Month: August 2018

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Parque Farroupilha

Parque Farroupilha is a big urban park with lots of different features. It is designed to give some variety. When we lived in Porto Alegre, I used to run around the park. It is – was – not big enough and I would have to double back and go in loops, but the variety made it seem a little better.

We lived in Porto Alegre when I was in my early 30s. This is a tough time for erstwhile athletes. You just cannot run as fast as you used to. You fool yourself that somehow harder work will stave off the slowing. It does not. All that happens is that you pull some muscles more often. The good news is that eventually you get old enough that it doesn’t matter.

I appreciate the park now in a different way. I just like to look around and notice the things that I ran past too fast.

A cool thing is how the tree roots grow. Trees in the tropics and semi-tropics seem to develop much wider roots and bases. I took some pictures of these.

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Marizaland in Moinhos de Vento

As far as I am concerned, the parks around our neighborhood in Moinhos de Vento is “Marizaland,” since everyplace around there reminds me of our little daughter, Mariza. She is not so little anymore, but the little white-haired girl abides here. Ironically, Mariza herself can have no memory of all this.

First three pictures are from Park Moinhos de Vento. That means windmills. This is some of the highest ground in Porto Alegre and they evidently had windmills here at one time to take advantage of the stronger wind. None are left now, except a ceremonial one in the park. Picture # 4 is our apartment. We had the top floor. We were always afraid that Mariza would fall out of the windows. They had locks, but parents worry. Last picture is La Basque ice cream shop. We used to love the double chocolate.

Recall that it is winter in Porto Alegre. It never gets very cold here and today was warm, but some of the trees do not have their leaves. It will be very beautiful in spring in a couple months. I said it does not get very cold and it does not by Wisconsin standards. But the relative warmth makes people not concerned about heating buildings, so have to have some warm coats and sweaters for the inside weather.

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World's Best Steak in Porto Alegre

Things are often better remembered than they are lived, so it was with some trepidation that I went to the churrascaria Santo Antônio. I remembered the steak there as the best steak ever and I did not want to confound that good memory. On the other hand … I had to know and I really wanted a good steak.

So I walked down and had the steak with mushrooms that I so liked. They used to make a big deal of cutting the steak with a spoon and they do that still. It was as good as I remembered, the experience and the steak.

Santo Antônio is a modest place, family owned and operated since 1935. Lots of the waiters have been there a long time, but I did not expect anybody to remember me and nobody did. I thought it proper, however, that I mention my thirty years of appreciation, so I told the waiter.

I got to meet the chef and family member Jorge Aita, as you see in the first picture. Next picture is Santo Antônio itself and the last three pictures are from the street where we used to live, Rua Santo Inácio. We were very lucky to live there for our first post.

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Adriana Barbosa founder of Feira Preta

Adriana Barbosa is founder of is the founder of Feira Preta, the largest Afro Brazilian entrepreneurship fair in Latin America and she was named one of the world’s 51 Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD) in 2017. I was prepared to be impressed by Adriana Barbosa after reading about her in preparation for our meeting and watching her performance on the TED stage and she came through in person.

I am not sure how much we can call this an exchange success, since we made connections with Adriana after her success was manifest, but she is a friend and our São Paulo post has a history of support. She participated in a Mission-funded “Voluntary Visitor program “Social Inclusion During Olympic Planning” in May 2010, and two years later, PAS covered partial travel expenses for her to attend the Global Women’s Leadership Network, Women Leader’s for the World program at Santa Clara University in California.

Our post in São Paulo has supported Feira Preta for several years with participation of American experts.

I had the chance to have lunch with Adriana, along with São Paulo Cultural Affairs Officer and Cultural Affairs Specialist.

Adriana talks about the need to reinvent yourself. This sort of belief system is common in all successful people I have encountered, and it is strongest in those who had to climb the farthest. To know that you can do is the key to doing.

Adriana came to the idea of Feira Preta while bouncing back from a “setback.” She lost her job. Instead of seeing this as a problem, she re framed it as an opportunity to do something new. She does not take the credit for this great achievement (another characteristic of successful people), but rather thinks of it as an outgrowth of her family and local culture.
Adriana comes from a long line of hard-working women. Her mother came from the interior of São Paulo state and found work as domestic. Her mother had a lot of entrepreneurial instincts, but she needed to use them just to survive and give her daughter a better chance at life. Adrianna understood that if these forces of enterprise were freed, people like her mother would flower. Like flowers, however, the vital seeds needed a nourishing environment. Feira Preta helped create that. Adriana created the idea of Feira Preta when she was just twenty-two years old. She didn’t know how to organize such an event, but she had participated in many and so got to work.

The first Feira featured 40 exhibitors with products aimed at the African-Brazilian market. She got Unilever as a sponsor, as they were at that time launching lines of skin care products aimed for African-Brazilians. Red Bull and the City of São Paulo were the other first sponsors. Today there are more than 900 exhibitors and 27 thousand people attended last years event.

Feira Preta has two aspects. On the one hand, it is a place to demonstrate and validate cultural products of Brazil’s African descendant community; on the other hand, it had a more commercial purpose of providing a place to display and sell products – things like clothes, accessories, jewelry and items of art. One of the most successful class of products have been health and beauty products designed for the African-Brazilian market segment. By both measures, it has been a great success.

We talked a little about profit and sustainably. Adrianna does not do all she does to make profit but recognizes that profit is necessary for sustainability of this great program. She just wants to make sure that the small entrepreneurs and artist get their fair share. This means that they have to get “regularized”. A big problem for new entrepreneurs in Brazil and elsewhere is that they know how to make products, but they do not know how to do business. Adriana is working to help with workshops and classes on mundane but crucial topics like accounting, planning and getting legally incorporated. There is also a problem of credit. Small businesses may need only a small amount of money, but it is hard to show credit worthiness when you have little history on paper. It is encouraging that banks are now heavily represented at Feira Preta, but also a little frightening. Interest rates in Brazil are high and there is some danger that new business owners, unfamiliar with borrowing and building capital, might make bad deals and lose their initiative.

Reference https://universa.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2017/09/07/conheca-adriana-barbosa-uma-das-51-pessoas-negras-mais-influentes-do-mundo.htm

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Saving Tropical Forests

Simple Idea with Worldwide Impact.
She got the idea during a visit to the dermatologist. The hand-held magnifying camera that the doctor used to examine her skin could would as well to magnify and record tiny cells in wood that could be used to identify the species. Her employers were not very enthusiastic about this new idea, so she found out where to buy one of the devices and bought it herself. She showed me the original. Simple, cheap but effective.

Since she – from the Instituto Florestal do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo Forest Service) returned from her IVLP “Promoting Legal Sourcing of Wood and Wood Products,” in 2011, her connections and cooperation with American researchers and authorities has deepened and thickened. She is in weekly contact with the USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin and has been invited to meet and do training with the U.S. Department of Justice and Border Patrol.

Stop Illegal Cutting and Selling Wood
The goal of all this is to stop the illegal harvesting and export of rare species of trees, and the deforestation, ecological devastation and release of greenhouse gases that goes with it. Many species of Brazilian tropical hardwood are so hard and dense that they do not float in water. This makes them ideal for flooring and some aspects of construction where very dense wood is needed. Add to this their extraordinary beauty – some brilliant vermilion, others almost pure black, still others with patterns that can only be called art – Brazilian tropical hardwoods are among the most beautiful and sought-after woods in the world.
Unfortunately, many of the most popular species are not being grown sustainably and/or are being harvested in ways that damage the local ecology. The – castanha (chestnut) — the tree that produces Brazil nuts, locally called castanhas-do-pará – for example, produces a beautiful hard and dark wood. It is a magnificent tree, that can grow to 160 feet high. The Brazil nuts it produces are among the most valuable non-wood product from the forest. This tree, however, is very hard to regenerate. Its ecology requires not completely understood complexities of an intact forest. Attempts to propagate them artificially have not been very successful. So, Brazilian authorities have made the harvest of castanha — illegal in most cases. Yet this wood regularly appears for sale, usually called something else. It is hard for non-specialists to identify them with certainty and harder still to prove their identity.

This is why she needed the erstwhile dermatological device. She had been working with the São Paulo environmental police and the Federal highway patrol to impound cargos of illegally harvested wood. To identify the species and it provenance, she used something like a jewelers’ loop. She could identify the species by the grain and the cells. But São Paulo is a big state and Brazil is a big country and there was only one and she was it.

Training the Police, Stopping the Traffic
She has done training from police all over Brazil and participated in symposia all over the world, talking about her techniques. Much of the training for police officers involves spotting potential violations and taking proper samples, so that they now roughly what to do. Training experts to identify species beyond a reasonable doubt, however, which is required to impound the wood or prosecute offenders, takes a long time. It is not something an average police officer can be expected to master. The skin camera, modified to look at wood, can take pictures and transmit them via Internet to her lab, where experts can decide. They also have a visual record. If it turns out that the species is not authorized, the cargo can be impounded. In that case, the police take a sample of the wood, label it appropriately with reference to the pictures, and send the sample to the lab, where it is catalogued and secured in case there is a court case.

She says that they so far have never been asked to produce the actual wood sample. The pictures have sufficed. One bad reason for this is that the real culprits are often not found or taken to court. They hire a truck driver does not know the origin of the wood he is hauling. When the truck is stopped, the real crooks disappear and write it off as cost of doing business. In this respect it is like drug smugglers, and there is in fact overlap in the business. Drugs are sometimes hidden in trucks carrying wood from the Amazon, which is also near drug producing areas of Columbia. The way that you can roughly tell the drug truck from the ordinary wood truck is that the drug truck often has a chase car, with armed thugs – a kind of evil “Smokey and the Bandit” scenario. It is dangerous for the police to stop this sort of truck. She has done more than forty training for police, including in the Amazon, reaching thousands of officers. They do not allow her to go along when these sorts of encounters are likely.

Experts have tried to apply IT and AI process to identifying wood, and she has been cooperating with American experts, especially with the Center for Wood Anatomy Research at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory, but it is currently more art than science. She said that it might work okay in the USA, where we have fewer major species to identify, but in the very diverse tropical and subtropical forests of Brazil, it has still proved to be a bridge too far. I asked about DNA analysis. This is also something for the future. Many of tropical hardwoods have not been sequenced adequately and the testing currently takes too long. When a truck is stopped on a Brazilian highway, the police legally have two hours before they decide to impound the cargo or let it pass. There is no mobile DNA test that can do that at this time. It is also easier to do DNA tests from leaves than from wood. The field, however is developing rapidly.

What did IVLP do For Her and for the USA
The United States amended the Lacey Act in 2008, which makes it unlawful to import into the United States any plant (or plant product) that was illegally harvested. It is in everyone’s interest to stop the illegal product before it ever moves AND – consequently – to remove much of the profit and incentive for those would exploit, deforest and denude large areas of the world. It is possible for buyers in the USA to be innocently duped. This creates problems for them, the court system, the cops and everybody except the crooks who deliberately broke the law. Better to stop that rock before it starts rolling.

She has been a thought leader and influential participant in the science and application of the science to protect the integrity of tropical forests in Brazil, in American and worldwide. She credits her IVLP experience with making this happen as it did. Not only did it do the usual great things of plugging her into American and international networks, where ideas propagate, but it also provided her the credulity to be heard.

Recall that she had to buy the hand-held dermatological equipment with her own money. She just did not have the clout to make it happen more expeditiously. On her return, things were already different for her and success built on success. This is especially important for her as a woman. The men she worked with had theretofore been quicker to shunt her aside. With her bigger profile came more influence and the forests of Brazil and the world have been the beneficiaries.

Please note – it is not a secret who goes on IVLP visits and nobody I talked to so far would object to being known, in fact they have been proud of their participation and I share the notes with them, but I replaced names with pronouns since there is no need to put all that on social media.

Pictures show pao Brasil – the Brazilian wood that gave the name to the country. It is very beautiful and that was its curse. The Atlantic forests were largely denuded centuries ago. Next shows some of the wood slices at the laboratory. Yes, the place has a kind of 19th Century feel. Picture #4 shows the Tropic of Capricorn. It runs right through the forest park and around the world, but that spot is evidently most important. Last is just a nice picture of the sun and the trees.

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Another Successful Youth Ambassador

Our Youth Ambassador Program has changed many lives. I had the chance to find out more about how this works in a particular case.
A Life Changed

Like most YA in my experience, he credited the program with changing his life. He came from a modest background. His father is a bricklayer, and he – like all YA – is educated in the public schools. He said that since making it into the YA program was “impossible” but happened, he learned that impossible things were possible.

The White House and an Ordinary American House
His YA program was certainly memorable. The group visited the White House on his birthday (how great is that!) and the White House was truly impressive, but he that the more impressive house was the one where he stayed in Charlotte, NC. He stayed with an ordinary family, African Americans, where he learned a lot about Americans life in general and the African American experience specifically. He went to HS with his “host brother,” played street basketball and attended a mega-church with more than 2000 participants.
Everyone in America was very welcoming. This is something he found pleasant and a little surprising. He had expected that Americans might be more formal and distant.

An America We May Not See, but Others Do
He also said something that I have heard from many others and it should be encouraging to Americans. It is not a great surprise that Americans enjoy a generally higher standard of living, even within the similar places in society. For example, he said that his “host brother” worked at Subway and with the money he earned, he could afford a car and enjoy going out. Subway is also present in Brazil, but a guy who works in Subway in Brazil is unlikely to aspire to own a car. Cars and many other such consumer goods are significantly more expensive in Brazil (due to taxes and logistics costs) than they are in the USA, even though wages are lower in Brazil.

More encouraging for me, however, was that he was struck by how Americans have a shared vision for the future and that they work pragmatically to make things better. With all our talk about our divisions and tensions, I think it is useful to see it from an outside perspective. We see the chasm of our differences, where someone not overtaken by passion or even hysteria just sees a little puddle to jump over.

He wanted to bring some of this spirit of cooperation and pragmatic problem-solving back to Brazil.

Helping Brazilians Build a Better Brazil
Brazil has a challenge currently in that many better educated young people want to leave, live and work elsewhere. A risk we always take with exchange programs is that after they see the possibilities outside Brazil, they will be less eager to return (recall the words to the World War II song, “How are you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree.”) This is not this Youth Ambassador.

He told me that he doesn’t want to live anywhere besides Brazil, but he wants to live in a better Brazil and hopes that he can help make that a reality.

Almost immediately on his return, he started working with leadership programs in HS, soon reaching more than 800 kids and spreading branches to seven other cities in his state. He co-founded the project Leaders of Tomorrow, which empowers and equips young people to be agents of change in their communities. He wants to make life better in Brazil and is helping create institutional infrastructure to do it. Once you know what you can do, there is much more you can do.

The Ripples Continue
We know that few will be able to by Youth Ambassadors. This year we had 13,500 applications for 50 spots. Add to that the vaster numbers who cannot even apply, since the minimum requirements include levels of English proficiency and community involvement not widely achieved, at you see that we reach few. But I believe. and the YA believe, that the ripple effects are much greater, and we see that clearly in his case. The programs he helped create have already reached hundreds of young people directly and w/o doubt thousand more through secondary networks. This is how positive change starts and how great things get going.

The US Embassy in Brazil created the Youth Ambassador program in 2002, when then Ambassador Donna Hrinak asked PAS for a way for us to interact with the Youth of Brazil. Nobody thought we would reach millions, but I think that we can say that we have. There is the immediate effect that I have seen. When a local YA “winner” is announced, it often becomes a significant media event in the YA’s home community. You cannot buy that kind of attention, but the YA program earns it. Then we have the ripple effect and secondary ones I alluded above. I am not sure how you measure that and I am not sure that you can, but it is real and persistent.

All Youth Ambassador applicants speak English and are good students for Brazilian public schools. They apply through sixty-plus of our partner organizations throughout Brazil, all of Brazil including little towns in places like Acre, Roraima or Rondônia, places where Mission personnel too rarely tread. This partnership is valuable. Partners are BNCs, education departments and schools, all of which are willing to devote many hours of their people’s time to the service of what they consider a worthy cause. They do it for love of learning and the future of their country. In the process we build friendships. The process is the product – well the relationships it creates in the process are the product.

Applicants write essays about American topics – in English, which are judged by boards that include university professors, teachers and BNC officials. They narrow the field to 180 finalists. After that a board in Brasilia made up of our CAO, our lead Brazilian colleagues plus some other people from consulates in Brazil.

During the first Youth Ambassador trip in 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell took the time to meet with the group. He spent more than a half hour with them, which is a lot of time for a busy guy like him at that time. Subsequently, they have met other Secretaries of State plus people like Laura Bush and Michelle Obama. It is a class act.

So, this is a great program in terms of tangible PR results, as is the principal exchange. We get press and we get noticed. By I return to what I consider more important, the lasting relationships. We have friends all over Brazil who have worked with us on these programs and recall our common success. Long after the newspapers have composted, and the television glamor has faded, these relationships abide.
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As part of my series about people I talk to about their returning exchange. As usual, the identity is lightly obscured, not because the individual is not happy with the exchange, but just not to publish the names.

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Climate Change IVLP

The day’s third meeting was lunch with Lunch with an IVLP in “Climate Change Adaptation & Infra Structure Planning,” in 2015)

It was a little poignant for me to hear the praise of the USA leadership in climate change and know that we have to a large extent abdicated that role. He said that he had thought about it during the IVLP visit. Lots of the climate change moves were made by presidential initiative. While he respected the speed that the decision could be taken, he wondered that if one president could do another could undo.

I repeated the mantra that I have repeated every year in my 31 years in the FS – “The American nation is greater than the American government and the American government is greater than the current occupant of the White House.” He understood this. One of the things he noticed and admired about the USA was that we were truly decentralized. States and localities took initiatives. Universities, firms, NGOs and even individuals acted as they felt necessary. Brazil is a federative republic in theory, but in fact there is much more centralization.

We talked about the difference between having one big plan and having lots of little ones, competing, combining and producing lots of options. We agreed the lots of options is usually more useful, since we live in an uncertain world. True diversity is a strength. We learn from failure, maybe more than success, and all success begins with (survivable) failure.

I asked if anything had impressed him about the program itself and he answered that it was the program itself. Even before he left Brazil, he was impressed with a country that would have a program like this, one designed to show various aspects of a pluralistic society.
The poignancy hit me again. Our open and pluralistic values are those of the America I love. Those are the values that should abide and I hope the current divisions are ephemeral.
Since he returned to Brazil only a few years ago, there was not a long term to assess, but even in the short term there are results. He is organizing programs with American NGOs and maintains a strong cooperation with many of those he met during the IVLP visit and his fellow Brazilian participants.

We had just come from our meeting with Harvard and mentioned that. Our contact thought that his organization, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, might be able to have meaningful cooperation with Harvard’s Brazil unit. They are, after all, literally just across the street from each other. You could throw a baseball from one and hit the other. I put our contacts in contact and I hope it is the start of a beautiful friendship.

My pictures are not closely related. I lost my hat and I needed a new one to keep the rain from pounding my bald head. The place selling hats had only Marvel Superheroes. I wanted Thor, but failing that, I got the Hulk. Next is the monorail, under construction. In the evening, I had dinner at KAA with my colleague Mark Pannell and one of our speaker participants. Nice place. Had a couple caipirinhas. They are better in Brazil. I think the limes are different here.

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Harvard in Brazil

Next meeting was at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center, Office Brazil. We met at the Ling event last week and talked about how ideas spread, so I thought a follow up might be interesting.

Harvard do Brazil
The Harvard Center mostly acts as a facilitator for Harvard professors, researchers and students wanting to interact with Brazil. Brazil is a great place to work because of its size and diversity. We talked about the many, many connections over the years. There were so many, and they were so effective that I finally asked if there was just some sort of compilation. Fortunately, there is. You can follow the link to see Harvard’s Brazil Alumni success.

Much of the Brazil-Harvard research is funded by a grant from the Lemann Foundation. Read about the Lemann grants at the link I will put in comments.

I am not simply trying to avoid writing by linking. The links just explain it better than I can and they will be maintained. As long as I am linking, the link to the Lemann Foundation will also be in comments.

So Big that we may Overlook
I am afraid that many of my fellow Americans are unaware of the beneficial reach of our nation and how much we benefit from the two-way exchange. It is not only Harvard engaged in this way. We have so many links with Brazil and they go back so far that it is easy to overlook them. It is like the fish does not know he is wet because it has always been. However, it is the task of the current generation to continue to build on what we received. These ties require work and renewal.

The image that kept coming into my mind was Velcro. I do not want to make light of this but our connections with Brazil are not like links in a chain, but like Velcro, with millions of little hooks, little connections. And each time we have an exchange or an interaction, we build another.

What Took Years to Create Should be Protected
That is why I was a distressed in my meetings today, at Harvard and with some of our veteran IVLPs to hear that they think Brazilians have become a little leery of the USA’s immigration policy. They hear about walls and think that it is a wall to keep them out. We can try to explain the nuances, but the overall perception remains. When I hear visitors talk about my country in such grand terms, I just think it is incumbent on us to strive to that ideal and stay open and welcoming of new ideas.

Black Earth
A tangential interest was when we talked about cooperation between Harvard and Brazilian scientists in pre-Columbian archaeology. Up-to-date methods and technologies are enabling new discoveries. Working in the remote State of Acre, for example, scientists are finding evidence of much more extensive farming than earlier thought. A big indication is the presence of “terra preta” or black earth. This is found along the rivers and is essentially charcoal mixed with soils. It helps the soils retain water and avoid compaction. It always indicates the presence of farming, as the natural disposition of carbon in that way is almost impossible. It is a human-created soil. Today forests grow better on terra preta.

Our picture of the Americas is based on faulty history. We still think of the Americas as a virgin land, with thick forests as far as the eye could see. In fact, it was not virgin land but widowed land. European diseases often arrived before the Europeans did, decimating populations. The land reverted to thick forests and when settlers arrived, this is what they thought had been there always. In fact, it is more likely that the land was a patchwork of clearing and forest of various ages.

Consider that malaria was introduced into the Americas, as was dengue. Absent those diseases, much of the Amazon had a relatively benign climate that could support garden agriculture. The land was emptied; it was not empty.

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Talking to an IVLP ten years later.

Talking to an IVLP ten years later.
My first meeting of the day was at Renaissance Hotel with a participant in an IVLP on “Conservation of Biodiversity & Promotion of Sustainable Development,” from 2007. We talked about his visit and what had changed for him in the ten years since he returned to São Paulo, but we soon got into the broader topic of standards. His specialty is working with contaminated soil and water and he has lately been working on remediation of “brown field” sites.

Mitigating “Brown Field” Risk
If you want to build a shopping center or a big residential development in São Paulo, you will probably be building on a brown field site, i.e. a site formerly used for some industrial purpose. This does not mean it was a heavy, dirty industry. Even a former gas station is likely a brown field site and so are even places where lots of cars or trucks were parked, since they may have leaked oil or other fluids. (BTW – I am using “brown field” in contrast to a not previously built site, usually called “green field.”) These sites often require remediation, or at least a survey to indicate that they do not need cleanup. W/o this, real estate investors cannot know the true value or maybe the big risk of the site. (I thought maybe our president could understand the value of making real estate investment less uncertain.)

EPA Works Fairly Well Most of the Time
Returning to the question of what he learned in the USA, he praised the American style of practical cooperation. This may come as a surprise to us Americans. Whether or not you support EPA action in general or think that they are a drag on business, you probably think that they are working in opposition. He learned that there is a lot of cooperation. The goal is not clean up pollution, but rather to develop processes that avoid it. This is better all around – less pollution, less damage, less money spent remediating and less strife. Beyond that, pollution is essentially waste. Redesigned processes can not only avoid releasing pollution but maybe a way to make it a valuable input into something else.

Exchanges Useful
I have long been convinced of the value of exchanges in human terms, but when thinking about budgets we must be a little more practically centered. This is good for everybody, but are there specific advantages for the American taxpayer to have helped Brazil in this way? Yes. Consider American investors in Brazil. They face challenges of language and culture, but the environmental regulator regime is more familiar. Investors calculate risk, but uncertainty is reduced. Beyond that, there is a good chance that American investors will meet those affected by exchanges, either in the first order or by connection. He talked about the impact his program had on his co-workers and even his family. Once again, this is a win all around.

A point I just found interesting, i.e. not closely related to the program, was when he talked about the need to reduce water and soil pollution by going to the source, literally. Many of Brazil’s rivers have sources or important tributaries on the high plateau, Goiás, Mato Grosso etc. This is the hydrological heart of Brazil. The rainy season recharges the ground water and the reservoirs.

My first picture is the Renaissance Hotel. I used to stay there every time I went to São Paulo. Unfortunately, it is too expensive for long-term stay. I miss it. I walked from my hotel to Renaissance, a long walk but mostly pleasant. Pictures two to four are along the way. Picture three is an an aruacaria tree. They are common in the hills of southern Brazil and are truly magnificent trees. Don’t see so many in São Paulo. Number four is a little park in Jardins. I was lucky with the weather. It did not rain on my walk to the breakfast meeting. It started to rain hard later in the morning. The last picture is Avenida Paulista on the rainy morning.

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Park Ibirapuera

Spent the morning walking around my neighborhood and to the big Park Ibirapuera. It was a cool and drizzly morning, but w/o real rain, so not bad to walk. Lots of people in the park.
I concentrate on the trees in the first batch. I cannot identify many Brazilian trees, but I think that the purple ones in the first picture are pink ipê. In Brasilia they are mostly yellow. The trees in the second picture are Indian banyan trees. I know that because they were marked. Picture #3 I do not know, but if you look closely you will see that all those trees are one tree. Some grew from roots and others from drop down branches. The second last picture is a sidewalk on the way to the park. I like how they just let the trees grow into the walls and walk. Last is just a nice picture of the pond, path and trees.