My name is Bernevaldo Martins Neves, I’m 51 years old and the father of seven children. The oldest is 28 years old and the youngest is 11. I have seven grandchildren, I live in the Sítio Fortaleza community, on the left bank of the Solimões River. It takes 3 days and 2 nights to get here from Manaus. First, you have to arrive in the city of Uarini and, then to come to our community, you get there by a canoe or a speedboat. You can come by canoe too, it’s possible to get here, but it takes an hour on a motorized “rabeta” (a wooden motorized canoe). By speedboat, it can take 40 minutes.
I have lived in this place for 51 years, there are 102 people in my community. It is a village, there are 17 houses, all of them are wooden. The floor is raised two and a half meters, but even so, the flood sometimes covers the floor. The power grid shuts off at 10:00 p.m., that’s when we turn on the power generator.
My community makes a living mostly by planting some crops, and a little animal breeding. We plant watermelon, corn, and also squash, maroon cucumbers, bananas, and cassava. We already get some income from fishing, but we all manage by sharing with the rest of the community, we catch fish and, in the end, we share a portion with each fisherman. We are free from IBAMA restrictions. Buyers come from Manaus and Manacapuru and we sell these fish legally: black pacu, Asian arowana, and “pirarucu”.
I wake up at 6 am, and then I take a look at my animals, and feed them. My wife and daughters help me too. My daily tasks are mostly taking care of my crops and my garden. Taking care of our gardens, the bananas, corn, watermelon, and cassava. I process cassava to sell cassava flour. I put the roots in water for 3 days, soak them, then we take them out, peel them, squeeze them in a “tipiti” (cassava strainer), using the roller to remove the water from it. After that, we put it in the oven for toasting. The oven is made of clay, and we put firewood under the oven for toasting the meal, and then we sell it in Uarini city. We cannot plant from March to June, because the land is all flooded with water, and then there is no way to plant anything. The water starts to rise in March, April, and May, and that makes it difficult for us to harvest the crops, because if we don’t harvest it before the land floods, we will waste part of the cassava, because then it will all be wasted. After the land floods, it becomes all soft and you can’t take advantage of anything else.
Our house is called a “maromba” house, it floats on the water. We put all the animals on top of a floating pen, and they stay like that for 4 months. The floor of the house too, when it reaches the flood, we raise it even further above the water level. We also use the floating system for our house. There are some houses that have floats. When the downstairs floor reaches the water, we raise the upstairs floor even higher, to clear the flooding. The platform height is 2 meters and 20 centimeters from the ground. Flooding always varies. This flood was 3 meters from the ground, sometimes it floods a meter above the ground, sometimes 2 meters and so it varies. So, our lives are difficult, but on the other hand, we can go fishing, we also work in managing lumber that is managed legally, and it is already possible to apply for funding for the community members who live here in this community.
