While there are many blogs about living in Macae, Rio de Janeiro and other big cities in Brazil, I have never come across one talking about life in the interior of Brazil.
My guess is that this is probably because there aren't many people who come to live in the north of Brazil, much less in the interior of the north of Brazil. If they do come here, it is because they are posted here for work and if they are working here, they wouldn't have that much time to blog.
I'm not even sure whether the interior of Brazil is the correct term for it. In portuguese they call it o interieur. I'm not even sure if it's spelt this way, but it sounds like it.
For a city girl from Singapore which doesn't even have much of a suburbs to come to a small city in the interior of the North of Brazil is a totally different experience. At first I thought I'd hate it and initially I did.
I hated that I couldn't go anywhere without the company van because the taxis and moto-taxis are not safe. I cannot take my company laptop home with me because there are armed burglaries. There were only three restaurants in town when I first arrived, and all the supermarkets close at 730pm, and all the shops downtown close at 530pm.
I arrived during housefly season, where hundreds of houseflies descend upon the city from nowhere and plague the lives of everyone. Even in the office where there was no food, houseflies abounded. My supervisor spent a good part of his day just hitting houseflies with a rolled up magazine. I killed one with my tele-book. I hate housefly season. Especially when you see them landing on your drying laundry. Or landing on you. I really hated small cities then. This small city was the countryside to me.
And then I went and saw the real countryside when I started going to the field.
Rolling fields of green dotted with cows, small cottages and squat trees that look like bonsai from far away. I say cottages because the view of the countryside is exactly what I imagined a countryside to be. Cows, horses and donkeys meander along the dirt-road, mascerating their food from dawn to dusk. Dogs and cats skulk around trying to find food thrown to them by people working on the rig, or the odd passing car or the farmers. Pastoral scenes of painters really exist in real life.
Sometimes, the sea is on the horizon beyond the rolling hills and fields of grass when your car reaches the top of the hill, and the sea turns into blue sky when your car starts going own the slope.
In the wee hours of dawn, the air is crisp and fresh. Sometimes we work at such high altitudes that a cloud descends upon the well and it seems like we are within a fog, especially in the cold of dawn. When the sun starts to beat its relentless rays upon our backs, the air turns mildly acrid with the smell of freshly deposited dung.
But nothing beats the smell of exhaust as the massive diesel-powered engines of the oil rig hoist 10meter long tubings up and down the oil wells. The silence of the night is the constant whirr of the generator providing lights on the well-site, punctuated by the clanging metal of tubings striking metal as they are deposited onto the tubing platform or hoisted onto the rig floor. You see so many stars that you wish you had a star chart so you could identify the constellations, but you have to pay attention to the job at hand because rig work is risky and the rig lights are really bright anyway.
Sometimes you can hear the rhythm of forro, pagodao and arrocha streaming from a farmhouse.
This is the country.
Not the town where there is a centro commercio where you find banks and supermarkets and lojas selling everything you want, marked up because it's a small town and everything is "imported", except the fruits and vegetables which are cheap because there is a farmer's market almost everyday.
Not the town where oil companies have their bases and restaurants cater to the people working in these bases from out-of-town.
I am reminded of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie.
Laura is a country girl, and they go to school in the town, where there are townspeople. This concept still exists today in interior Brazil, and probably everywhere where there is agriculture and land aplenty. Poor people who live far from town undertake the long walk or bicycle ride to the nearest bus stop, or to town because they cannot afford a car or motor cycle, or they wait for a bus which could be illegally privately operated, or privately operated but widely recognised. Or they try to hitchhike with their thumb. Some country folks set up make-shift stalls along the road for passers-by to buy fresh agua de coco, or coconut water, or grilled corn or local food like pe de mulakey. Or fruits, vegetables, honey from their bee farm.
Always, these people are with a smile. The city girl cannot understand how they can live in such surroundings with all the houseflies and animal smells and dust and mud. The country people cannot understand how the city girl can live without the smells of nature and fresh greens everyday.
Churches abound here. Someone I know who lives in a bigger city thirty minutes from here once said, the people in this city are so poor that faith in God is the only thing that keeps them going. The city girl cannot understand why these people don't get a job, until she sees that there are few jobs available, and the country people need to walk a long distance every time they want to see about a job.
Such is the environment of the interior of Brazil. Small cities surrounded by miles and miles of fields or terreno. Within the city, hospitals and other modern amenities - only if you manage to get here, and only before 530pm.
