Democracia
One of Cool Earth's first community projects is based in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The project is centred in the small village of Democracia which happens to have a large but, until now, poorly equipped secondary school serving twelve smaller communities along this part of the Rio Madeira.
Since 2007, the deforestation around the village of Democracia has been halted by Cool Earth's partners. This has resulted in an area of just under 70,000 acres providing a sustainable barrier to further deforestation from the south. Considerable support from Cool Earth's sponsors has also gone into the community with the extension of the existing school being the key project over the past twelve months.
Cool Earth and its community partners have put funding into a variety of local enterprises but decided to concentrate investment in the school because of the very limited facilities and the focus it provided for an otherwise dispersed group of villages.
Just in time for Christmas the computer room and library was opened with a very loud ceremony involving, it seemed, everyone within a days' travel of Democracia.
We have now helped build a new library with a broad range of books donated by partners throughout Brazil and a computer suite with twelve workstations that will give the community access to the internet for the first time in the new year.
About Democracia
The Madeira River flows from the south and joins the Amazon 90 miles to the east of Manaus. It is less well known that the Rio Negro (Black River) or Rio Solimoes which join at Manaus at the famous "Meeting of the Waters." This is where the acidic, cooler and darker waters of the Rio Negro meet the muddier, warmer and faster flowing waters of the Rio Solimoes and flow alongside each other for 5 miles before finally mixing before they are joined by the Rio Madeira.
Madeira means wood in Portuguese. The region surrounds the Rio Madeira has long been a source of an extraordinary range of tropical hardwoods and there has been a devastating amount of clearance from the south. Removing a single cubic metre of mahogany entails the clearance and burning of many times the amount of timber, whether in the form of canopy and branches, surrounding sub-storey and undergrowth trees or roots. The removal of a single specimen also opens up the otherwise dense primary forest to further clearance. As can be witnessed along the frontier of deforestation from Colombia and Peru to Brazil - the more trees removed, the more industrial and larger scale the clearance becomes.
Democracia stands on the very edge of this frontier. To the south of the community, ten of thousands of square miles of forest have been cleared, exposing the thin soils to erosion and leaving the land as scrub-like savannah or cerrado. Whilst the logging provided some jobs to local people, the majority of the work was undertaken by workers brought in from the state of Para. Those local people who were employed moved with the frontier of deforestation, taking them many hundreds of miles away from their community for many months at a time.
And once cleared, the land supported little more than a few cattle, that generates very little employment. Even more importantly, the forest products that so many communities depended upon for their sustenance and cash income - from brazil nuts to acai berries - were lost forever. In the wake of deforestation lies very marginal opportunities. As a result, the loss of the forest can often lead to the loss of the community and inevitable migration to urban conurbations.
A day in the life of a child in Democracia
It gets light at 6 o'clock in the morning whatever the season and we always get up around then. My Dad is a fisherman and he may have been fishing with his nets on the Rio Madeira all night. If so he won't be around until much later as he will have taken his catch up to Manicore to sell or be packed in ice and taken to the big market in Manaus. Sometimes we preserve the fish in salt which we eat on special occasions.
For breakfast we have some manioc or fried plantain which I love with lots of sugar. If it's a special occasion, like a feast day when we all get a day off from school, we'll have pancakes made out of tapioca. My mum mixes chopped up Brazil nuts with the tapioca before she fries it and it is delicious.
On school days we usually only go for either the morning, afternoon or evening. This is because there aren't enough spaces in the school for everyone to go at the same time. This suits me just fine as I like helping around the house and, even better, playing with my best friends.
My two older sisters usually go to school in the evening from about 6 o'clock - just when it's getting dark. This means they sometimes sleep in a little longer, although I'm not sure how. Everyone is so noisy, it can't be easy to have a lie-in.
