Celebrating Earth Day on the Loo

In honor of Earth Day, I’d like to introduce you to our new best friend (on the left).

Anyone know what it is? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

It’s a Bio-Digestor!!!!

We’re so excited about this we could just… well…. pee!! And with this, we'll finally no longer have to do it behind the bananeiras.

So what is a bio-digestor you ask? Well, it digests biological stuff. At least at the end stages of that stuff.

In carving out our little spot of paradise (petulant, bratty and trying as it can be), we have done our best to keep it as sustainable and low-impact as possible. Not too hard so far, given that we don’t even have electricity.

But a suitable arrangement for our plumbing and septic had us a bit flummoxed for a while. The traditional way on the roça is either the afore mentioned bananeiras, or if you’re lucky enough to have running water and a porcelain vaso, you build a septic leech field. Well, behind our house and a level down is a large swamp. A beautiful one actually, full of lilies and cattails and birds. It is home to all sorts of animals and plays a very important role in the ecosystem, one that we didn’t want to upset with possible contamination from a nearby septic field.

Enter the bio-digestor. This little beast can handle organic waste of up to 600 liters. After it does its digesting job, it releases from one end water that is tested 99% pure. And from the other end, into a small casement box the effluent gathers which once every 4-6 months needs to be cleaned out. It comes as dry as ash, clean and uncontaminated and can be buried or sprinkled about as fertilizer. Cool, hugh!?

(Here's C with his internet instructions trying to work out with Vicente how to install it.)

But wait, there is more…

Do you know what makes this grand process work? You’ll never guess….

Soda bottles.

Yes indeed! The bio-digestor runs on PET plastic! We were totally blown away when the guy in the store opened up the top to give us a tour and out tumbled chopped up Sprite and Coke bottles. We though they were just in there for packing material, but no! They are actually the filter that enables the anaerobic process to take place. Don’t ask me how, I haven’t quiet figured it out. It’s a design invented by some clever Brazilians (they are very good at coming up with ways to reuse PET plastic) and I think patented as well.

Up until now, bio-digestors have been mainly used for recycling livestock waste. But there are a number of efforts being made, especially in areas where poverty and sanitation are real issues, to bring them into residential/community use. Many bio-digestor designs allow for the methane gas they produce to be reclaimed and used for heating, electricity and cooking gas! How cool is that?

We’re very excited about our newest addition. I was really hoping that we’d have it installed and ready to be inaugurated by Earth Day, but alas, as usual, things are moving slowly. So for the time being, we’re still roughing it in the great outdoors.

Little Reminders

Whenever we walk down the road to our land I feel an immediate sense of gratitude for nature's abundance. Its tenacity, its relentless overwhelming growth that makes it easy to forget what a perilous state our planet is in. I feel like every time we get frustrated with the overgrown fields that need tending to, the weeds that crawl up the back door of the house, the invasive banana trees that sprout up the day after you cut them back, that Nature is there, standing off to the side, laughing at us. She points her finger and doubles forward with the giggles, saying:

“Don’t you get it? I own you. You people are so deluded. You think you can infest the planet, chewing it up like termites, but I’m stronger. And in the end, I’ll will take you down. So go ahead, cut back the brush, plow under the field, burn down that wasp nest. It doesn’t matter, you might as well go on tilting at windmills.”

And then she commands the weeds to grow faster.

But some days I’m grateful for her displays of prowess.

Like on Wednesday. We walked down our road in the late summer sun, the air thick with blue butterflies and end of the season smells. Those fecund smells that radiate out from the underbrush where the sun can’t get through the trees that have grown top heavy and weighted down with flowers. The smells that drift from cool shadowy places, where dry leaves mix with wet earth and dying vegetation and over-ripe raspberries.

We were stuffing ourselves on those raspberries as we walked down the road, and seeing more just out of reach, I started digging my way further into the brambles when suddenly, I came upon this.

So perfect, so delicate and so beautifully necessary. A completely self-contained miracle.

I called to C and our friends and we stood there in awe before quietly backing away so as not to upset the mother. We were grateful, beholden, and a little more hopeful than before.

Summer scenes

I'd like to introduce you to my newest obsession.



Candied figs with fresh farmer's cheese. Here I have managed to restrain myself to only two figs, but rest assured, I could eat the whole jar in one sitting.

Candied fruits in a simple syrup are a big specialty in Minas. You can find oranges candied with the skin, green papaya sliced paper thin and rolled up, mango, peaches and guava. Dried guava sold in big blocks is also a perfect combination with white cheese - they call it "Romeo and Juliet."

But my favorite is the figs. They are like eating sticky green jewels. I finish eating them and my mouth immediately wants the sensation of holding another on my tongue. I think for me this will forever be the taste of summer in Brazil.

And it is summer! It's hot and the days are deliciously long and the green has just exploded everywhere as only it can in the tropics.

The weeds have consumed the sidewalks, and aren't they pretty?



And the sunsets get more and more spectacular by the day (and just a bit scary.)



And speaking of scary...

This was our view of the moon rising last night.



It was a dog symphony all night long.

Weevil Update:

You will be pleased to know that I discovered that my hungry bean bugs were Rice Weevils. (Because you were just dying of curiosity, right?) And how you might ask was I able to identify my little friends so accurately?

Because rice weevils fly and granary weevils don’t.

Aren’t you relieved now that the mystery has been solved?

Also in my research I discovered that new babies can take a month to hatch and if your food gets infested you’d best throw the whole thing out -- or, I also read, you could put it in the freezer for a few weeks to kill ‘em.

After lunch I started picking through the beans for the good ones and got bored/ fed up with the task and left the baking sheet on the counter, to be dealt with later. (Translation: it was going to sit there for a day until I gave up and threw the whole thing out.)

Then over an evening lanche C, out of nowhere, turned to me and said: “What is the world going to do?” I had no idea what he was referring to. Do about what?

He clarified: “People are using 30% more resources than the planet can provide. What is going to happen to us?”

I put the beans in the freezer.

Okay, so when I'm not busy mooning you with weevils, I can be serious for a moment every now and then... So I'll just say this:

While no one is asking you to eat buggy beans we really do have to pay attention to the little choices we make everyday. (Every action leaves a mark – this is the law of karma.) So even though few of us need anything else to sober up the holiday this year, that 30% statistic is a pretty good one to keep in mind – during the jolly season of excessive consumption and beyond. The greatest gift we can give to each other and especially to kids, is to give less stuff (and by doing so, give back to the planet.)

Use less. Consume less. Walk softer and put down that big stick.


(and check this out: http://www.storyofstuff.com/ )

Sugar Craving

Meet Bonitão.


He's got a sweet tooth.

That's right, our new car eats sugar.

Sugar cane that it. Well, the ethanol made from it. Already we are saving a lot on our fuel costs. Which is exciting given that we pay USD$5.50 a gallon for gasoline. (In a country where the majority survive on less than the minimum wage of USD$200 a month -- which probably goes a long way to explaining my previous post on Brazilian fuel efficiency.)

Ethanol is costing today about USD $3.20 a gallon. Of course you don't get quite as good mileage but still it's a considerable savings.

All this also has to be taken into the context that Brazil is now 100% fuel independent. It doesn't need to import anything. So the costs reflect both production and demand, and while I'm sure bureaucracy is certainly involved on a domestic level, the cost doesn't reflect the ups and downs of foreign relations.

Sugar cane is a much better and more efficient crop to turn into ethanol. Even with the problems of slash and burn cultivation, it is a lot better for the environment than corn. You can read more about it in this NY Times article from a couple years ago.

I must say that our one and only gripe with Obama is his continued support of tariffs on Brazilian ethanol. Oh well, he's not perfect and not the messaih, but we love him anyway. Almost as much as the Bonitão.

Fire!

A few smoking strands still left

So here I am again. I make no excuses for my absence and no promises for future posts. Actually I don’t even think I will tell anyone that I am even writing here and just let people figure it out on their own if they please. I never have done anything well under pressure and already have a pretty complicated relationship to writing (I usually sit paralyzed by the blank page until various internet procrastinations wear me down to the point where I turn off the computer) so with all the expectations this bog thing became a chore quicker than I learned to enjoy it. But lately I have been afraid that I will loose my ability to see things here in Brazil with any clarity of perspective. I’ll go “native”… and take it all for granted. On top of my fear that I can’t get anything sensible onto the page without feeling like I’m giving birth to a watermelon, there is the greater one that if I don’t capture the moment now it will flee faster than my attention span run down by a blinking cursor.

We are still in a terrible drought. While in Africa it won’t stop raining, our half of the world hasn’t seen a single drop since May. Winter days have strung us along under a dull and relentless sun: cold in the morning, too hot at noon and nearly perfect by 4pm. Without a chance to be hosed down, the city and occasional tree has been colored a sandy grey by dust and pollution. Dharma sports permanently dirty knee-socks.

Grassland fires are common in the winter here. Sometimes they are intentionally sparked to clear brush, which is illegal. The slash and burn used to be rampant throughout Brazil but C tells me there was a big government campaign to educated people some years ago, and now it happens much less, at least in areas like ours, where there is a small, albeit inconsistent, of control over the populous. Of course in the sugarcane belt of the northeast it is still the standard and accepted technique of cultivation (this by the way will only get worse with the rush to capitalize on the thirst for ethanol) and god only knows what’s happening in the Amazon backlands where the cattle barons run lawless. It still seems like there are a lot of intentional fires set around here too -- so I can’t imagine how it must have been before the public awareness campaign and purported crackdown.

But frequently in dry months the fires do start on their own. This year’s drought has all but looked like the beginning of Armageddon -- the Rapture Index folks would have a field day. All of the hills in and around the city have blackened from burning. On any given day there is smoke and prickly fire-smell drifting in from somewhere. On the street and through open windows curls of black ash float down like devilish snowflakes. One night we were outside having a beer at a boteco at the bottom of our hill when the ashes started landing in our cups. We moved inside and overheard people saying it was the hill behind the hospital Santa Casa – the same hill behind our apartment. We finished our beers, not in much of a hurry -- fire can’t do much to a cinder block construction. Arriving home we found on the end of our street a few red municipal Ford SUV’s belonging to the fire department, and half a dozen firemen standing around watching the hill go up in flames. No water, no pickaxes. Just the typical milling about and kicking the dust. Appears they might have spent their firefighting budget on the cars. I was furious that no one was doing anything and extremely worried about the beautiful trees that wood the hill behind us and do so much make our little street so fresh to live on – not to mention the monkeys that live in them. I was equally furious that I had left all the whites out on the line to dry and they were all covered in soot. In the end it thankfully didn’t get too many of the trees, but the whole unwooded side of the hill that in the summer once turned a blousy green now looms over us charred and sad.

Along with the burnings, a plague of mosquitoes have descended. No one is sleeping at night. The theory is that they have been swept in on the dry winds, driven from the fires in the surrounding countryside. It’s all anyone talks about. In doctor’s waiting rooms, and bank lines and in the town praça the conversations all sound alike. Somewhat baffled, everyone from old men to pimply teens complain and shake their heads saying “never seen anything like it,” “put up mosquito nets on all the beds,” “its enough to make you loose your mind.” The stores have had a run on repellent and the nighttime plug-in remedies that release enough toxins to warrant several pages of warnings but do nothing to stop the relentless whine that wakes you slapping at your ears in the early morning hours. C and I shut the house up at 4pm when the sun starts to set and sleep with the ceiling fan on high and the covers up to our noses. Don’t even get me started on why Brazilian’s don’t make screens for windows. It’s enough to make you loose your mind just wondering.

Kung Fu Christmas

So, given the debate over Christmas trees and some two way e-reprimanding between me and my mother, I decided to put my holiday decorating where my mouth was and experiment with an “ecological” bamboo Christmas tree. Bamboo grows like weeds – quickly and invasively. Two of the empty lots coming up our street are thickly overgrown with it. I sent C down one evening to chop off a good sized pole for my festive ambitions. It looked great in the vase and really brightened up a forgotten corner of our living room. But when I strung it up with the first string of lights it quickly bent over under the weight. This I solved by rigging it up with fishing wire to a few thumbtacks in the ceiling. It wouldn’t tolerate too many decorations, so I settled on a few plastic silver bobbles and some silver dipped miniature pinecones. All of this had to be done with dish gloves on because even though bamboo leaves look delicate and tame they are actually razor sharp little monsters.

I was extremely proud of my efforts for about three days until I realized that an ant highway had been set up between the living room window and my new Christmas tree. At first I hoped that they had been brought in with the tree and were now on a mass relocation exodus, but it became quickly apparent that the opposite was true and my holiday decoration was their new home. Then overnight all the leaves rolled and started dropping off. C suggested it might actually look cool without leaves, a sort of spiky postmodern commentary on a Christmas tree. But Dharma (an incorrigible leaf and flower eater) took a liking to the dead leaves (mmmm, crunchy) and after twice cleaning up post leaf consumption vomit, I cut the whole crumbling bug infested mess down and chucked it into the lot next door -- a week before Christmas.

But in the end, my friend Mika saved Christmas.

A few years ago she heard me complaining that C was a bit of a scrooge and wasn’t in full support of my desire to spend money on a tree. She showed up at my house with a loving gift of a tiny spruce tree with miniature decorations. The spruce didn’t make it to Brazil, but the decorations did, along with a number of origami boxes she made as gifts for her wedding guests. Cute, right? (The bonsai however has seen better days. It’s still making a slow recovery from C’s neglect the last time I traveled to the yoga center.)

Thanks Mika! I miss you!

A politik interlude

This blog was not intended to be overtly political. Those of you who know me know my politics, and it doesn’t take a genius reading any thing I write to deduce my stance. But it is difficult to avoid being somewhat political in writing about my experiences because as an American living as a guest in this country, I am confronted with the politics, policies and perceptions of the United States everyday. Let’s face it, Americans are not well liked around the world these days and as much as we try to whitewash everything for our own peace of mind (so we can sleep at night) citizens of the world did not just suck their dislike of us out of their thumbs. Brazil is probably one of the few countries still having an unabashed love affair with the culture of the United States and one of very few where Americans can travel and be accepted with minimal criticism. But still I am faced with a lot of questions, frustrations and opinions about the USA on a regular basis.

I’m saying all this because my previous entry sparked a debate with my mother over my students not liking the fact that we chop down that big tree that gets lit up at Rockefeller Center every year. Now I know that it is just one tree, and I know that the vast majority of real Christmas trees sold are farmed and that farming provides jobs and even valuable CO2 reduction, etc., and obviously the deforestation of the Amazon is in no way comparable with the farming of Christmas trees. Besides, lord knows I wouldn’t want to go raining PC hand grenades over anyone’s holiday traditions – after all, I used to put up a real live Christmas tree every year in my tiny Brooklyn apartment.

However we do tend to have somewhat short memories, so it’s always interesting to point out that while the deforestation of the Amazon is a very real and serious problem, over 90% of the forests in the continental USA have been chopped down since whitey first set foot in the land. In fact, at the peak of the deforestation somewhere around the 1920’s, we Americans were cutting down our trees at a faster rate than that of the current destruction taking place in the Amazon. Additionally almost 80% of the remaining virgin forests in the continental US, particularly those in the Pacific Northwest, have received the thumbs up for logging.

Anyway, I’ll leave it at that and just say that if my idealistic college-aged students want to get their nose out of joint over one lone Christmas tree in New York, well, I kind of have to let them. Because for them it isn’t about a Christmas tree, but about a sort of general indignity and frustration with, what is in their opinion, the hypocrisy between what we Americans do and say.

All right, enough, I’ll revert to my fun and games and leave the politics out.

Ho Ho Ho

So I’ve been away for a while. I traveled again to the yoga center south of Florianopolis to teach in mid-October and came home to C’s mom visiting, followed by a whole string of other distracting events and well, time just slips away. The trip to Floripa was great, as it was the last time, but even more so as I managed to score a new laptop (with some help from home.) So now fully equipped I will do my best to stay more on top of this blogging thing. No promises though – I’ve cried the promise wolf a few times already so no one would believe me anyway.

For some reason last year I gave my mother the idea that Christmas in Brazil isn’t a big deal. This isn’t at all true. Maybe it was true for us last year. Not having any children, still having a lot of our belongings in boxes and being so far flung from everything routine and familiar, we pretty much ignored Christmas last year. That with the fact that it is so hot here, and I was too timid and inarticulate to do any Christmas shopping by myself, it was hard for me to get in the holiday mood. But Brazilians don’t seem to have any trouble getting revved up for Christmas.

This year the decorating started early in November in some stores and our neighbors had flashing lights strung out on their balcony by mid-month. (Brazilians do have a thing about the full strand flashing lights; although thankfully icicle lights and the computerized twinklers that have several patterns of flash are becoming increasingly popular.) Most of the shopping centers and galleries are very decked out and daily I can look out from my balcony across the city and see more and more lights being added.

Last night we attended the opening celebration of the “Christmas Season” on a jam-packed street. Years ago a very distinguished family donated their factory to the city on the condition that it be maintained as a cultural center. It’s a very old lovely building that houses art galleries, a library and a municipal market. Last night shortly after dark, Santa Claus showed up and was presented a key to the city by the mayor. Then a switch was thrown and all at once the whole building lit up the night.


Even if you are a die-in-the-wool scrooge (like my husband) you couldn’t help but applaud. It was beautiful. Fireworks were shot off over our heads and to complete the awwww factor, 400 children poked their heads out of the windows and began caroling.


Of course it wouldn’t be a Brazilian celebration if it were not without its mix of problems. The street was dangerously packed and there was no crowd control. Looking down at a small child at my feet I started thinking about the thousands of pilgrims killed in hajj stampedes, except here Mecca was a badly costumed Santa Claus sweating profusely in the Brazilian summer heat. And as cute as the caroling children were, they were terribly out of tune and the sound system projecting their voices left C cringing and gnawing his cuticles.

But still, for a little Brazilian city it was a sight -- and hey! even for all it's hype, Rockefeller Center has nothing on us!

Actually this week I began leading English conversation classes and in several different classes the subject of Christmas in New York came up. I was asked if I missed the holidays there (of course I do) and is it really like it is in the movies (big fluffy white snow gently falling on cue on Christmas Eve and romantic ice skating in the shadow of that enormous tree with all the lights.) Sure I told them, sort of. Except the snow is never on time nor so amiable and the ice skating rink is actually tiny, overcrowded and stupidly expensive. Oh, and yeah, the tree is beautiful but it has always pained me that every year we have to go cutting down some really old tree to satiate some sort of desire for a mythic Hollywood Christmas. “What!” my students exclaimed, “the tree isn't planted there?! It's cut down? It doesn’t live there all year round?!” No, I told them, sadly it doesn’t. And with that many offered some disgruntled, under their breath commentary about how Americans love to point the finger at Brazilians for chopping up the rainforest, but seem to have no problem with their own culturally sanctioned destruction of big beautiful trees every year. Yeah, well… what could I say?