Why have Ed and I traveled twice to Brazil, exploring different parts of the country for the whole month of August in 2012 and 2016? We do love to travel and explore the world when we can, but even so, the Brazil vacations are a particularly grand commitment of time and resources for us. The answer lies in Ed’s history with Brazil. In the early 1980’s he spent three years in Brazil, working in a program similar to the Peace Corps.
Pernambuco is the the Northeastern bulge of Brazil
Orobó
And now, without further ado, Edward Elder’s article:
Pernambuco Memories
I lived in Brazil as a volunteer for the Mennonite Central Committee from January 1983 to December of 1985. We began in Brazil with 3 months of language training in Recife. While not as obviously lovely as neighboring Olinda, Recife is considered the Venice of Brazil for the many rivers and canals that cut through it. It has some truly wonderful beaches, even if there is some risk of being bitten by a shark. I never actually heard of anyone being attacked while I was there, but there are plenty of signs up now.
After getting some facility with the language, I moved with another volunteer to the town of Orobó, which is about 100 km from Recife. At the time this would take about 3 hours, either by bus or cômbe (small van), because the roads were so filled with potholes. On Danny and my first trip to Brazil in 2012, we made that trip and the roads at least had not changed much. At least the road to Orobó had not changed. The road to Caruaru on the other hand was fantastic, beautiful and smooth.
Ed tried to find the road he used to take out of Orobó to get to his farm house, a 45 minute walk from town. But Orobó had changed too much since 1985.
This man remembered all the volunteers who came with the Mennonite Central Committee. He recalled that Ed had trained his wife in public health.
The Mennonite’s had asked for a volunteer to help train people from the countryside in basic medical services to help expand the reach of Brazil’s marvelous (on paper) health care system. Each town should have a Basic Health Unit, with larger city’s having Intermediate Health Facilities and the major city’s having state of the art Tertiary Health Units. When I got there, I found that there had been a bit of a miscommunication and no one in Orobó had known this is what I was going to do. So, my partner and I moved to a small house in the countryside and began doing our volunteer work as best we could. He was there to help with rural agricultural development, having grown up on a farm in Ohio. Of course farming in the agreste (fertile land) of Brazil is very different from farming on Ohio. And I was to train women in health care, having a year of training in health education from The Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. And the book “Where There is No Doctor”.
Orobó’s cemetery. Thirty years ago Ed helped bury two of his neighbors, carrying the coffins all the way from the country to town (remember, that was at least a 45 minute walk).
We believe this is the grave of one of the neighbors Ed helped bury. She was a woman who died at 80 of severe burns after falling onto the hearth fire. She refused to be taken to the hospital, and perhaps it would not have helped. Ed did what he could for her until she passed.
Looking back on Orobó as we make our way to find Ed’s old country home.
Yep, Blumenau, founded by Dr. Herrman Bruno Otto Blumenau and 17 other German immigrants 1850 in Southern Brazil and now home to about 300 000 souls, a fifth of which have German ancestry, claims the distinction of playing host to the biggest Oktoberfest celebration in the world after Munich, attracting up to a million tourists to its Bavarian bacchanal. Every other German city can just eat its Brazilian dust.
Quando eu te encarei frente a frente e não vi o meu rosto
Olinda is a beautiful historic town, one of the oldest in Brazil, founded 1535 in the state of Pernambuco. The large metropolitan capitol city of Recife looms just south, contrasting modern high rises at the horizon with the quaint colorful buildings and handsome churches of historic Olinda.
Salvador, in the state of Bahia, is a Brazilian city full of highs and lows. Quite literally, at first blush, due to its topography. The historic center sits on a high plateau separated by a steep cliff from a lower section of town at the shore. Which makes parts of Salvador look like a city on top of a city, like something dreamed up by Escher or Christopher Nolan (see top photo).
For our Brazilian musical selection, it is long past due that I share one of the most famous upbeat selections Brazil has gifted the world. You may not know the title “Mas Que Nada”, but you have surely heard this track’s lively chorus. Possibly no piece of music has been used more often as a shorthand to illustrate Brazilian high spirits.
This is the little 4 seater airplane we hired (with some birthday present “mad money”) to take us on a thirty minute flyover across the whole Lençóis region. The pilot and his trainee sat upfront and Ed and I sat behind.
Around ten years ago Ed and I saw an extraordinary Brazilian movie called “The House of Sand”. It is set in a landscape of endless, blindingly white sand dunes. So unusual and otherworldly the film seemed to be taking place on another planet.
Ever since seeing “The House of Sand” I have wanted to explore this fantastical landscape in person. And this August we did it. It required flying into São Luís, the capitol of Maranhão, then taking a 4.5 hour bus to Barreirinhas, the largest town near the Lençóis Maranhenses, from where most tour excursions originate. But even once in Barreirinhas, most routes into the “Bedsheets” require a long, bumpy trek over sandy roads. On the map below, only the black dotted line represents an asphalted road. The red dotted lines are deeply sandy paths over which four wheel drives slosh and jump and jostle their way for at least an hour before you reach the white dunes. It’s like riding a bucking kangaroo.
Above and beside, these great lily pads are called Victoria Regina. Something tells me it wasn’t a Portuguese gentlemen who coined the name.
Two weeks ago Ed and I flew into Corumba, near Bolivia in Brazil’s southwestern state of Mato Grosso du Sul, the main southern access point to the vast Pantanal region. The Pantanal might be best described, to Americans at least, as Brazil’s version of the Everglades. An immense system of rivers and wetlands, with water levels that rise and inundate the land in the rainy season and fall again in the dry season, releasing some ground from a watery blanket. The Pantanal waters are separate from those that form the Amazonian system.
Harpy eagle.
To the right, that’s Ed and me and our head protection (it’s easy to bump your head making your way through and past the tight corners, low ceilings and odd protrusions of a cave system). Below is the entrance to the Santana cave. It looks rather modest for what would wind up being an elaborate, impressive 12 km cave system. Turns out this entrance was blasted open by dynamite a hundred years ago. Originally the opening was much smaller, just enough for the water to pour out and make a strange grumbling sound, which is why it initially was called the Snoring Cave.
Above and beside you can see some of the walkways we took to get through the cave system. Ed says “I love about Brazil that you can do things here that would be considered totally unsafe for tourists in America”.
There are animals that live exclusively in the caves, like this spider.
Ed is looking at a rock formation which is called the horse’s head for obvious reasons.
Today’s tour through Rio will conclude on Corcovado. And I promise you I will be sharing pictures of Cristo Redentor that are unlike the typical postcard pictures or Google Images you will find of the iconic location. Our visit there turned out to be less than typical, and that will be reflected in my photos.
Notes from a Composer 