rich, rich soil

So I deppared myself with this book at BoingBoing about Fordlândia, and what was not my surprise to google about Fordândia and find a great interest about this adventure of Mr Ford.

I, met Fordlândia´s case a different way.

Travelling around the amazon in January 2006 with 2 friends, Renato a teology student (at age 26) and the other a come to be atheist and filosofer (at the time he was only 17 years old), Gabriel. And me, Andre, a advertising student with 20 at the time.

Renato used to make this trip to the amazon rivers and villages once a year. So once I met him and he told me about these trips I prontfully volunteered to accompany him. Latter on, only a couple of weeks before departure Gabriel´s father in maybe a maneuver to save his child from his recent growing apart from the paths of church offered to pay for Renato´s trip if he would be willing to take Grabriel.

So making a long story short, we were travelling in the Tapajós river and deciding in which villages we would stop. Gabriel suggested Fordlândia because his father had commented something about it.

I came to know Fordlândia on pure luck.

And now I present some of the photos we took while our 2 days stay.

You can see the “American house”. There are more in the village, but all stuff that was left was brought into this one house. We found books, and even a very beautiful USA flag, so that the patriots can be proud of.  We even found a book autographed by the author – Caravans of Commerce. There were also books like: “tropical diseases”  (something like that).

Look at the GE (general electric) fan plugged into the wall, there was one in each room. I can´t imagine how all “civilized” people from the beginning of the 20th century could stand a humid place full of mosquitoes and all sorts of other wierd stuff.

There is a photo that depicts Gabriel descending the water tower. In the background inside the river you can see a cement building, that was the water pump used to pump water from the river all up to the tower. Needless to say that it doesn´t work anymore.

It´s a pitty that I dont have much more to show.

As the locals told us, in the 60ies there was a attempt to revive the installations somehow, thus the old trucks.

Also we proudly made the first abbing (rapping) of the history of Fordlândia =).

There was a Hospital and the American Village all built by ford, but now all abandoned.

Another thing in defense of the locals generally described as bums and lazy people is that we say that because of our occidental view of facts. They live in the middle of the rainforest and aside of the mightiest rivers of the world. They need not to work to be rich. They do not plant crops, and do not stock food. Each day they will go fishing or hunting. And the job is done, they can rest until the next sun rises. So why in the world would they want to work in a Industry as full time workers. Making rubber for a machine that in that time they never even had imagined of,  for people they didn´t have a clue about.

For what? To have money? They don´t have where to spend it.

If anyone is curious here is a video of the whole journey

As a disclaimer: In all journey we stayed with locals, and as you may imagine there are no supermarkets in any place. Any animal depicted, if dead was food.  We did not take, neither brake anything in Fordlandia.