Our friend and expert on the Bumba meu Boi game, Prof. Dr. Soraia Chung Saura, visited us here in Maranhão and she gifted us with beautiful descriptions of her visit: I don’t think we had entirely recovered from Saint John and Saint Peter when we decided to see the celebrations of Saint Marçal, on July […]

Our friend and expert on the Bumba meu Boi game, Prof. Dr. Soraia Chung Saura, visited us here in Maranhão and she gifted us with beautiful descriptions of her visit: “First admire, then you will understand.” Gaston Bachelard The family is now wandering through Maranhão, arriving just before the June festivities. This time they settle […]

Quem foi que disse                                                     Who is it that said Que janeiro não saía                                 […]

On departure the luggage consists of a spoon, a bucket and an empty sack. Upon return, it’s a sack full of bebe fumo. Many families in Acupe support themselves by catching a kind of shellfish that has the curious name of bebe fumo, or smoke drinker. There is a long trip by foot in order […]

According to its citizens, Abadia is a land of medicine women, midwives and herbs that work better than any pill. A land where pilgrims come from afar to worship the image of Our Lady of Abadia, and where the dolls are baptized like every child. “Everyone deserves to be baptized,” said one of the girls.  […]

Neck deep in water, Felipe never tired of watching his little boat slide around on the whims of the wind and the current. Built with his own hands out of a rubber sandal hull, plastic bag sails and a rudder made from a bent bottle cap, the boat was christened with the name of his […]

There are boys who, while making their toys, are like a bird learning to fly, they have a deep desire and persistent hands. They won’t stop making until they have arrived at what they wanted. Trial, error, fixing, adjusting, polishing, re-doing, they even make funny faces or stick out their tongues to help get it […]

The house was far, hard to get to, with countless gates to open and several splits on the road where we had to guess which way to go. If we hadn’t been there the day before, we would never have found our way. We didn’t tell them we were coming, we arrived by surprise, needing […]

Is hunting a big boy’s thing? Neto is only 2 years old, the second youngest of nine brothers, an attentive boy with a voracious intellect. As I followed the filming of his older sisters, he was tugging at my clothes and inviting me to look around. I asked him to wait a bit, more worried […]

On the way there, everyone walks quickly through the bush, eagerly anxious to see if there is something in the trap they set up days ago. Anxiety also to see if the trap is still there or if it has been stolen by someone, along with the bird. Basically, the anxiety of waiting, of surprise. […]

Anxious, with fast movements and speaking quickly, the boys insist on taking us to the mangrove to hunt for gaiamum (a type of crab). It’s Wednesday morning, lunch and school will happen soon, but there is no argument to convince them that this isn’t the best moment. The agreement is that we’ll be quick, find […]

Dona Joana would leave the house at 4 o’clock in the morning and, walking down the trail with a kerosene lamp, she would see hunters on the way and they would tell her: go on, miss, I won’t do anything. “There was no road then, now we have our boat, every hour.” It was common […]

Sitting in the corner of the living room, Dona Custódia da Conceição tries to look where she can see the past and slowly lets her memories out into the air. She says a good dancer doesn’t settle on her heels, she is always on the tip of her toes. They would play harmonica, cavaquinho and […]

The days go by but the kids’ desire to show us what they know remains. When night falls they’ve already surrounded us with suggestions for the morning. “We still haven’t made the spool car,” one of them says. “Why don’t we go hunt crabs in the mangrove?” says another. The list never ends, they really […]

For days the boys of Tatajuba have been telling us about their tiny weapons made of palm straw. I’ve seen entire arsenals of children’s weapons, but one made from palm straw was new to us. Does the weapon fire something? I thought it did. But no, it doesn’t fire anything, instead it launches the boy […]

Nasepotiti means “burnt bat” – eating bats was an old custom of some of the Panará people. Today the bats fly freely around the village and no one bothers hunting them, they prefer other game like fish, stingray, eel, tapir, spider monkey, capuchin monkey, caiman, tortoise, and many others. The village is located in the […]

August is the windy month, and the winds call for bicudas and arraias, or airplanes and kites, in the sky. Acupe is currently covered with children on the docks, the square, in streets and backyards with their eyes turned to the sky and their hands waving deftly, like a maestro conducting his orchestra. The bicudas […]

The fire invites us to talk about fear, to listen about courage, to warm us from the cold. The moment we sat around it, stories began to appear without invitation, they simply appeared. In Tatajuba, every child has a terrible story to tell. No, not stories they heard, stories they lived themselves. These children have […]

Beneath a mango tree, Seu Dodô creates his incredible paper masks. These are masks borne out of a fearful imagination and painted in the colors that belong to it: black, red and white. First the clay is worked, smoothed, and sculpted into frightful shapes. Next, he covers the clay with strips of brown paper mixed […]