I spent three years in Brazil as a diplomat, junior cultural and press attaché: 1976 in Rio, and 1977-78 in Brasilia. Sandy and I spent our first year of marriage the second year in Brasilia, which is in the center of the country in a big arid plain called the cerrado. You can see the area on the map. Brasilia is near the place marked Planaltina, which is the regional research site for Emprapa, a government research agency which I have visited in several parts of Brazil.
Early on in Brasilia, we took a long drive from Brasilia north through the cerrado on this dirt road in the photo and others like it north to a town called Barreiras. (After that we went east to Salvador and other, greener places, but that is another story for another day.)
As you can see from the picture of the road, this was way out in the middle of nowhere back in 1977. If we had not been driving an exceptionally sturdy VW bug, we might still be out there somewhere. As it was, Sandy drove the VWbug into a VW bug size pothole in the road, which was concealed by being completely filled with dust, just outside Barreiras. Once the dust had cleared, the car was so tough that we just started it up again and drove out of the hole.
As a former farm boy, I could not resist taking a picture of a farm further east in the cerrado. As you can see in the photo, it looks like what my plain spoken Idaho father would have called a dry lot and a lot of sunshine.
The region seems to have gone through a remarkable transition. As the New York Times reports today, Barreiras and the rest of the cerrado have become the breadbasket of Brazil. The region is now a major produce of soy, wheat and cotton.
A recent picture of Brazilian soy in a field in the region is shown in a picture from Emprapa, the Braz
ilian research agency featured in the NYT story. Embrapa seems to have discovered a mixture of chemicals that can make the arid soil very productive.
Another recent photo shows a field of cotton near Barreiras. Quite a difference from what we saw in the mid-1970s.
If you are curious, check out the Times story athttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/science/02tropic.html
3 comments:
It's kinda fun to read stories about you guys back in the day. I've always kinda wondered about how things were for y'all especially in the time right after the time I'm in now (because it's the natural desire to learn from where you went and either emulate or react and find a different way). One of the things that does keep coming back to me is how both of you switched careers kinda partway in, mom re-entering first with junior high then academia, and dad going from foreign service into academia, which makes me wonder if I will end up academic or drift other ways like Julia and Rolf. I'm also more and more worried about turning into a clone of mom, because I'm starting a research project which will probably evolve into my honors thesis on, guess what, Germanic medieval women mystics. Madness.
And this comment went a far way away from your blog post, but it was where my stream of thought went. Love you both!
That photo of the cerrado in its current soy-ful incarnation looks a lot like Vilhena did--soy as far as the eye could see. Like I'm prone to say, it looks kinda like the Brazilian version of Kansas. Beautiful sunsets, though.
Also, I don't think Mickey Sunshine would've held up as well as your bug did. Yours didn't catch on fire, either.
And Kristy wants to read Chris' thesis when he's done.
FYI--we posted on the fairness post, but it says we didn't. So check there, too.
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