 |
| The future of Brazil |
Amazon Concluding Remarks
We sailed out of the mouth of the Amazon on December 1, 2022. All-in-all the ship spent a week on the river and it was a fantastic learning experience. The mightiest river in the world is something to behold. But the question is, can Brazil protect the basin from further degradation? Gym thinks not. Brazil is not a wealthy enough country to do it on its own. Brazil can’t even provide secondary education to the villagers along the river. And if you can’t educate your citizens past their 13th birthday how can you make them understand how vital their rainforests are to the rest of the world.
Gym and his lovely sidekick, visited a few small villages that haven’t been covered in the blog. They all had a Catholic church and a primary school. They all tried to sell the travellers, the same cheap trinkets at inflated prices. They all had young teenagers that were trapped in these settlements with no real future. Gym saw one girl that was no older than 14 and she was at least 7-months pregnant. A learned, local guide named Renaldo, told Gym that this is common and that the girls protect the identity of the fathers by telling their parents that it was the dolphins that got them pregnant. No kidding, it is a commonly used explanation.
So what is going to work in Brazil? You can open up these villages to the outside world by building expensive roads and that will make secondary education more accessible. However, that means knocking down more trees. The reality is that these uneducated teenagers will find that the only future they may have, is in harvesting rare amazonian hardwood and farming the cleared land to feed their families.
The only solution is for Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Trudeau to adopt a bunch of these kids and take them out of the basin, so they can go to school in Malibou and downtown Toronto.
The Insignia turned north and headed back towards the Caribbean. The next stop would be Bridgetown, Barbados on December 4th, 2022.
 |
| Gym wanted to stop at the Bar Titanic but he wasn't allowed |
 |
| Amazon 7-11 |
 |
| Igreja Matriz, Alter do Chao |
 |
Lots of beans and rice, all you need is a chicken in the pot
|
 |
| Boca da Valeria - there are no roads into this village |
 |
Catholic church in Boca de Valeria. It is on the
highest point in the village |
 |
| Boca de Valeria Bar and Grill |
 |
| Boca de Valeria from the Amazon |
 |
| Would stand out at any party |
No comments:
Post a Comment