People in Manaus eat a lot of freshwater fish and various restaurants offer varieties of fish I have never heard of before. They had names like tambaqui & pirarucu; I cannot recall which were which. All that I know for sure is that I had at least five and maybe as many as eight different kinds of fish. They all had a kind of whitish meat and a mild taste. A lot depended on the way they were cooked and nothing had the kind of strong taste of cold water fish like salmon or trout.
You can see from my pictures what servings look like. Everything tasted better than it looked. I think it was the tambaqui that I liked the best. I don’t know for sure, but in the models you see of the two fish, I think it is the bigger one. It is not served whole, like the others in the pictures.
I just took the advice of the people I was with about what to eat and I was glad that I did. The food was very good and different than I usually eat. I eat salmon and trout, but otherwise my fish comes in squares with breading on it and they don’t stare back at me. Below is the airport & the turtle pond pond in front. Notice also the pickup trucks. Manaus has lots of pickup trucks.
The picture you see above shows a successful outreach to a favela. It was not a big favela, but it was troublesome. I took the picture from the garage of our BNC in Manaus. The BNC folks told me that it used to be very dangerous being near the favela. People would climb up the wall, steal things or just vandalize property.
The BNC was happy when the city government decided to do some renewal. The street you see in the picture used to be an open stream, more of an open sewer. The water now passes under the road, which follows the old water course. The people get to stay in the simple but comfortable houses on condition of decent behavior and keeping their kids in school. There is evidently some provision for secure property rights, but the people I talked to didn’t know the details. Improving physical conditions followed by provisions that establish discipline and some kind of property rights or at least responsibility are the essential ingredients of stability. As we learned in the 1970s, just building houses for the poor does no good and may actually cause harm if it breaks down social bonds. Buildings are important components of communities but it is the human relationships that really count.
Speaking of relationships, the BNC also did its own outreach. They went down into the community, offering some scholarships but mostly just getting to know the people better. Today, they tell me that peace and harmony are more or less established in this particular corner of Brazil. It looks orderly and clean. Somebody is picking up the trash. That is a good sign.
In general, BTW, Manaus is a fairly clean city with significant numbers of trees along the streets. This complex doesn’t have many trees, but they seem to have made provision for parking.
Reaching youth audiences in a meaningful way is a perennial challenge for public diplomacy. We sometimes pander to them, trying to supply vacuous messages in a pathetic attempt to be cool. I don’t like this. We (USG) are not cool in the adolescent way and I don’t want us to be. But I think we already have nearly perfect vehicles for sustained contact with youth. We may not appreciate them because we have been using them for a long time but we have not been using them in the same old ways.
I wrote a note about our BNCs earlier here & here. So far, I have visited BNCs in Rio, Recife, São Paulo and Manaus and that has made me more certain than before that this is a great vehicle. We reach thousands of young people with almost no direct cost to the U.S. taxpayers. BNCs have also played parts in a couple other great programs, that I will describe below. It is the synergy that we are always seeking.
For example, one reason I went to Recife and Manaus last week was to follow up on participants in our youth ambassador program. Young Brazilians went to the U.S. a few months ago. Most of the winners were chosen with the help of the BNCs. The BNCs also did follow up programs with runners-up, as I described in an earlier post here & here. Now they are hosting Americans coming to Brazil as the counterpart of the program. It is a great experience for the young Americans, but it is even more important to the young Brazilians they meet. The program lets us reach all parts of Brazil. Each of the youth Ambassadors personally interacts with hundreds of Brazilians. Through social media and traditional media (they are interviewed in newspapers, radio and TV) they reach even more. One reason this is so effective is that they are in smaller centers too. An official American is a bigger deal in Manaus than in São Paulo and an even bigger deal in Rio Branco or Boa Vista.
In Manaus, I had planned to meet the four American youth Ambassadors who went there. So I invited them to a meeting. I had not counted on all their new Brazilian friends and former Brazilian youth Ambassadors. I ended up with twenty kids at Pizza Hut, excitedly talking about America with me and with each other. They want to know about … everything. They commented that they couldn’t believe that American diplomats could be so open and eat so much pizza. They had a image of us with three-piece suits. The Pizza Hut encounter changed their minds. I am not saying that twenty kids will change the world, or our image here, but, as I wrote above, they talk. It was touching that they worried about spending my money and wanted to chip in for the check. It cost about $R20 a person. We can afford that and it was money well spend. I think I will try to regularize these kinds of meetings with young people. I used to do it a lot in Poland and it worked well. Kids everywhere like pizza. Me too.
The other program I have been following around is the Brazil-U.S. Principal Exchange Program. This one takes the best principal from Brazil and sends them to work with schools in the U.S. It is followed by some of the best American principals who come to Brazil. Each group studies the work of the others and suggests exchanges of best practices. These educators go to places where Americans are less common, like Acre, Tocantins, Mato Grosso or Rondonia. They reach thousands personally and maybe millions through the media.
I spent the morning in Manaus with the principal that went to Amazonas & Acre. Her name was Sandra Boyles and she was a principal in the State of Georgia. She made her report to the State Secretary of Education in Amazonas at a big assembly of school leaders from throughout the state. They met us – literally – with a band and a choir.
I talked to the Secretary of Education Gedeão Timóteo Amorim during lunch that followed the program. I have rarely found anybody so satisfied with one of our programs. He said that he had spoken with the principals that went from Amazonas and that his staff had lots of ideas for following up. In fact, our current good situation is a partial follow up to an even to an earlier program. This guy was an IVP. He told me that he got many ideas about distance educations during his official visit to the United States. Amazonas is mostly rain forests and it has few roads. People have to travel hours by boat along the rivers or they have to fly. Amazonas today has one of the best organized distance learning systems in the world. And we helped; our program made a big difference. And the authorities in Amazonas recognize and appreciate it.
Our principal was treated like a rock star by the HS students and she told me that this had been her experience during his whole time in Acre and Amazonas. Students, teachers and administrators flocked around to have their picture taken with us or to offer their words of English. With the social media, they are sharing these pictures and sharing their experience. She told me that it had been like this during her whole trip. The other principals confirmed this with their own stories. I lost track of the number of times I heard some variation of “Americans are so much better than we thought from the news or movies” I heard from the kids.
I am certain that we will have had a lasting positive effect on Brazilian education and I think the exchanges of ideas will have a lasting positive impact on U.S. education. But strictly from the public diplomacy point of view, I don’t think we could have made a greater impact on youth audiences in any other way. These programs work.
As much as we want direct contact with the youth audiences – future decision-makers- which these programs give us, I still believe in the imperative of reaching current decision makers. This exchange program got us in close personal contact with decision-makers like principals, politicians and state secretaries of eduction who will decide what to do now. The principal I was working directly with in Amazonas has impact in the states of Amazonas and Acre. This program also sent principals to Alagoas, Ceará, Espirito Santo, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Norte, Rondonia, Roraima, São Paulo, & Tocantins. Suffice to say that the got to places were our public diplomacy would not otherwise reach. They talked to people we would not otherwise meet and had experiences we will never have. Beyond that, there is a network that has been created. This year’s principals are benefiting from those that went before and so shall it be in the future. I repeat because it bears repeating that the American nation is greater than the American government. A program like this lets our public diplomacy leverage the power of the American nation.
I also repeat again – just about everything we do in public diplomacy is simple. Success depends on energy and persistence in the application of things almost all of us know to do. We have to get out of the offices and among the audiences, fewer meetings with each other and more meetings with audiences. And we have to leverage the efforts of others. We all know that. It is simple, but maybe not easy to do. My first weeks have included lots of travel and literally hundreds of meetings with Brazilians. This “boots on the ground” approach is also something that works. I hope I have the energy to keep it up and to keep up with the Brazilians.
One more thing to add about our youth outreach. We are using the interaction of old and new media very well. During my stop at the TV Globo in Manaus, I ran into two of our vice-consuls, Dustin Salveson & David Fogelson doing TV and then online interviews about visas. Nothing is we do really more interesting to Brazilian audiences than visas. There are lots of myths and misconceptions. Almost all Brazilians now who seek visas get them. This is a change from years ago, but many people still believe the old system is still in place.
Beyond that, there is essentially no wait for student visas. I asked our vice-consuls to repeat that early and often. You have to repeat the same message over and over. It gets boring for you to do it, but we have to remember that most people are hearing it for the first time and even if they heard it before, they probably did not pay attention. Our vice-consuls did a great job. You can see the pictures of the “event”. This is a trifecta. We get television, live-online interview and a written record.
I believe that you have to understand before you can try to be understood, which is why I am doing so much contact work and travel in Brazil. I am learning a lot and my Portuguese is improving too. The more I see of what we are doing in Brazil, the more encouraged I become. Our colleagues of the past laid a great foundation and our colleagues now of doing a great job. Beyond that and most important, the Brazilians like and appreciate what we are doing. I have always been lucky with my posts, but this one seems to be beyond great fortune.
CENTENE (see link) has the challenge of getting science into common use. Centro de Estudos e Sistemas Avançados do Recife (C.E.S.A.R.) does that as its primary task. Its job is innovation or more correctly translating innovation into profitable and sustainable enterprises. I talked to Claudia Cunha and asked her what she meant when she used the term innovation. This is not a simple question. Innovation is one of those terms that everybody loves but sometimes defines in different ways and often when people say innovation, they mean totally new products, but don’t include the actual application. I was pleased to see that we agreed on the more inclusive definition. Innovation, of course, includes new technologies or processes, but it also includes different ways of using old things or organizational changes that increase productivity. And it always means actually bringing improvements outside the think tank or the laboratory.
As a sidebar we talked a little about the challenges of productivity in the recent economic downturn. All wealth creation is ultimately based on productivity, but productivity means that you can produce more of the things you want with fewer inputs of time, materials or labor. In other words, productivity – in the short run – costs jobs. More precisely, productivity improvements costs jobs in existing enterprises and in existing clusters, while creating them in other places where they might not be seen as the result of productivity, not a good argument for politicians. This is a problem as old as innovation, but it is worth thinking about it all the time when arguing for more productivity.
CESAR is an incubator and a consultant. It works with existing firms (such as Motorola, Samsung, Vivo, Oi, Positivo, Dell, Visanet, Bematech, Bradesco, Unibanco, Banco Central do Brasil, Siemens, Philips, CHESF e Agência Nacional de Águato and others) to improve their products and processes. It also provides financing, incubates and then sells off startups. We couldn’t talk about all the aspects of the work. They maintain strict separation of lines of endeavor, since they are working with proprietary information.
Suffice to say that this is another non-profit that makes a good living. They want to have “profit” in order to do more. Profit, after all, is the price of survival. The CESAR method has been successful in Pernambuco and now has been established also in CESAR Sul, in Curitiba, Paraná. I don’t know why they still call is CESAR. Maybe it should be CESAPR (for Paraná).
My pictures are not from CESAR. They didn’t want me to take pictures, lest I inadvertently reveal some proprietary information. The pictures are Fortaleza, where I made a stop on the way to Manaus. I got them from the plane just before they made us turn off electrical devices, which I learned includes cameras. This is still in the Northeast (CESAR’s district) so I figured it was appropriate enough. Up top is a low rent district that still has a nice sea access. Below is the city itself and finally are some windmills taking advantage of the steady winds.
Recife and the state of Pernambuco are some of the places in Brazil that have changed the most in recent years. In fact, the whole of the Northeast has been changing. It is still the poor part of the country, but it is catching up. Recife is now a center of high technology and a magnet for high tech businesses. Centro de Tecnologias Estratégicas do Nordeste (CETENE) is a part of this.
CETENE was founded in 2005 by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Its mission is to develop and disseminate technology in the area of the Northeast. This includes nanotechnology and biotechnology. One of the main thrusts is the development of energy using the resources of the Northeast, which include lots of sunshine (for solar energy) and long growing seasons. They are working on plant varieties and biotechnology that will produce fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel more efficiently. They are also cooperating with EMBRAPA to produce blight resistant varieties of plants for the Northeast.
I hit it off well with Giovanna Machado, who specializes in nanotechnology and her colleague Andréa Baltar Barros, who does biotechnology. Biotech and nanotech are truly the industries of the future since they deal with basic materials we use to construct our lives and with life itself. Giovanna is interested with working with us on a mentor program for women and girls in science. Our role would be to facilitate the sharing of American experience, maybe do some CONX programs or even a speaker tour. Our Consulate is working on this program.
The facilities at CETENE are modern and well equipped. Most interesting for me was the electronic microscopes that can see down past the molecular level (see nanotech). These devices are so sensitive that vibrations caused by far away traffic or even the waves on the sea can cause them to malfunction. Giovanna told me that the ground in Recife is a little unstable. The city is not build on bedrock. To address this, CETENE has an elaborate system of balances. We talked about the strength and versatility of carbon nanotubes and the strange properties of elements at the nano-level. Gold, for example, is a superb conductor and catalyst, but very expensive. At the nano-level a less expensive metal such as copper can be made to have the same properties as gold. It has to do with surface areas. The surface area is the only part of a material that really interacts with others. Nanotech can alter this interaction. Nanotechnology has the capacity to essentially eliminate shortages of crucial products, such as rare earth elements, since manipulating substances at the molecular level make other things do the same job. Manipulated copper might be ersatz gold, but if it behaves like gold in the way you need it to, does it really matter? The dreams of the alchemists may yet be realized in ways they could never have imagined.
Just to add a little background – A nanometer is a one billionth of a meter. How small is that? It is so small that a human hair is 100,000 nanometers thick, an average man is 1.7 billion nanometers tall, a strand of DNA is 2-3 nanometers & an atom is 1/10 of a nanometer. You can’t see a nanometer with your naked eye or even with the most powerful optical microscopes. But we can see them with our electronic microscopes mentioned above and nanotechnology means we can now manipulate matter at the atomic level. This is nanotechnology, one of the most exciting industries of the future.
For most of the activities of our daily lives, the things we can see with our eyes, Newtonian physics works just fine. But when things get very small, on the nano level, elements behave in different ways. A nano-particle is not the same as a molecule. Molecules are stable. Nano-particles are not because they behave according to the rules of quantum physics. Don’t ask me to explain that.
Nanotech is an enabling technology. For example, nanotechnology is already being used in medicine. A nano-particle can deliver medicine directly to cancer cells and kill them w/o affecting neighboring cells. Some nano-particles can be activated by infrared or magnetism. In that case, a nano-particle could be directed to a cancer cell and then activated to get hot and kill the cancers. These advances have developed only in the last five years.
We are now familiar with the stain repelling, wrinkle free fabrics, even sox that won’t stink. These were developed using nanotechnology. We also have self-healing paints. For example, paint on a car that can cover its own scratches. The closest thing to a mass produced commodity product today are carbon nano tubes. They can be stronger than steel but at almost no weight.
Biotechnology is similar to nanotechnology in that scientists are changing the properties of things, in this case living things and their DNA codes. (This has often created reactions among those who fear the new science and there have been bans of biotech products and crops.) It is also similar to nanotechnology in that the things they are working with are very small. I didn’t learn much about the specific biotechnology experiments. I have to admit that I would have had trouble understanding some of it even if we were speaking English instead of Portuguese. But I can give you some of the simple-man conclusions.
Among the things they are working on are yeasts and algae that secrete biofuels (see biofuels). For example, they have some kind of fermentation that produces biodiesel instead of alcohol. They also had some kind of algae that is supposed to break the bonds in water, releasing oxygen and hydrogen. This is what is pictured above. Photosynthesis normally separates oxygen from carbon in CO2. This also separates oxygen from hydrogen, don’t know how. I do know that hydrogen is a superb fuel, but it doesn’t have much mass. In its natural (gas) form, hydrogen has only 1/24 the weight of gasoline and takes up lots more space per unit of energy. That is why it will never be used directly to drive vehicles. A pound of hydrogen has more energy than a pound of gasoline, but a pound of gasoline is much denser. A gallon of gasoline contains four times the energy of a gallon of LIQUID hydrogen, which would require high pressure tanks to maintain. But hydrogen can be used to generate energy using fuel cells at fixed locations and since energy is fungible to some extent this will address the liquid energy problem.
We talked a little about cellulosic ethanol. I used to have great hopes for that, but I don’t anymore. They told me that the science would eventually make it possible to make ethanol from cellulose at an acceptable cost, but the real market for it might not be there.
For a little background – Cellulose is common in farm and forestry wastes and is “available” as a feed stock, but it also has other characteristics. Most notably, cellulose waste is bulking, heavy and it tends to burn well. It will never make practical sense to move all this stuff to factories to be turned into ethanol, a process which will produce relatively little energy in return for the massive input. The most useful alternative is what the Brazilians already do with bagasse (the mostly cellulous remains of sugar cane after the sugar is extracted) and what many pulp, paper and wood mills do with their sawdust and scraps: burn them on site to produce electricity. This is a good use if we remember the more inclusive word bioenergy instead of the narrower biofuel. This woody biomass is a vastly underutilized bioenergy source. If we use electric cars, it would be good if the electricity is produced from a carbon neutral source such as woody biomass.
In Brazil, not only does the bagasse fuel most of the ethanol plants that use sugar as a raw material, they also produce electricity for the Brazilian grid. It is especially useful because the cane harvest season coincides with the dry season in Brazil, when the hydroelectric plants have less water. Why would you give up the real benefits of bagasse as a fuel to chase the chimera of cellulosic ethanol?
The most promising bioenergy that might replace petroleum is not really bioenergy at all, but rather is a byproduct. Much of our modern industrial society is petroleum based and much of that is not the stuff we burn. Plastics, drugs, fertilizers and many composites even the paving on our streets is petroleum based. We could replace liquid petroleum fuel a lot easier than we could do without many of these petroleum based products. But when we recall that petroleum is a biofuel, we can see that we could use bioenergy production to replace petroleum in many of these uses. In fact, Middle Eastern potentates feel more acutely threatened by developments in alternative materials than they do the development of alternative fuels. As long as we need the “byproducts” production of oil etc is assured.
The problem for CETENE, they told us, was the difficulty they have in translating science into practical applications. We talked about other research parks in the U.S. and I mentioned Research Triangle in North Carolina. I was surprised that they did not know about it, but we will follow up with information and maybe a CONEX program or speaker tour. We will be in touch.
It is hard to get a taxi driver’s opinion about things, unless you ask. They aren’t a statistically valid representative sample of the population, but they know the city better than average and they get to meet lots of different people, so it is worth asking. I rode in eight taxis in Manaus and decided to get something more from the exchange than transportation. I started with similar questions. (1) How long have you lived in Manaus and (2) How do you feel about the changes in the last ten years? That kept the conversation going for the rest of the trip, no matter how long and one trip took an hour.
All but one of the drivers had grown up in Manaus and the one who didn’t had lived there more than forty years. This was a bit surprising, because they all told me that most of the people in Manaus are newcomers. Maybe taxis drivers are uniquely recruited from native populations. But besides the guy who had immigrated to Manaus, nobody had ever gone anywhere else, not even other parts of Brazil. They explained that Manaus was like an island. It was not connected to the rest of Brazil by any road that you could use. To get to Manaus you had to fly or take the boat up the river. A couple grumbled that this was a kind of conspiracy by the elites in the rest of the country, who wanted to prevent competition from the new frontier regions. One guy told me that there used to be a road that went west across Amazonas and connected with Rondonia and from there to Brazil in general, but the road had fallen into disrepair and was now been reclaimed by the jungle. They blamed foreign NGOs and environmentalists for preventing repairs and improvements.
Manaus has grown fantastically in the last ten years. Although it is far from everywhere else, it has a port on the Amazon that can handle ocean going trips. Once you get a container on the boat, shipping costs to any other seaport of the world become much less important. It can cost less to ship bulky cargo thousands of miles around the world than it does to ship a hundred miles on some of Brazil’s roads. Manaus has a free trade zone, which has attracted all sorts of assembly industries. They assemble computers here, no surprise, but they also make heavy things like cars and Harley-Davidson motorcycles, thanks to the capacity for cheap shipment by water.
All this growth is a mixed blessing. The city’s infrastructure is not up to the population growth. A couple of the taxi drivers told me that they used to play football on the streets that are now so chocked with traffic that it is hard to run across them to the other side to safety even when the light in in your favor. One of the drivers told me that there are 3000 more cars on the streets every month. This might be apocryphal, but it gets on the perception of the problem.
Many of the buildings and whole neighborhoods are new in Manaus. There is a feeling of growth and vitality. It is becoming a high-rise city, although there are some nice green and low places in the old city, as you can see in the pictures. It would be nicer if the transportation network could keep up. Mass transit is not good. They have plans for a monorail that is supposed to help with all the traffic associated with the World Cup. Of course, having it ready by the time the World Cup rolls around in 2014 is a low probably event. It is expected to go only thirteen kilometers anyway. It would not address the problems of the large and growing city.
A couple of travel & taxi-tips – there are not enough taxis to meet the demand during most of the day, but especially during rush hours. It is not like São Paulo or Rio. Taxi stands tend not to have taxis waiting. You have to call. Traffic is increasing daily. You need more time between appointments than you think. Distances also tend to be a little greater than you would think if you were thinking about a more densely packed cities like Rio or São Paulo.
Evangelical Religions
Besides the new buildings, the thing you notice driving around Manaus are the many protestant churches and meeting houses. They are mostly store front affairs, but some are really big. I didn’t ask the taxi drivers about their religions, but one volunteered that Jesus had changed his life. And they all talked about the growing religion.
I don’t know the figures, and I am not sure figures would be accurate anyway, but it seems that Manaus has more evangelicals than other places in Brazil. This would seem to track with the idea of migration. People willing to make big changes in their lives in one way, for example moving to a new city, are also often more willing to change their lives in other ways, like converting to a new religion.
The protestant religions are mostly native Brazilian, i.e. they are not the result of recent foreign proselytizing or foreign immigration. I say recent, because clearly the Baptists and Pentecostals so widely present in Brazil did not originate here, but they have been fully Brazilianized so that now the people seeking new converts are Brazilians. Brazil is evidently even sending missionaries to other places like Africa and even the United States.
In any case, the many new churches are self-sustaining with local support. I heard about, but did not actually see that a new Mormon Church was being constructed. I also heard that a mosque was being built, but this is not a native development. According to what I heard, it is being implanted with Arab money, maybe Saudis, but that is all the information I have. There is a significant Arab community in Manaus, but many are Christian Arabs, whose families have lived in Brazil since the time of the Ottoman Empire, and many with no particularly strong religious affiliation. Brazilians generally seem tolerant of religious differences in an easy-going way.
I learned a lot from my taxi experience, but I followed the trust but verify rule, i.e. I asked others too at my other meetings and there was significant concurrence. For example, I asked a few educators about the idea that Manaus was being disadvantaged by elites in other parts of the country. They said that they personally did not believe that to be true, but that lots of people did believe it and they could find examples. I suspect my taxi research is as useful as any focus group. Way back in MBA School I was officially trained as a researcher. After all, it was only a quarter century ago.
Speaking of taxi knowledge, I have a story from São Paulo too, this one a little less serious. In the morning, one of the drivers told me about a football game to be played between Corinthians and Americana MG. He told me that Corinthians were the team of the people and that all good people in São Paulo liked them. That evening in another cab I heard the game on the radio. I figured it must be that game, so I said that to the drivers. It was and Corinthians were ahead 1-0. I commented on the game and the driver was surprised and delighted. When Corinthians scored a second goal, he said I was good luck. And when it came time to pay, he rounded the fare down $R 5, which is not common for taxi drivers to do. Of course, the truth was that I had deployed every bit of knowledge I had on the subject. Good he didn’t ask any more questions about football.
I had never been to the Amazon rain forest before and I am not sure that I have been there now. Manaus is indeed the heart of the Amazon rain forest, the place where the Rio Negro (Black River) meets the Rio Solimões to form the Amazon. But Manaus is a very big city. It has more than 2 million inhabitants and you can easily forget that you are in the Amazon when you are stuck in traffic and surrounded by tall buildings.
My appointments included the usual meetings with journalists, academics and a stop at the local BNC. These are things I would do in any other city. I did, however, get to make a stop in the remnant of the forest. As the city was growing rapidly, a few farsighted people figured that it would be good to have a big green and natural place in the middle of what would become the greater city. They set aside – and really defended – a large area of natural forest. It is called the Bosque da Ciência and now features native forests and animals such as manatees and otters that were injured and brought to the place.
I was a little surprised by the forest. The trees were not a big as I thought and there was a lot more brush on the ground. I read that rainforests were so dark because of the shade of big trees that there was not so much growing on ground level. This was not a completely natural place, so maybe it is like our own temperate forests, i.e. thicker when they are reestablishing.
Maybe it sounds strange, but the Amazon forest I saw just reminds me of being around a lot of really big house plants. Many of the species are the ones or like the ones that decorate our windowsills and offices. Look at that picture of me with the giant leaf. It gives a the thought of falling leaves a menacing aspect. The tree on the side is thought to be the oldest in the park, at least 600 years old. It is mostly hollow and provides a home for all sorts of animals.
My ostensible reason for visiting the forest was to accompany a group of U.S. youth ambassadors and their Brazilian counterparts, as well as their escorts from the BNC. I got there before they did, so I had a chance to look around in the company of one of the young Brazilian guides. It was hot and humid, but I just love being in the woods, no matter where. I understand, of course, that I couldn’t survive long if I were actually in this wild. The first thing I noticed was a kind of howling sound. Big cicadas were responsible. You can see what they look like in the picture nearby. The sound was more musical and a lot less annoying than the kind of mechanical sound similar bugs make in North America.
I went into a little museum, were I encountered a group of Brazilian school kids. I was evidently more exotic than the animals. They literally flocked around and followed me, bashfully saying words in English. It was funny. I guess Americans are rarer around here than the cool animals.
I got a very interesting fact talking to one of the scientists. She said that they are studying the ecology of the forest in a very broad sense, including studying the habits and culture of the people who live in the woods. She said that they had to persuade forest dwellers to change their long-held habits. One of the cultural habits that needs to change is the slash and burn agriculture practiced by the natives for generations. Of course, I knew about slash and burn agriculture. I learned about it in anthropology classes many years ago. But I guess I didn’t focus on it in the modern context.
The natives have been using slash and burn for thousands of years. It was a sustainable kind of agriculture because native populations were very small. The burned fields remain productive for only three to five years using the ashes as fertilizer. After that, the farmers have to move on and clear new land. Obviously, this destroys lots of forest, but with low population densities the forests grew back before the stone-age farmers came back. Think about what this means. It means that the tropical forests are not very old, although a few very old ones would survive in limited areas, especially around rivers or ravines. Even with low densities, it is likely that forests would be slashed and burned every fifty to 100 years. This seems like a long time and it is a long time in human terms. But in a forest terms, it is not. My pine forests go from inception to final harvest in around 35 years. The rain forest is essentially a kind of extensive farm. It also means that the trees can grow back rapidly. It is a hopeful thing.
I bought an interesting book at the airport in Brasilia, “Guia Politicamente Incorrecto da História do Brasil” (A Politically Incorrect Guide to Brazilian History) and read it on the plane to Recife & Manaus. It was the #1 non-fiction best seller on Veja Magazine and featured lots of debunking of popularly held misconceptions. Among other things, it talked about the treatment of the forests by native Brazilians. They burned them regularly and it was actually the Jesuits who taught them that the forest should sometimes be left standing. This is very similar to the case in North America, as I have often written in my forestry blogs. Fire is the favorite tool of stone-age man. It is really the only way they can clear and manage forests. Stone axes just don’t do the job. Anyway, my airplane reading fit exactly into my on the ground information. Sweet. I want to get a much more in depth study of the rain forests and get to know them in the ways I know my North American woods of home. It will take a lot of study as well as contact with somebody who really knows the biomes.
My trip to Manaus taught me a couple of things. First, Manaus is a big city that only happens to be in the Amazon. I worry about the urban advance. Second that the Amazon forests were regularly disrupted and burned long before the European arrived. On the plus side, it means that renewal is possible.
The pictures are explained in the text or need little explanation. The otters are very cute, but they are aggressive. If the put two of the same gender in the same place, they will kill each other. They eat mostly fish and breed rapidly. The Amazon manatee you see being bottle fed does not breed very fast. They are at greater risk. The local river dwellers and natives eat them given the chance. The popular local name for them is river cow and some people think of them exactly as that. Come to think of it, we used to call them sea cows before they picked up the less pejorative name of manatee. Manatees are harmless herbivores. Other things inhabit the water, like the alligator or Jacaré. You can not easily see it laying there in the plants. They have brains the size of a peanut, but they don’t need to be very smart to bite down. I am not really very fond of them.
This is another of my out of order posts. It is from my trip to Rio a while back.
National Basketball Association (NBA) players came to work with kids in the Complexo de Alemão, which just a few months ago was one of the worse and most violent favelas in Brazil. It requires the sustained intervention of the Brazilian army and police to push out the drug dealings and retake control of the neighborhood. They are employing a kind of counterinsurgency strategy that I recognize from Iraq. It is the “seize, hold, build” strategy at work. General Petraeus would understand.
The back story is interesting, as one of the top-cops explained it to me. There was a political reaction against the police and the military after the end of military rule in the middle of the 1980s. One of the dominant modes of thinking explained and to an extent excused crime among poor people as a reaction to the violence and disrespect of the authorities. There were obvious problems with the police at the time and there was merit to the idea that the police should act less as an occupying force and more like members of the community, but what amounted to a partial withdrawal of the forces of order had a negative result. Of course, this is a simplified explanation and nothing ever happens for one simple reason, but this is part of the explanation.
In any case, the favelas were effectively out of control. Movies like “Tropa de Elite” show the situation, no doubt with some cinematic exaggeration, but the fact is that nobody would enter the favelas in safety and the crime spilled out into all regions of the city.
Crime was oppressing not only favela dwellers but spilled into other parts of the city. Some commentators almost seemed satisfied that the quality of life for “the rich” was declining because of the fear of violence, but a storm that wets the feet of the rich often drowns the poor. The rich retreated to walled compounds and hired guards. The poor just got robbed and killed.
The Rio authorities decided to pacify the favelas. They started cautiously, trying to bring services into the favelas, building sport complexes. We had our NBA event in one of those complexes. It was/is a nice facility, but until the police established order, it was a used as drug emporium.
Anyway, even the limited pacification efforts annoyed the drug lords of the favelas, who wanted to keep things the way they were. Evidently to show their displeasure and get the government to back off, the drug gangs started to attack and burn cars and buses outside the favelas, but instead of backing down, the government doubled down. It was a heroic moment. State, local and Federal authorities cooperated to retake the territory from the drug gangs. The Brazilian army literally invaded the favelas, taking them back from the traficantes. Following the forces came services. It was the “seize, hold & build” strategy.
Today police presence remains strong and obvious, but the big story is the return of life and vitality to the favela. I was able to walk freely in places were heavily armed police could not tread just last year.
The authorities have no illusions about wiping out the drug trade. There will always be criminals. But there is a big difference between crime that goes on in the world and actual control of territory by criminal gangs. It was important to secure the authority of the government. When they raised the Brazilian flag on the high point of the favela de Alemão at the end of November last year it was a proud day for the Cariocas and all Brazilians.
So far, so good. The streets of the favela are now crowded with people and the shops have products in them. There is a chance now. The security has been established, the essential first step. Now the government is making investments in infrastructure. You can see all the workers in the pictures. It is also an auspicious time because the Brazilian economy is growing and providing jobs. But perhaps the most surprising development, one unpredicted by experts, is the dropping birthrate within the favelas. This will give Brazilian authorities and people of Brazil a breathing space to make the changes they need to make in the culture and nature of the favelas.
The pictures are from the favela. You can see the closeup of what it looks like. The favela is a kind of vertical city. It crawls up the hill. It reminds me of those Pueblo Indian dwellings, only much bigger. One guys roof is another’s front yard and walking the streets near the top means climbing stairs and even ladders.
ABA is one of the newest BNCs in Brazil, only twenty-three years old. Executive Director Eduardo Carvalho told me that when the BNC was founded, they looked to their older cousins for advice and modeled their program on ALUMNI in São Paulo. ALUMNI at that time was aimed mostly at adult students, so that is what ABA did too. They soon found, however, that most of the demand was among younger people, teenagers and children. ABA now enrolls around 3500 students; 800 of them are adults. Preteens and teenagers make up the biggest group.
Four American Youth Ambassadors were visiting ABA for their orientation while I was there. This is only the second group of Americans. The Embassy has been sending Brazilian Youth Ambassadors to the U.S. for more than ten years. The program was so successful that everyone agreed that Americans should make the return trip. The Americans arrived last week and have been spread across the country. I will be meeting with some of those who went to Manaus tomorrow. Their goal is to learn about Brazil, learn a little Portuguese and interact with Brazilians.
Eduardo is enamored with technology and wants to use it throughout his program and you can see his interest all over the building. There are well equipped computer rooms and the library has digital access to publications. I noticed notices without much text taped to walls around the building. Eduardo showed me what they were with his I-Phone. They were I-Phone patches that could be read with the device and each of the patches had a clue, in English, for a kind of scavenger hunt. The students were supposed to learn (and play with) the technology while learning English and solving a puzzle. You can see what the posters look like and the ABA library in the top picture. I will put Eduardo in touch with IIP’s office of innovative engagement. They make I-Phone apps that I am sure will be a big hit in Recife.
Business is good at ABA, both their own and that of others. A big source of income and connections for ABA comes from the business seminars they sponsor or host at their headquarters. Recife has grown into a business capital. Firms are flocking here for the high tech industrial base, including informatics, nanotech and biotech, as well as because of the growth of the port facilities and heavy construction. The port is expanding to handle bigger shipments of agricultural materials from the interior, expected when a new rail line is completed next year. Petrobras is using Recife as one of its staging areas for the exploitation of oil in the big new discoveries in the Pre-Sal formations off the coast. All this business creates business for ABA. People need to learn English and businesses need places to train their staffs. ABA is ideally positioned for both these things.
ABA is an impressive operation. It is not-for-profit, which means that it is not allowed to distribute money to owners or shareholders, but it is – or would be – a profitable enterprise. It produces enough revenue to cover all its costs and do valuable social services, such as provide scholarships and cultural events. ABA also houses one of our EducationUSA advisers. It is a great and growing partner in a great and growing part of Brazil.
I would be remiss not to mention to efforts of our neighbors to the North. Brazilians often refer to us as North Americans and I suppose that can include Canada. The Canadians have claimed some of the space in ABA with their early childhood program called “Maple Bear.” I saw classes of little kids learning English by playing games. Some people joked about “the competition” but I don’t see it that way. The kids are learning English, which means that they will come to the American BNC at a higher level. Beyond that, it is great if more people have exposure to better English at an early age. We don’t offer anything like Maple Bear, so we should be thankful that our farther north-North Americans have stepped in. I don’t think most of the customers care.
My posts will be late an out of order. I am really enjoying my work in Brazil and I asked my colleagues to create very tight schedules for me on my travels. They did. I am usually scheduled with an early morning or breakfast meeting, meetings during the day and then some sort of representational event at night. I don’t write this so much to brag (maybe a little) but to emphasize the scheduling. Back home, some people think the life of a diplomat is just doing fun things … and it often is. It is great fun and personally rewarding to have the chance to meet so many Brazilians and talk to them about such a wide variety of concerns.
But it is also very tiring. I always tell people that everything about doing public diplomacy is simple. You just have to keep doing it and keep doing it. It is also hard to speak Portuguese all day AND at the same time keep track of the important things that are being said. You will read in subsequent posts about our visits to a high-tech complex in Recife. It is hard to talk nanotech in Portuguese. Actually, many of the high-tech words are almost the same, but the concepts are not easy in a foreign language.
The biggest challenge is writing notes. What I post on the blog are derivatives of the notes, so you know what I am talking about. I take out most of the names and some of the details and add a few more touristic details. I generally cannot take written notes during meetings. It would be strange or bad manners to pull out the old note book at every lunch meeting. So I have to write notes within a day or two, otherwise I forget details. If I don’t make a note and share it with others it is not really much of a meeting from the practical point of view.
I think I should add a note about the “tourist” aspects of diplomacy, because this is something I didn’t understand as a junior officer. My first time in Brazil, I mostly worked on the things people call work. I wrote all my reports, made the official points etc. I think I did a good job, but not a great one because I didn’t understand that the fundamental task of a diplomat (IMO) is to understand and appreciate the local reality. I am not talking about the usual tourism, of course, but of a better understanding. The people I contact in Manaus want to know that I have seen and appreciate their Opera House, for example, even if some of them have not actually visited themselves, BTW. So one of the most important tasks is to learn about the points of pride or concern and just be there. Imagine a diplomat in Washington who never had time to visit the Washington Monument or the Smithsonian. His credibility is compromised. So now I make it my business to study the places I go. It makes my job a lot more interesting and makes me much more effective. That is the part the blog posts reflect.
The Brazilians that I meet have often known other American diplomats. The ones that they remember, the ones that were effective, are those that knew and appreciated Brazil, not the ones that effectively delivered talking points about the most recent hot issue. They did that too, but they knew that the message has to be delivered in the proper cultural context.
My rant is done. Have to get to work now.
The picture up top is indeed the Manaus Opera House, which I made sure to see. Below is a picture of modern Manaus. It is a big and dynamic city. You would not know you were in the Amazon, except for the remarkable heat and humidity.
