to pronounce, spell, or remember. We loved it. 

We also bought team uniforms to equip us for a series of soccer games in our host community. We can pretty well predict already that these matches we be at least slightly humiliating for us, but we welcome them anyway. We bought some cool blue and black striped jerseys with a contrasting neon green one for the goalkeep. Maybe the beauty of our shirts will stun the opposing teams into giving up a few goals. (Maybe not.) 

We then walked the orla (riverfront) to take in the low bustle of the town, especially out in the river(s), as boats were moving in all directions at all times. The particular attraction of the river here is that the brown Amazon River flows alongside a feeder river that is more blue/black called the Tapajós River. They have different densities due to the silt levels in them, so they actually flow next to each other but barely mix, leaving a long line with brown water on one side and blue/black water on the other. 

This "meeting of the waters" is an awesome sight to see and it serves as a bit of a metaphor for our relationship with the region: we can get as close as possible to the friendly communities here but we will never try to change them to "be like us." We will just run together side by side for a period of time and allow each side of the arrangement to be true to itself. 

All metaphors aside, we are pretty tired from our trek. People say they slept more than they ever have before on planes, which was an excellent plan. The 7.5 hour flight that took us from Miami into the capital city of Brasília also made for a perfect opportunity to switch our body clocks to a 5-hour time difference from our California home. We didn't universally stick the landing, but an early night tonight should get all of us there pretty quickly. 

We get up early in the morning and head for the community boat of Anã to make the four or so hour journey to our home for the next few weeks. We loved the feel of the new city we've entered (Santarém) but we are eager to get to our Amazon home. We are getting mixed messages about communications technology there, as during our last trip in 2020, there was no cell signal or wifi in the community except for a manually-switched computer center with very slow dial-up internet service. Now we hear that there is some connectivity available, but not in the eco-camp area that will serve as our home. We'll figure things out and give you a more clear report in tomorrow's post. 

The video team is working on its daily piece right now and we will post it as soon as possible at the top of this page. We will likely add some photos from today as well. Until then, please rest assured that we are all safe, happy, and awestruck. We intend to keep all three of those qualities front and center during our trip. Please keep checking in and let's see how we succeed!