Wet and Dry

From North to South, Brazil spans a little over thirty-nine degrees of latitude, more than four-thousand-three-hundred kilometers, (greater than the distance between New York and Los Angeles). 

From East to West it's not quite that big -- by about fifteen kilometers.

No wonder, then, that Mother Nature subjects this country to great variations in climate.

But this year the Old Lady has been unusually capricious.

To begin with, rainfall has been at record levels. This sign showed the high-water mark of the worst flood ever to hit the city of Manaus on the day the record was broken.

There, not far above the point where the Rio Negro becomes the Amazon, many people build their homes on stilts.

This year, for the first time, they’ve been forced to add extra floors - or suffer the invasion of their homes by water, rats and snakes.

And while the people in the Amazon region have a surfeit of water, the farmers in Bahia can’t get enough of it.

As a result of which, their crops and their cattle are dying.

Their rivers have run dry.

Their reservoirs have emptied.

And the little water that remains has become largely undrinkable due to the concentration of ground salt.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, the scenario is much the same.

In Rio Grande do Sul two hundred and seventy-nine communities have declared a state of emergency for lack of water.

More ruined crops.

More dying cattle.

And yet twelve other communities in the same state have been forced to ask for federal aid to solve a different kind of problem.

Flooding.

Yet, despite it all, Brazil’s economy continues to grow, and São Paulo continues to be one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. 

Please don’t ask me to explain this, because I can’t.

And most Brazilian economists can't either.

And all I know is that, in this town, poverty and great wealth have always lived side-by-side - no matter what Mother Nature keeps doing to us.

Leighton - Monday

Rain

“São as águas de março”

Tom Jobim

When it comes to the vagaries of nature, Brazil is particularly blessed. Down here we don't get volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, typhoons or hurricanes.

We get rain.

But before you conclude that rain is entirely inoffensive , peruse these pictures.

They’ll give you an idea of what long-lasting, torrential, Brazilian downpours are capable of.

In many parts of this country it rained, almost constantly, from the beginning of March until mid-April.

And, in some places, the rain is still going on.

This is the main highway between Santos and Rio de Janeiro.  Rain-induced landslides destroyed the road and cut off the two cities, one from the other, for days.

Larger landslides have killed hundreds in the last fortnight.

How many hundreds?

Nobody really knows.

Here’s why: landslides seldom bring down wealthy communities. Landslides almost always bring down shantytowns. (favelas). Those shantytowns are constructed on land too poor, or inaccessible, for anyone with a modicum of money in the bank to be interested in. And the occupation of that land is technically illegal and always unregistered. When the whole community slides down the hill some of the bodies are recovered. Others often disappear beneath the rubble – and stay there.

That was the case here, on Bumba Hill, just across the Niteroi bridge from Rio de Janeiro. The favela was built on what had been a garbage dump up until the late 1970’s. Experts had warned, time and again, that it was going to plunge down the hillside one day. But people built anyway. The municipality did nothing.
And then the rains came.
More than two hundred people died.
Some of them found permanent graves among the still-rotting garbage.

In Angra dos Reis, on the other side of Rio, the disaster was similar, but on a much smaller scale. Estimates of deaths don’t exceed forty.

Depressing? Sure it is. And more depressing still, it happens every year.

The quote with which I begin this post translates as “they’re the waters of march.” It’s from a song by Tom Jobim and, other than the reference to our yearly rain event, has nothing to do with the sad stories I’ve just related.

But, if you need a little cheering up, as I do at the moment, “Aguas de Março” is just the thing to do it. Here’s Tom performing it with Elis Regina back in 1974:

 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYLoxMtnUDE

Leighton - Wednesday