More on the Amazon

After sitting for a night on my previous blog entry, I realized that I missed some key information on the Amazon.

People of the river live a significantly different life from most westerners, as you can likely imagine. But how? Here’s what I understand. There are two types of housing. One is the house built on a platform that floats at the edge of the river. At about 900 square feet or less, it’s very pared back, with minimal furnishings, but always with a TV and a large satellite dish that sits just outside someone’s window. There’s a docking port on the platform house where you can pull your longtail canoe up to the house and disembark. There’s no electricity. The whole family lives there – grandma, grandpa, Mom, Dad, children, dog, cats.

These people earn their livings from fishing, hunting, and some farming – sugar cane, fruits, etc. They survive on food they catch and eat, and sell the remainder to others and use that money to buy things like clothing, candles, gas, sundries, etc.

The other style appears more affluent, though not significantly different in construction or format. A small dock, just a short wooden platform allows a person to dock their longtail canoe. Up the hill is the house, which has some small amount of external decoration and even a patio. The house is up on stilts so that, in the high water season, the house stays above the waterline. Om and Dad and the children live here. About 100 yards away is another house, similarly constructed, which houses Grandma and Grandpa. In another direction, about 100 yards away from the main house is another house, again with the same construction. This house is for a grown child with his own family, or perhaps a brother with his own family.

These compounds seem to indicate that these families are somewhat affluent. Typically, they have several cows (or more) as well as some farmland where they have small plantations.

Each of these people live secluded – there are no “next door neighbors.” Typically, the closest neighbor is a 15 minute longtail ride down the river.

Being a city girl at heart, this existence baffles me. To have resources at my disposal: education, shops, arts & entertainment – it all seems necessary to my happiness. But I suppose that if you’re raised in this way, that’s simply the way that life is. Many of the guides I met were raised on these riverboats. They left for a few years to live in Manaus or work in a hotel, but they came back to the area and became guides. The guides I spoke to had been guiding for seven or more years. The Amazon River must flow through their veins.

The people here in the North, Amazonians, look different than Brazilians in the South. In the South are the fine European features or African features mixed with European. In the North, far less of that, and instead people look much more traditionally American indigenous. Dark rust skin, black hair, flatter, wider facial features, shorter and broader in body. It’s like the Portuguese didn’t quite make it up here to mix with the indigenous people. I think maybe because the conditions here are so difficult. It kept all but the most tough, rugged Portuguese away.