Hi! I’m Elisângela Conceição Cavalcante, I’m 48 years old, I live in the community of São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi, on the Uatumã River, 6 hours away by a motorized “rabeta”, which is a wooden canoe with a small motor in the stern. Our community is located in a sustainable development reserve area. It is part of the municipality of Itapiranga. I live in my house with my husband and my daughters, grandchildren and some nephews and nieces who also live there with us.

We live in a community where approximately 22 families with 122 people reside there. Here, we work with farming, in “tucumã” extractivism (a native palm tree). We also work with fishing and tourism, because in our community there is also a community inn. There are 28 hectares of “tucumã” and our “tucumã” palm tree grove is native. We never needed to plant a single “tucumã” palm tree, as the animals, when feeding, spread the seeds. So they are our sowers.

The family harvests “Tucumã”, so there are always two or three people cutting the bunches down – as it’s a palm tree and the bunches grow way up there, it’s tall – so four or six people gather the fruits and place them in bags. After putting them in bags, we take them to the municipality of Itapiranga and, from there, to Manaus, the capital, where they are sold.

We speak to our nephews and nieces to agree to our schedule to start harvesting the “Tucumã” fruit, and so we usually leave before 7 a.m. Our workday is busy harvesting and putting the fruit in bags, we only take a break to eat lunch, and then we finish our work at 5 p.m. We use a sickle for cutting the “tucumã” fruit bunches, it makes cutting the bunches easier, it’s much better than using a machete knife.

Now, “tucumã” fruit is out-of-season, so the fruit supply is reduced and the price increases. The price is pretty good from July to January, after that the prices drops. Production increases, but the price drops. We try to do other activities and then these other activities make us neglect our “tucumã” grove, when we do that some fruit is wasted. We harvest about 800 thousand bags during the high season and from 300 to 400 bags in the off-season, and we have to support our family on that decreased income, earning less from the “tucumã fruit and “breu” fruit extractivism and from our garden, crops, and our other fruits.

We raise chickens, pigs, ducks, but only for our own food supply. We have a cattle breeding ranch near our community. Livestock farming here is underdeveloped, as we are not interested in opening grazing fields here for cattle because we know there will be vegetation, and underbrush will grow; we are very concerned about that. We prefer to keep the native forest.

We pay the people who work with us, our family members, our nephews and nieces, and sisters-in-law from the income we collect from the “tucumã” sales. They all earn their daily pay, right? The community also raises cassava, as it’s our flagship crop, for making cassava flour. We have a vegetable garden growing cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, greens, chives, for our own food supply. We also grow some fruits, like papaya, coconut, “cupuaçu”, and açai. So, our community also habitually eats fish and, in September, we go sport fishing within our RDS (Sustainable Development Reserve). The inns offer authorized fishing to their guests. Fishing also generates income, because the fishing guide earns a daily income from the fishing of the guests. Sometimes, we have other jobs, such as working at the inn or making furniture. We rotate activities, and not always the people who do them.

There are certain rules to follow for tourism in the RDS. Our inns in our communities define how things will run and not those who just pay their fees. For example, I cannot use live bait at all for fishing as a sport fishing tourist. I can neither roast nor sell any type of fish, under any circumstances. As a tourist, [I can’t] eat shell animals, such as “tracajá” (a yellow-spotted-river turtle). As a resident, I can. We are interested in increasing the number of these animals and, if the tourists and we are going to consume them, when will they increase in number? For this reason, we are also working with some turtle-release projects, which make us even more aware of their care, so they will grow in number. Around 18,000 turtles have already been released from our reserve. It is a sign that we really want life to continue and, for life to continue, I also need to take care of other lives.

I think the Amazon is life for our community and for me, we say we live in the heart of the world, so we try to take care of it, preserve what nature provides us and what we believe. The Amazon is saving the planet, the Amazon protects the planet, the Amazon is the planet.