Hoarse Speak

So less than a week before I start the trek back home. This past week has been good, Ana and I have been talking a lot about our future plans and are both looking forward to being home again. She's staying here another month.

Last weekend, we were invited to a birthday party out on a farm where about 50 people showed up for a Mass and feast. The woman who's birthday it was turned 66 and still rides her bicycle into town twice a week to buy groceries and whatnot. As it took us over 20 minutes to get there in a pickup truck, I was impressed - I'm sure she'll live to be 106 at this rate. Farms in the Bahian sertão are quite different from North Carolina farms - If people are lucky, they've been able to actually stucco their houses, a lot are still just taipa (mud brick and wattle) with tile roofs. This woman, Maria, had a very simple house, but stuccoed with a single solar panel for lights at night. The stove was a simple wood stove built from stone and concrete like you might have seen in houses 60 - 100 years ago. She also collected all her rain water into a covered cistern for drinking; she had water delivered for the animals and for cleaning. For the celebration she had slaughtered two goats and she and her daughters and perhaps some neighbors cooked up a mess of rice, beans, macaroni, and farofa to go with it.

Here are some pictures of local kids practicing some horsemanship across the street from our house for the 17th anniversary celebration of the city.

The rains have finally started and brought with them spectacular thunderstorms as well as some relief from the oppressive heat to be replaced with oppressive humidity and flies - the flies are infinitely more annoying than the mosquitoes which mainly come out at night and can be avoided by a bed net. Aside from the annoyance of the flies, I love the desert when it rains as everything turns green and the cactus flower.

Unfortunately, when the rains come, the Martians invade. I though I had escaped the walkers in the dunes of Ceará, but they seem to have found me in Sobradinho. At least I was able to collect some photographic evidence:

Images of the walkers decending in the evening


Destruction of a local pentecostal church

Luckily, finding only poor farmers, fishermen, goats, cows and vaqueiros, the Martians satisfied themselves with the destruction of the Pentecostal church then moved on across the Caatinga towards richer hunting in the coastal areas.

Ana and I celebrated our luck by coming into Juazeiro and eating at our favorite restaurant here: Papa's Bode Assado (Papa's roast goat) - the best place for goat in Juazeiro. It's a place with only outdoor seating, plastic tables, cheap beer and two things on the menu: Half order of goat or Full order of goat either with or without fat. We usually get a half order without fat.

We're both looking forward to going back to a vegetarian existence when we return to the states.

Well, I'll let the photo speak for itself…

As can be seen, safety first. I have been electricuted minorly by a myriad of these death traps. This one was in our hotel in Fortaleza, and the only way to shut it off without getting zapped was to get out of the shower, put rubber soled shoes on and turn the water off. The other day, I got shocked by the stream of water coming out of the side port at the base of the shower head when the little hose popped out on the one at our place in Sobradinho. The tapwater is so warm by afternoon in Sobradinho that heating the water isn't really necessary this time of year, but disconnecting or otherwise tampering with the thing is probably akin to playing with a live rattlesnake - especially given Ze Caçola's (our slumlord) Kwality wiring.

As we were heading to Salvador for a meeting that Ana had to attend today, we decided to pass through the town of Canudos, the sight of the war of canudos also known as Antonio Conselheiro's rebellion. The original site has been flooded due to a dam project on the river and the new town is about 3-4 km away.

We took the bus from Juazeiro - which was an agonizing 6 1/2 hours (5 of which were on dirt roads averaging about 30kph) - arriving in Canudos at almost 10pm. We'd made a reservation at a pousada in the Rough guide, but no one seemed to know it or where it might be. When Ana asked about the address, one guy said that the praça she was asking about was in another town. Luckily there was a pousada in town and it was a short walk from the bus office. The new Canudos was probably a town of about 5 thousand people, but that's just a guess. When we got to the pousada, we lucked out because there was another set of travellers who were hiring a guide to drive them out to the state park and battlesite and they offered to let us in on their tour if we split the cost. The people who owned the pousada were really interesting too, they were telling stories that their parents and grandparents had told them about Antonio Conselheiro and Canudos. It was interesting for there to be a sort of living memory of the city and the ideals that Canudos held for the people who trekked from all over the Sertão to be part of the city. They even had a cannon ball from the siege.

The park itself is mostly the battle site. There is one area called the Vale do Morte (valley of death) where most of the massacre took place. The 4th expedition of about 9,000 troops finally broke Canudos, though at the loss of half the expedition. There are still trenches dug in the hilltops where the Conselherenses defended the city from the soldiers. One of the plants that grows in the area is called the Favela tree, its leaves are thorned to protect it from being eaten, and it grows to be about 10-15 feet in height. I'm not sure, but I think the word favela for the brazilian slums of displaced people comes from Canudos and the favela tree…