Wrap up of Amazona’s trip

I am finally heading home, typing this at the airport. It’s still a long journey to get there (35+ hrs), but I am so happy to be sleeping in my own bed and hug my girls soon.

This trip has been epic! What a privilege to be traveling with a group of 40 people from different disciplines (experts in water, transport, environment, climate, social protection, health, education, finance, banking, etc. you name it!). It brought such a diverse perspective toward a complex problem: how to protect the forest in the Amazonas while ensuring wellbeing of the people. Amazonas has nearly 28 million population, most of them living in urban centers but a few millions still live in the Amazonas forest. Before going to this trip, my easy fix is to relocate all these people living in the jungle to urban centers, leave the forest alone. How naive. I came to realize that the communities living in the Amazonas need to keep living there, with a decent living condition of course, because without them, it will be more illegal deforestation. Furthermore, these people seem to like living in the nature, so who am I to deprive them from that? Yet, living conditions are precarious, and they don’t have stable income sources. Thus, still a big challenge for the humanity to keep Amazonas from further deforestation. Yet, I am hopeful because this group of people and many more from the field are passionate about tackling this challenge, and we will all come together to contribute to protect this global good.

The trip was super packed, we start usually around 6-7am and finish the day by 9/10pm. We met local communities, companies, government, lab center that studies Amazonas’ plants, this nice rainbow showed up in one of our meetings.

we visited cooperatives that supply to Natura, the local/regional cosmetics company. We also visited their factory, so advanced. I learned that they take their ingredients from the Amazonas, learn about the local traditions, test those so-called medicines (whether there is scientific basis for their claims, and make them into products if so). Their nature-based water filtering system is state of art and super innovative. Even our water specialist was impressed and want to replicate in other parts of the world.

we learned about their history, mission, current challenges, and got a goodie bag of soaps.

oh we flew from Manaus to Belem midnight and got 3 hrs of sleep one night, followed by a full day including dinner at 9pm. It was a feast of local fish and shrimp, soooooooooo good! I think I’ve had many years’ worth of fish during this trip as fish was served for all meals.

I also tried many new to me fruits from Brazil, this one was my favorite. It looks like an apricot, but the texture is like sweet potato.

when I can choose what to eat, I had this sort of meals: plenty of veggies, beans, and farofa (casava flour toasted/fried). I love it. I basically went to the same buffet restaurant for dinner.

I met with many new people, people that I would never crossed path before, learned about their stories, and developed a special friendship. I know that people say we will transition to remote meetings, that humans can be replaced by AI. I disagree. The human interaction, spontaneity, is hard to replace, at least for me. I will always prefer f2f meeting than zoom. It’s only in those casual, not scheduled interactions that innovative ideas, friendship, connection occur.

I know when a trip is a good one when I feel inspired and hopeful. This trip makes me very excited for my next job, mostly because of the people I will be surrounded by.

EPIC!