2020 Brazil Individual A-Term - Fabrício P. Guerra

Day #2: USP Marine Biology Institute & Surfboards

Waking up came just as the previous day, sticky hot and loud nature. However, something was different. It wasn’t as hot and there was a different sound: waves in the ocean. It was a constant, wave after wave after wave. From my room, I could tell they were massive. Last night, there had been a thunderstorm, so today the ocean would be swollen and violent. After breakfast I went to the beach and turns out they weren’t as big as I was expecting, maybe the storm had passed only a little before, so the ocean wasn’t at peak potential, though it was still big. The plan for the day would be to go to the University of São Paulo Marine Biology Institute, otherwise known as CEBIMar. After that, Thiago would come to our house to show us how he builds the frame of the surfboard using plastic bottles, industrial glue, and a PVC pipe.

The Institute of Marine Biology is located more east of Maresias and closer to the port city of São Sebastião. For an Institute of Marine Biology, I was expecting something slightly less elaborate and smaller compared to A&M Galveston. Considering that the University of São Paulo is one of the best Universities in Brazil, so really anyone would think that. Boy, was I off with my expectations. Located six beaches to the east in a bend in the highway SP-55, sits the gate of CEBIMar, facing the canal that separates Ilhabela with the mainland. The entrance stands atop a hill, and past the bumpy and seriously uneven parking lies the first office, and the living quarters for scientists who do research and studies there. Everything is below a dense canopy and the floor is littered with moss and tiny fern plants. We met a woman named Simone, who worked in the front office, and she showed us around a little bit since most of the professors were in meetings talking about coronavirus. Since it had been closed for students, it was mostly desolate. She showed us the living quarters, and inside each room there was a bunk bed and a desk with enough space for two people. Very tiny, but it was enough. The entrance to the living quarters also had a sort of spiral staircase that led down to a medium-sized classroom filled with desks and chairs.

Entrance sign of CEBIMar

Whilst we were in the room we were greeted by Professor Luciano Douglas dos Santos Abel. He is part of the culture and expansion administration for the Institute, and we gathered some chairs and started to talk. We started talking about our project, what it was doing and how to spread out over many different topics. We started talking about coronavirus and politics, how the global economy was going to suffer because of it and how everything could be so much better. Right as we started talking about more tangential things, Dr. Augusto Alberto Valero Flores, the general director of the Institute and a specialist in genetics, walked in and apologized for being late as he was in a meeting about the shutdown of the University. We went over everything again and they were quite intrigued. Talking with Dr. Augusto had me practicing my Portuguese since he himself was Portuguese and I always have trouble with the thick accent. They both seemed very interested in the United States, asking questions about the politics there and practicing their English with us. We talked in that circle of chairs for about two hours, until Dr. Augusto had another meeting to attend and Luciano said he would show us around.

Us in the classroom with Dr. Augusto (Far Left) and Luciano (Middle Left)

Turns out the Institute wasn’t just those areas. Behind the front office there was a little plaza with a small cafeteria, and beyond that stood a staircase built from rock all the way down to the other buildings and two beaches. Here they had several different laboratories, some of them had their own tanks filled with starfish, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, fish, and I even saw a seahorse. There were boats in unused truck racks and in front of the main laboratory stood a black cat named Eggplant. The two beaches were named Praia Secreta (Secret Beach) and Praia do Cabelo Gordo (Beach of the Fat Hair). When Luciano told me the name of Cabelo Gordo, I let out a chuckle. It’s just a very funny name. He explained that the beach was named by the Portuguese in the 16th century, and in old Portuguese “gordo” didn’t mean fat, it meant oily. Apparently, to avoid mosquitos and blood-sucking flies, the natives would rub animal fat all over themselves, including their hair. So when the Portuguese arrived and saw their oily hair, they named that beach after it. The other beach, Praia Secreta, was also true to its name. Tucked away by dense, low grass plants it was maybe only 300m long and held a cove of water. In the cove closer to the channel was a weird looking contraption. From where I was standing I could see that there was an anemometer, but Luciano told me it was also used for testing water temperature and pH, etc.

Me looking at one of their tank

We went inside some more laboratories and saw some more things, most notably some alien-looking bugs kept inside glass capsules. After that we left to go eat lunch at home, because soon enough Thiago would come with his supplies and help us build the frame of the surfboard. After he arrived we got everything ready and my brother and I started doing what he told us to. He had two bags full of two liter plastic bottles that were sent to him by Nestle, and it was our job to count 42 of them into a pile.

Us separating the bottles for cutting

Thiago showing us where to cut the bottles

Me cutting bottles

Filling the bottles with air so that they become stiff

Half of these would cut and the other half would be used as combiners. To make the combiners we had to cut the plastic bottles into sort of hourglass shapes, except the bases wouldn’t exist. We did this sitting down in the grass, and soon enough there were a lot of black flies biting at my legs. I must’ve gotten close to twenty bites before I put on some repellent. After we finished cutting, the next job was to sand all of the bottles, combiners included. If we didn’t sand the bottles, then the glueing faze wouldn’t work. This was probably the part I thought was most tiring, because it was just the same movements for every single bottle. Not only that but it made a lot of plastic dust, and if you breathed it in it would make you cough real hard.

Once that was done we would finally get to the glueing part. We needed six stacks of bottles, each stack containing 4 complete bottles and 3 combiners. The glue we were using was industrial level glue that air dried, so if you got it on your skin (like me) it would stay on there for the next couple of days. After all six stacks had been made we glued them together and they formed a surfboard. One part of a surfboard that is essential to the way it performs in the water is that the front needs to be curved, so Thiago got a PVC pipe and half-melted it over the stove and then bent it to around a 25 degree angle. He put this rod in the middle of the board and then bent the bottles so that they fitted the board, and voila it was complete. All that was left to do was to wait for the glue to dry and clean up all of the leftover plastic. After that, Thiago left and the sun had set, so the only things left to do were to eat dinner and go to sleep.

Day #1: River and Fishermen

As I made my way out of my bed, the sounds of bustling nature and the sticky hot air hit me like a brick. The place I am at is a small town hidden in a cove of mountains 600 meters tall covered head to toe in dense foliage and is part of the much bigger port town: São Sebastião. The town’s name is Maresias, named after the fine mist strong waves produce when they crash. This place captures the bi-polarness of mother-nature in both the sea and the air. One day there is heat and humidity with the calmest ocean perfect for any swimming, but as night strikes a thunderstorm ravages the hill houses and the coconut-heavy palm trees and the next day you have cool temperatures with an ocean only the most adrenaline-seeking surfers would approach. Needless to say, quite an incredible place. It’s beauty and impressive surf attracts several outsiders from all over the place, but a majority of the tourists are residents from the largest city in the nation, São Paulo. These people come mostly during the weekends, and during their stay they spend a lot of money, albeit hotels or merchandise, which adds to the economy of the town. People begin to fall in love with the town, noting its romantic atmosphere. The wealthier tourists buy houses that are closest to the beach and now there is even more money in a relatively small town. Suddenly, as more low-income people notice this economic growth, they all flock to the same area. This mixture of limited space, poor infrastructure, and an overflow of people, in any scenario, never ends good.

However, noticing this growth, the city hall makes a decision to add a sewage treatment plant so that the river that runs through the town doesn’t get polluted (before this people had underground storages for their sewage and most just emptied it into the river, but the population was small so there wasn’t a that bad of an effect on the environment). It sounds like the perfect plan, until they build it and then it never gets put into use and then the population triples in 10 years. Now, there is a major problem. This was our main focus of the day: water pollution and how it affects the environment and the people. The inspiration around this project came from one event and one man: Thiago Oliveira. He is the founder of a very small non-profit organization called Desengarrafando Mentes, Unbottling Minds in English, that deals with common pollutants such as plastic and educates children about these pollutants and with the town’s surfing culture as well. One very spectacular thing that he does is make surfboards from plastic bottles and borrow them for children to learn how to surf. He’s lived here for 7 years and has a wife and daughter of 4 years.

He told us about what his organization was about and what it did and after the encounter my parents and I connected the idea back to student-proposed A-Terms, and it's all history from there. During planning an idea sprung up about a mini documentary to ease explanation and give better visualization of what was happening during the A-Term presentation, if it happens (kudos to Costa Rica J-Term for the film inspiration). So to film all the stuff two people from Maresias TV (@maresiastv) named Rafael César (@rafaelcesarjornalista) and Lucas (@lucasrec_) as well as Priscila Pirillo (@pripirillo) and Suellen to also record for Unbottling Minds Instagram page (@desengarrafandomentes).

The first thing that we did collectively at the start of this beautiful first day was have a meeting about how the documentary will go and go more into detail about what we would do that day. We went over the narrative of the documentary and what kind of shots would be included and all of that. Having something similar to the Costa Rica film in mind, I was looking for a lot of shots of the environment since there was plenty to showcase, but Rafael and Thiago were thinking of filming the work we were gonna do, so at the end of that part of the discussion I decided on doing what they thought was better because nature shots would be included by default anyway. So for the rest of the day we would eat lunch and then explore the path of the river from the bottom of the mountain all the way to the mouth at the beach. So at around 1:30 in the afternoon after we had our lunch we set off about 2 kilometers until the end of the road Novo Iguaço at the head of the Poço Do Caetano trail (Poço means well in english, but at the end of the trail there isn’t a well, but a sort of mini-waterfall where the water gets around 3 meters deep, as if it were a well but it isn’t). Here, at the end of the trail, is a picturesque view of the forest from below, and the water is crystal clear. Thiago said that he has a friend who hiked up the river for four hours and the water quality just keeps getting better and better.

This is the head of the trail

A little creek in the trail

River Maresias at the bottom of the mountain, covered in dense foliage

Poço Do Caetano

Thiago Oliveira stands in the middle of the family, explaining to us wear the piping starts

After we visited the trail and the river at the bottom of the mountain, we headed over to the sewage treatment plant, which was never put into use. Here is a scene which I thought was the mother of all ironies: the sewage treatment plant, standing tall and abandoned, and right across the road is a ditch filled with foul-smelling, parasite-filled, grey liquid which is, put in small words, raw sewage. The sewage from this ditch flowed down a series of pipes and other ditches that split up in different paths that all joined the river at some point. One very interesting thing about the sewage plant is that after it just stood there and was never used, people painted mosaics on it as a way of protest, saying, “Hey, so are you guys just going to build this and just leave it here?” One fault of the mosaics is that most people took it not as a form of protest, but as a form of acceptance, as if they were saying that the city hall would never do anything to help because that’s just who they are.

One of several mountains overlooking the sprawling town

The pipe where the sewage in the ditch leaves

The infamous ditch sits at an intersection and contains all of the sewage from the houses behind it

Across the street from the ditch are the unused sewage treatment plants, decorated with local artwork

Following the experience of witnessing raw sewage, we went to two other locations, one was a place where the sewage joins the river and a place where a hotel releases all of its water from. The first location wasn’t so bad. It’s what anyone would expect from a polluted river, a less polluted part joins up with the very polluted part and now there is more polluted water, simple as that. However, since the sewage joins at a bend in the river, there forms a depression where water circulates with the sewage, and it’s just the nastiest black color, something you shouldn’t find in nature. After that we went to a very important place, where a hotel connects their waste to the river via pipe. At this point the river is a solid brown, absolutely no visibility whatsoever. The stench was, at the time, not so bad, but Thiago said that at times it is unbearable and can be smelled from far away. Sometimes, the hotel does large amounts of laundry, and to do laundry you need detergent. The drainage from the laundry machines has a lot of excess elements that are very hazardous to the environment. The bridge stands about 2 meters above the water, and the river is about 2.5 meters wide and god knows how deep. Sometimes, when the laundry excess is released, bubbles are formed and they overflow the bridge.

Plastic in the bend of the river

That was the worst part of the river, but from there on it twists and turns under dense foliage that somewhat filters some stuff out, but eventually it empties out into the beach and into the ocean. Here the river isn’t as bad as it was in the other area, but it still has a dark green color with somewhat okay visibility, but in some deep parts the bottom is covered in a green slime, which produces an unpleasant smell. There is one part of the river that is formed when the ocean waves push it back, and this part has no water movement at all, and that makes it very low visibility with a very strong stench. When the polluted river enters the ocean, the current pulls it around the coast of the eastern mountain and then gets sent out to the open ocean. However, along the coastline of the mountain there is another much smaller beach named Prainha (Little Beach in English) that for a long time has been the place where fishermen keep their boats and canoes, because a little down the mountain coast is where the best fishing spot is. Before the population of Maresias grew exponentially and the river was nowhere near as polluted, the fishermen were bringing in 400 kilograms of fish every time they went out and collected their nets. When we went there they brought in their nets and pulled in only about 30 kilograms of fish. They say that ever since the river became polluted, this has been the reality. Not only that, but the water has had a greener hue and the rocks have become slippery, something that had never happened before.