My name is Neida Pereira, I work as an extractivist, I’m a daughter from a small riverside community called Coroca, on the Arapiuns River. I’m 51 years old, and I work in extractivism. The community of Coroca is located approximately 55 km from the municipality of Santarém, in the State of Pará. Our community is small, there are 18 families, and we also work with community-based tourism, turtle breeding, stingless bee breeding, and farming. That is my work. Not just mine, but all the women in the community do this.

My daily life in the community: I wake up at 5 am, prepare breakfast for the whole family, then I’ll tidy up the house, sweep the yard a little until the sun gets brighter. When it’s 7 o’clock in the morning, I get the sickle and the machete, and go into the forest to collect straw and herbs for dyeing. But I don’t go alone, I always go with someone to stay near me, and we go together and enter the forest to collect “tucumã” (a type of palm tree) straw. It is a thorny palm tree and after collecting this straw, we will collect herbs for dyeing it. We collect this from the forest, we do it at the same time, all together. Then we get home, we rest a little and clean the straw. Cleaning it means removing all the thorns, and then we wash it, put it in the sun for three days, but we have to bring it inside at nighttime. On the last day, we leave it for a short time after nightfall, before bringing the straw inside so that it becomes very soft and white. While the straw is drying, we prepare natural dyes. We collect annatto, for orange dye; “crajiru” (pariri), for red dye; we gather genipap, for black dye; and while the straw is drying, we prepare these dyes. After everything is ready, we will work on the handicraft.

The next day, we repeat the same thing. I wake up at 5 o’clock, then I prepare the straw, shred it, make the straw strings, and remove any thorns that are left. Then we make the fabric for the handicraft. There are 25 women working on handicraft. There we drink a cup of coffee, a biscuit, a snack, then we agree where we will work the next day: “it’s going to be at your house, it’s going to be at her house”, and that’s how we do the rotation. After lunch, at around 12-noon, we sit down again, start working on the handicraft and work on it again until 6 p.m. During that time, we have to finish the handicraft piece, and we stop working on handicraft, so we can rest and go to sleep around 10 or 11 pm. Then we’ll take showers, and rest and sleep until the next day to be ready to work again.

On Saturday and Sunday, I will work on community activities as a group: meetings and discussions. We organize the handicraft pieces and bring them to the Association, separate the pieces going to the customers in other states. I spend two days away from my handicraft work to do this.

I have four daughters, and only one of them likes to work with handicraft. She is the one who takes care of selling the production, and she also makes handicrafts together with me. We organize all the handicraft pieces for selling and then take them to the association. The association stock team puts tags on the products and selects if they go to a customer or stay in the store.

The forest supplies all our needs, both food and luxury. It says in the documentation that we raise turtles for selling, but our residents are so fond of them we don’t want to sell them. They stay here, and we don’t want that, they should stay there. The females have already started to reproduce, they have started to spawn in 2020, since last year. We already have hatchlings from these turtles. So we started to fall in love with the turtles, so we didn’t want to sell them anymore.

The Amazon Rainforest is a laboratory. Besides, being a laboratory, it is a source of wealth for those who know how to coexist with the forest without harming the environment. As we need it, we know how to take care of it, and earn an income from it. We earn a living from our handicraft, “tucumã” (a type of palm tree) straw, and natural dyeing. Everything comes from the forest. So, the forest is like our mother. Besides that, she needs to be taken care of and, for her to be taken care of, she needs our awareness. The forest is everything to us, and the Amazon needs this forest to remain standing.