Easter In Pomerode

In most of Brazil, the Easter Bunny hops-in, early on Sunday morning, to leave colored eggs as gifts for the little ones.

These days, most of those eggs, are of chocolate – and the bunny, being a modern bunny, distributes them through retail outlets, where shopkeepers charge outrageous fees for their services and parents make pickups on behalf of the children.

Some of those chocolate eggs are hollow and stuffed with still more chocolate.

And the bunny is big on distributing figurines of himself as well, thereby offering the kids another option to eat themselves sick.

Pomerode, a little town in the southern state of Santa Catarina, does it somewhat differently.

 Pomerode was founded by Pomeranian immigrants back in 1861.

All of them have passed on by now, but the German language, and German customs, still prevail. 

And, since language can never be entirely separated from culture, it leads to some holidays being celebrated differently.

In Pomerode, at Eastertide, they not only paint eggs, and distribute them in the form of chocolate, they also hang them on the trees…

paint their faces…

And even their animals.

Fun to see!

Leighton - Monday

The Brazilian Connection

Brazil shares borders with Colombia, Peru and Bolivia and has eight thousand kilometers of coastline.

Those borders are porous and the coast is ill-patrolled.

So, even though the authorities manage to do a lot of busts, it’s still a snap to smuggle-in cocaine...

...and crack.

And Brazil is one of the cheapest places in the world to buy it.

Quite naturally, domestic usage has swelled in recent years.

And the violence that accompanies the trade has flared.

Of the fifty most violent cities in the world fourteen are now in Brazil (Twelve in Mexico, Five in Colombia, Forty in Latin America).

The murder rate in Maceio is up one hundred and eighty percent from ten years ago.

And in Bahia, it grew four-hundred-and-thirty percent between 1999 and 2008.

But it’s not just an internal problem.

Brazil is an important conduit for transshipment. Thousands of tons of drugs pass through the country on their way to Europe.

A hundred grams of cut cocaine, bought on the street in Rio de Janeiro for twelve hundred dollars, can be sold in Helsinki for more than thirteen thousand.

With profits like those, thousands of amateurs are being tempted to try their luck, travelling to Europe frequently...

...and being apprehended in ever-increasing numbers.

The Brazilian government recently earmarked the equivalent of six point three billion dollars to secure the country’s borders and an additional two billion to curb the spread of crack.

A necessary measure, perhaps, but also a tremendous waste.

How much better it would have been if the same amount of money could have been spent on better schools, better health care and lifting families out of poverty.

Leighton - Monday  

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

How Brazil Got Its Name

When the early Portuguese explorers first came ashore in what is now Brazil they called their new possession Ilha de Vera Cruz, Island of the True Cross. It wasn’t long, though, before they discovered it wasn’t an island. That’s when they changed the name to Terra de Santa Cruz, Land of the Holy Cross. And so it might have remained. 

But then they stumbled across this tree.

They’re a rarity these days, but five hundred years ago the country was covered with trees just like this one. And before gold, before precious stones, before sugar cane and coffee, they were the source of Brazil’s wealth.

Early on, it was discovered that the wood, ground up very fine, could be used to produce dyes and paints of a unique color. That color was often described as closely resembling red-hot embers. Embers, in Portuguese, are brasas. The tree came to be called Pau Brasil, (very) roughly translated as “wood that produces the color of embers”.Today, English speaking people call it Brazil wood.

Literally millions of trees were harvested over the course of the next four hundred years. Their sawdust was used to color fabrics, but also as a pigment by the great artists of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of whom mixed their own paints. By the nineteenth century such paints were being commercially produced. By then, the painters of Italy had corrupted brasil into verzino, the name by which the color became known. It was available in several different shades, two of which are in the background of this painting by van Gogh.

These days, verzino has largely been replaced by cadmium and azo pigments, which can duplicate the same colors at lesser cost. But if a painting is over a hundred years old, and contains this shade of red, the likelihood is that it has a little bit of Brazil in it.

I know of no other country that got its name from a color. But Brazil did.

Leighton - Monday