Uma aventura bacana!!!!!!!!
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:20:03 -0400
To: danglerscastro@hotmail.com
From: laroht@nytimes.com
Subject: Re: READER MAIL: Larry Rohter
Danglers, claro que lembro de voce. Tenho pensado muito em voce ultimamente, e fico feliz em saber que voce conseguiu me encontrar. Como vai a tua vida? O que anda fazendo hoje em dia? Continua morando e trabalhando no Amazonas? Tem mulher e filhos? Me escreva de volta, por favor. Tenho muita curiosidade em saber.
Talvez voce nao saiba, mas ano passado publiquei um livro no Brasil, chamado "Deu no New York Times," que entrou na lista dos mais vendidos. O livro tem ensaios sobre diversos aspetos da sociedade brasileira, incluindo um capitulo inteiro sobre a Amazonia. Cada capitulo tambem traz materias traduzidas para o portugues, e no capitulo sobre Amazonia, uma das reportagens incluidas e justamente a materia que fiz com voce, sobre o censo. E por isso que voltei a pensar em voce e quis saber onde voce andava.
Acho que voce pode encontrar o livro facilmente em qualquer livraria. Mas aqui vai uma copia do texto original em ingles. Voce tambem pode acessar este texto facilmente. Basta ir para o site do jornal (www.nytimes.com) e la em cima no lado esquerdo, onde aparece a palavra "search," escrever o teu nome. Ai, a materia vai aparecer rapidamente. Um abrazo, Larry Rohter
Iranduba Journal; Snakes and Scorpions vs. the Census
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: Saturday, October 28, 2000
IRANDUBA, Brazil--Counting the 170 million or so inhabitants of a country that is larger than the 48 contiguous United States is not easy. But taking the census in the Amazon jungle, some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, is even harder, as France Maria de Souza discovered when she set off one morning to interview 22 families living on an isolated island near here.Under a broiling tropical sun, Ms. de Souza, a 26-year-old schoolteacher, boarded a small uncovered motorboat, slipped on a life jacket -- nervously, since she does not know how to swim -- and counted her supply of census forms as the craft moved out into the broad Solimoes River. She knew she was working against the clock: the rainy season in this part of the Amazon begins in mid-November, and some communities may soon be inaccessible.
''We face every obstacle imaginable on this job,'' Ms. de Souza said after deftly crossing a fallen tree trunk used as a bridge over a stream. ''I just hope that I find everyone home here, so that I won't have to come back again.''
Once every decade, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics assembles an army of people like Ms. de Souza, 180,000 people in all this year, in an effort to count this sprawling country's population. The agency's rather dry name notwithstanding, its workers here in Amazonas State are not deskbound bureaucrats, but modern-day ''bandei rantes,'' descendants of the 16th-century pioneers who braved Brazil's vast and unexplored interior.
''There are huge areas of the Amazon where no one lives at all, but we still have to make every effort to count everyone, no matter where they are or how difficult it is to get to them,'' said Cesar Serrato Pinnola, director of the census effort for Amazonas. ''Earlier this month we flew for two hours in a helicopter to one place and didn't see a single house on the way.''
With more than 600,000 square miles, Amazonas is the biggest of Brazil's 27 states, larger than France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium combined. But it is also the country's most sparsely populated state, with an estimated 2.6 million people, about half of whom live in the state capital, Manaus.
So census takers like Danglers da Costa Castro can spend up to three weeks at a time in the jungle, going from house to house by boat along the network of rivers, creeks and lagoons that ties Amazonas together, however precariously.
The boat also serves as a home during the excursions to remote areas, with the census taker and the boat pilot stringing up hammocks on board at day's end and cooking their simple meals on a gas stove.
''Sometimes the local folks are nice and will offer you some fish, fruit or manioc,'' Mr. Castro explained, ''but it's best to come with your own provisions. You eat a lot of canned food when you're out in the field, but that's not the hard part. The worst thing is the clouds of mosquitoes that descend on you at dusk, sometimes so thick that you can't see to the other end of the boat.''
And once they are on solid ground, the conditions are often just as harsh and unfriendly.
It can be a two-hour walk from one house to the next, requiring the help of a local guide so as not to get lost, and along the way census takers need to be on the lookout for poisonous snakes, stinging ants and scorpions, wild hogs and even the occasional leopard, not to mention plants with razor-sharp leaves or secretions that cause uncontrollable itching.
All that for a salary of about $200 a month, or double the minimum wage here. ''We get people who quit,'' Mr. Pinnola acknowledged. ''They want to work, but they are just not prepared for how arduous a task this is going to be.''
Mr. Castro is only 22, and taking the census is his first job. But his manner is patient and polite, and he knows how to calm anxious settlers.
''What a lovely name you have,'' he tells Lucilene Brasil Teixeira after she and her husband, Benilio, complain that answering the census questions may cause them to miss a boat to Manaus to visit their hospitalized daughter-in-law.
Overcoming resistance is not always easy. The Brazilian government has spent millions of dollars on radio and television advertisements, but census takers still find that people in many remote areas do not know what a census is and that some become indignant at their presence.
''When people have no idea at all why you are asking all these questions and want an explanation,'' said Fernando de Souza Lima, a longtime census official in Manaus, ''it's best not to say you represent the federal government, because that just creates a barrier. In those cases you're better off saying that you're taking a count so that the mayor or the governor can know how many new schools or clinics need to be built.''
Even so, in some places census takers have been greeted with buckets of water or macho husbands who object to their wives' talking to outsiders. Down south, in large cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the problems are different: doormen who cite security reasons for refusing to let census takers enter buildings in upper-class neighborhoods, and gangs in slum areas.
''I've had guns drawn on me several times in slum areas in Rio by drug traffickers and bandits who wanted to know who I was and what I was doing on their turf,'' Mr. Pinnola said. ''So I much prefer to work out in rural areas like the Amazon, where the people are more polite and patient and friendly.''
There have also been criticisms of the questions that Brazilians are being asked. Gay rights groups have complained, for instance, that while questions about religion and even ownership of electrical appliances are included on the census form, one asking sexual orientation is not.
But the trickiest and most controversial question in this country that likes to boast that its population includes ''every color of the rainbow'' is clearly that of race. The census long form asks about ''race or color'' and contains categories for black, white, brown, yellow and indigenous, with interviewees being allowed to classify themselves.
Black advocacy groups maintain that if a meticulous count were taken, Brazil would have a black majority. But more people in the Amazon, as elsewhere in the country, describe themselves as brown, or ''pardo,'' rather than black, no matter how dark the color of their skin or how deep their African roots.
Of course, a small group of Brazilians does not get counted at all. Near the border with Peru, in some of the most remote and thickest parts of the jungle along the Rio Javari, are ''a few Indian tribes who don't want any contact with the white man,'' Mr. Pinnola said, and either flee at the sight of outsiders or threaten to attack with spears or bows and arrows.
''Unfortunately,'' he said, ''I don't think we are going to be able to take the census out there.''
Photo: Sanderlei Monteiro dos Santos held her daughter Gleisse as France Maria de Souza, a census taker, conducted an interview. Brazil's government has assembled an army of 180,000 to count the nation's far-flung people. (Larry Rohter/The New York Times)
A version of this article appeared in print on Saturday, October 28, 2000, on section A page 4 of the New York edition.
More Articles in World >At 10:57 AM 4/23/2009, you wrote:
To: LARRY ROHTER
You have received reader mail via nytimes.com. To respond to this reader, simply 'reply' to this message.
READER'S NAME:
Danglers castro
READER'S E-MAIL:
danglerscastro@hotmail.com
READER'S MESSAGE:
Oi Larry, Talvez não consiga lembrar de mim. Mas vou tentar te fazer lembrar. Você fez uma matéria comigo aqui no Amazonas, no ano 2000, mais precisamente no Rio negro, onde eu estava ressenceando as comunidades ribeirinhas perto de manaus...(lembrou?) Você até enviou pra mim; fotos e a matéria do jornal impresso..., pois é... gostaria que vc enviasse pra mim o link dessa matéria. se você não conseguiu lembrar, me avisa por favor! um abraço de Danglers!
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