As I’ve said more than once, our trip to the Amazon was life-changing for me. Unfortunately the bad part of that is that I want to go back immediately. And then again. It’s a little bit of how I feel about South Africa which is also a major love affair of mine–we went four times in three years as I got a little crazy about it. Fortunately, I was able to get a small dose of the Amazon right here in Boston, two weeks after we returned from Manaus.
I mentioned in a prior post that, in order to prepare for the trip, I read a book about a tiny fish called a piaba being a part of saving the Amazon. The book is here. And because I am such a groupie, I sent an email to Scott Dowd, the New England Aquarium scientist/educator/guru behind Project Piaba to tell him we were going to the Amazon, that we loved the book, and did he need anything back from the area?
Scott responded almost immediately. He gave us some ideas of where to stay and to go, and also told us about a woodworking foundation called Fundação Almerinda Malaquais (or simply “Fundação”, site is Portuguese only) in the town of Novo Airão. We visited this collective on the last day of our stay and were treated to a tour of a large open-air (roofed) warehouse where benches and tables were marked with the names of the workers, and we talked to several of them about what they were working on. One woman, who had left the tree-felling industry (yay!) had been through a number of classes and re-training and now was making a lovely carved ray. One of her rays lives now in our house, probably hating the lack of humidity.
Image credit: Fundação Amerinda Malaquais
The fundação is all about training locals to sustainably work with the forest–and now Scott is also working with them to train the aquarium fish workers in woodworking too for the offseason. Here is a part of Scott’s note to me about it.
In the high water season, the aquarium fishers that I work with can’t fish – too much water. We’re organizing a program for them to spend a few weeks in N/A and get some woodworking training. This is intended to be an off-season source of income. The plan is for them to carve aquarium fish themed items, and ship it all out using the same intermediaries that would transport and export the aquarium fish. The fish hobbyists up here are showing strong indicators that there is a good market for that sort of thing, Here’s some of the early trials: https://www.reef2rainforest.com/2017/03/05/tannin-aquatics-introduces-new-products-supporting-project-piaba/
All of this background is leading to something I promise. Our treasure in the backyard: the New England Aquarium, and by association, the interesting people who work there. We’ve been members since the first week we moved here from Brazil three years ago. It is, to me, the perfect sized and designed aquarium–ascending along the sides on long ramps with individual aquariums until you reach the top and a coveted view of Myrtle the Turtle at the top of the Giant Ocean Tank (GOT)–then descending in a spiral back to base. All the way being treated to the sights (ummm, and smells) of lots of penguins. If you haven’t been: go now. And go early. We are usually first in at 9 am because later in the day it gets impassable. To whet your appetite, there is a live cam of the GOT that makes you lose a whole lot of your day watching (ummm, oops, that’s me but Myrtle did just swim by).
Scott invited me and my kids to a backstage tour there and on a given Thursday, Nico and I went into Boston to meet Scott. In a way, I feel like I should give up on any description of the backstage because Sy Montgomery in her book The Soul of An Octopus has done such an unparalleled job. Actually it’s a good thing I am reading that book only now because if I had read it before, I would have been too intimidated to even reach out to Scott. He’s a titan. But one without a pedestal, and he has not eaten his god-kids since I did see them at a book talk in Cambridge
