| This was a floating Majoca flour mill. The flour, a Brazillian staple food, comes from a root that the men and women of the region harvest and process into a flour meal that is sold to feed people or livestock - depending on the quality. This factory was filled with a dozen people and used only one small gasoline engine to do all the hard root grinding work. | |
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Inside of the flour mill the women peel and cut up the roots like a potato. There is a particular way to sit so you can do it for hours on end without causing too much wrenching back pain. The root is then ground and baked into flour. In the back of the mill the men press the water out of the root, bake it, and then sift out the impurities. The unused parts are thrown into the river and become food for the river life. |
| The young start working pretty hard at a fairly young age. They attend school by canoe in the morning and then come home to work all afternoon. It was a small town of approximately 500 people. |  |
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Even the toddlers seem anxious to join in. Just think, when most of
us grew up, our parents would never give us knives that big or that sharp.
There was only a few rooms that the mill workers lived in. It was in a boat house that was attached to the floating factory. The huge logs they are built on come from trees deep in the Amazon jungle. Why is everything floating? Because the Amazon can quickly rise or fall tens of meters with the rains and droughts. |
| Tiffany wanted to learn more about these unique hardworking people so she decided to venture into their living quarters. There was a floating house, adjacent to the mill, where 2 families of 12 people lived. They did their best to make it a home and she felt quite comfortable there, though she had never been in that type of surroundings before. She thought the best way to "break the ice" was to show them the video she took of them through the color monitor on her video camera. They were so thrilled and were very energetic about taking turns to look inside the magic camera to see pictures of themselves. |  |
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Once little girl was so sweet and charismatic that Tiffany decided
to have some fun french her beautiful long hair.
Since they spoke Portuguese, Hans was able to converse with them and intrepret for Tiff. The young children seemed like any of the children we would see back home in San Francisco. Always smiling, playful, and curious about life. The older kids, (over 15) seems much more serious and committed to working hard to make ends meet. That is the time most of the girls start getting married and having children. You really do grow up fast in the Amazon. |
| They were quite exhuberant to talk to us. The kids genuinely looked
happy and it was obvious they had a strong family bond.
As you can see Tiffany was enamored with all the kids. It is too bad that we will never see them again. They made such an impression on us. "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us to find it" --- Ralph Waldo Emerson I think that the children of the world carry the beautiful with them .... at least until society pressures them into another mold. |
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In their yard, a riverbed which was near their floating home (which is sometimes covered in water), there was a cute little pig eating some of the flour. Or, should I say a big pig eating everything it could, just like a pig. |