Alright folks, please fasten your seatbelts, put your trays and seats in their most uncomfortable, upright position, please put all your items into the overhead bins or kick and cram the heck out of them to get them stashed below the seat in front of you and make sure that you irritate any and all small children around you so that they begin to cry as we get ready to take off on our next adventure!
So, we are off to the deserts of Brazil, wahoo! So I got home Sunday night from Maceió with an awesome sunburn-yea, and threw all my clothes in the wash, and then packed them super early the next morning to head of to the interior of Pernambuco. From what I have seen in different movies I expected it to be a baren wasteland with cracked, dried dirt everwhere, nothing green and just hot, hot, hot, but it actually rather resembled southern Utah.
This is more of what I expected to see when we went out there, and obviously there was a little of this, but the people there have cultivated it and made so much more out of the desert. We went out for our internship, we have been working with a company called Diaconia and they have some families out in the desert that they are working with to help improve their lives.
The first person we met was Ivan, him and his family all live out on this piece of land. It is a really cool story actually, his dad bought it with kind of the same vision that Brigham Young had, he saw all this land in the desert and for him, ´this was the place´, he had all sorts of ideas and just wait till I show you the pictures, it is fantastic! His vision of what he could make out of the land, it is amazing, and everything that they have done, wow, so incredible! First we saw the animals...
Turkeys, cows and a donkey, aren´t they so cute. They actually, with the help of Diaconia, have built cisterns to catch the water in the few times that it rains, and one other really cool thing. They don´t buy gas out there to cook with or anything, they have built this thing that actually uses the resfuse from the cows and processes it to take out the methane gas, then it comes out the other side, they take it and lay it out and use it for fertilizer after it has had time to dry, it is brilliant really. They save so
much money just by creating their own natural gas, and it is super efficient. The oddest part was that it didn´t really even stink, we were all very impressed by that fact alone not to mention everything else.
After that they took us back to where they have all their fruit trees and greenhouses and all sorts of cool stuff. They have practically turned their land into a mini Garden of Eden filled with fruit. There were so many different kinds, passion fruit, goiava, little cherry-like things, avacadoes (those were my favorite part, they were huge!!! I almost stole all of them!), green oranges, mangoes, pomagranites, and just all sorts!
We just kept going further and further into the trees and discovering new fruits, new wonders, they even have banana trees. Now the people there are kind of discouraged from planting banana trees just because they take a ton of water, and they kind of live in the desert that is even worse than Utah as far as receiving rain goes. But the people there absolutely love them and so they grow them and they are beautiful. They also plant tons of corn here and are just so proud and happy with where they live.
Oh, there I am with the awesome avocadoes, don´t they just look divine, what more could a person ask for?
This was the next farm that we went to, they still have fruit trees and stuff here, but this one is more directed towards farming as you can tell in the picture here. Of course the climate here creates a growing season that lasts year round basically, so they had about 5 or so rows of just carrots, and they would plant a row as they would start harvesting another so that they have a continual income of carrots all the time-and they do that with everything. They had onions, tomatoes and heads of lettuce to name a few.
One big thing that they grow here is sugarcane. This family has been living here at this place for well over 100 years, and the machine that use to put the sugarcane into in order to extract that juice, it was built by this guys great grandfather and has been working for I think he said around 70 years! This is a picture of us walking through the sugarcane. Below is a picture of his family.
One really cool thing they had there was...something that you could break open and when you mash the seeds you get an orange paint, so Carbonel ran off into the wilderness to find it and came back and painted a heart on my arm, and then war stripes on him and Danilo-I guess I am a lover, not a fighter!
So, we are off to the deserts of Brazil, wahoo! So I got home Sunday night from Maceió with an awesome sunburn-yea, and threw all my clothes in the wash, and then packed them super early the next morning to head of to the interior of Pernambuco. From what I have seen in different movies I expected it to be a baren wasteland with cracked, dried dirt everwhere, nothing green and just hot, hot, hot, but it actually rather resembled southern Utah.
This is more of what I expected to see when we went out there, and obviously there was a little of this, but the people there have cultivated it and made so much more out of the desert. We went out for our internship, we have been working with a company called Diaconia and they have some families out in the desert that they are working with to help improve their lives.
Turkeys, cows and a donkey, aren´t they so cute. They actually, with the help of Diaconia, have built cisterns to catch the water in the few times that it rains, and one other really cool thing. They don´t buy gas out there to cook with or anything, they have built this thing that actually uses the resfuse from the cows and processes it to take out the methane gas, then it comes out the other side, they take it and lay it out and use it for fertilizer after it has had time to dry, it is brilliant really. They save so
After that they took us back to where they have all their fruit trees and greenhouses and all sorts of cool stuff. They have practically turned their land into a mini Garden of Eden filled with fruit. There were so many different kinds, passion fruit, goiava, little cherry-like things, avacadoes (those were my favorite part, they were huge!!! I almost stole all of them!), green oranges, mangoes, pomagranites, and just all sorts!
We just kept going further and further into the trees and discovering new fruits, new wonders, they even have banana trees. Now the people there are kind of discouraged from planting banana trees just because they take a ton of water, and they kind of live in the desert that is even worse than Utah as far as receiving rain goes. But the people there absolutely love them and so they grow them and they are beautiful. They also plant tons of corn here and are just so proud and happy with where they live.
Oh, there I am with the awesome avocadoes, don´t they just look divine, what more could a person ask for?
One really cool thing they had there was...something that you could break open and when you mash the seeds you get an orange paint, so Carbonel ran off into the wilderness to find it and came back and painted a heart on my arm, and then war stripes on him and Danilo-I guess I am a lover, not a fighter!
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