Hi,
My name is Claire and I live in a small fishing village called Prainha do Canto Verde on the North East coast of Brazil.
I used to live in England. I grew up in London where I trained to be a Montessori teacher. I worked in nursery schools and a North London Primary school (Brookfield) before coming to live here in 2004..
I have four children. My eldest son (now 20) lives in London, my three other children, aged 15, 12 and 4 live here with me and attend the local school.
Canto Verde is very different to London. I hope I can show you some thing of our life here.
As you know Brazil is in South America, it’s a very long way away from England, just over 7000 Km (for adults reading this who still think in old money, nearly 4,500 miles away).
When I was in Primary school in London I went to France, I thought that was quite a long way away but the South of France is only 1000Km, so as you can see Brazil is 7 times further away than the South of France.
I’m sure you also know they speak Portuguese in Brazil. We had to learn to speak a new language, my children had to go into a school where no one spoke English and learn to do all their lessons in Portuguese, it wasn’t easy for them but now they can speak the language the same as everyone here. Its been a bit harder for me because I’m older and it gets harder to learn new things when you are older, but its important that I keep trying and my children help me, isn’t that funny, they are teaching me!
Brazil is a very, very big country, I’ve been told that the United Kingdom, that’s England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, could fit into Brazil 35 times, WOW THAT’S A BIG COUNTRY!
Being so big, Brazil has many different regions, with very different climates. In the south of Brazil it can be very cold in the winter, with lots of snow. In the north there is the huge Amazon forest. I expect you have all heard quite a lot about the Amazon and how its important that people stop cutting down the trees there. There is another area of forest that is as equally important as the Amazon, it runs down nearly the whole coast line of Brazil and is known as the Mata Atlantica. Unfortunately people are cutting down this forest too.
You might know of an imaginary line that runs right round the middle of the earth, if you’ve heard of it you’ll know its called the Equator and all the places that are near this line have very hot weather. Prainha do Canto Verde where I live, is only 4 degrees from the equator (that’s really not very far) and we have hot weather all the year round. Canto Verde means Green Corner and that is what Canto Verde is, there are lots and lots of coconut trees so Canto Verde is beautifully green and surrounded by white sand dunes.
The sun comes up at 5 in the morning, every day, by 7 its warm enough to feel comfortable in a T shirt and shorts, by 1 o clock in the afternoon the sand is too hot to walk on in bare feet and you can’t stay outside for too long, it doesn’t really start to cool down again until after 4, the sun goes down at 6, every night. The temperature is usually between 30 and 37 degrees, though often it feels a lot more and we have to be very careful that we don’t get sunburnt
.
At the moment (February) it is winter in the NE. They call it winter but its not winter like in England. Its called winter because it’s the rainy season, we get periods of heavy rain and thunder storms, with the heaviest rains coming in March and April.
When it rains it really rains, it pours and pours and then the sun comes out again. Lagoons spring up all over the place and plants begin to grow all over the sand dunes.
We have a huge, beautiful beach and the sea is lovely and warm for swimming in. Surrounding the village are big white sand dunes and then a little further inland is the strip of forest, its not the Mata Atlantica that I mentioned earlier, its called Catinga and is mostly low level trees with some coconuts and cashews that you get cashew nuts from.
I found out that sand dunes can move! The wind blows the sand from the top down the front and little by little they move forward. We have coconut trees with only their very tops sticking out of the sand, slowly the dune is moving into the forest and covering it over. In several places on the dunes, you can see where there was forest, the sand dunes have moved over it and killed all the trees, now the sand is moving away, leaving all the dead dried out tree stumps, blackened and brittle, sticking up all over the place. As the sand moves on, new plants begin to grow and one day the forest will return.
Sadly there are places where man has intervened, causing problems that nature cant repair. There is a very beautiful lagoon near to Canto Verde, it’s called Lagoa Salgado, which means Salt Lagoon, it gets it’s name because the water comes in from the sea and so is salty. The lagoon was surrounded by mangrove swamps, which kept the water clean and stopped the sand dunes from moving too quickly.
A very wealthy man bought the land around the lagoon and built a big house there. He wanted to have an uninterrupted view of the sea, so he cut down all the forest and the mangrove swamp on the opposite side of the lagoon from his house. Within a very short time the sand dunes built up and now they are filling up the lagoon. Now the man can’t see the sea because of the sand dune. It takes time for mangrove swamps to become established, I don’t know if it will be possible to re-establish them at Lagoa Salgado, but if not we may well lose the lagoon, that would be very sad.
There is only one road into Canto Verde and there is a very big dune that runs down one side of it. Every now and then the dune moves right over the road and no cars can get past it, the council have to send a big digger to clear the road or no one can get in or out. Two years ago there was a problem with the digger, it couldn’t come and we couldn’t leave the village except on foot, for over a week!
The problem became so serious that another solution had to be found. It was a bit of an experiment because no one could be sure what would work. A local coconut grower donated thousands of fronds from his trees*, then a team of men worked for about a week, covering the dunes. We hope that other plants will begin to grow in between the fronds and stabilise the dunes further. So far it seems to have worked, we haven’t had to call the digger back.
*(the coconuts shed their fronds just like other trees lose their leaves but usually people cut them off. It can be very dangerous to stand under a coconut tree, the fronds are very heavy and would hurt if they fell on you. If a coconut were to fall on your head, it could kill you)
Our village isn’t very big, there’s about 1200 people in the village, that sounds a lot but its not really. We live right on the edge of the village and we have an unusual shaped house, if you imagine a square with two half circles on opposite sides, a sort of lozenge, that’s the shape of our house. In the garden we grow bananas, mangos, avocados, pineapples, melons, watermelons, guavas, coconuts, acerola berries, pumpkins, beans, tomatoes and I am hoping to grow more fruit and vegetables in the future.
We have had lots of animals: A donkey, a goat, several chickens, a duck, nine cats and several dogs. We don’t have the donkey, the goat or the chickens and duck any more but we still have 5 cats and 3 dogs.
If you have any questions, please send them to me and I will do my best to answer them.
