On the 28th of February 2001, Buck and Luciene moved to the Amazon Basin of Brazil. We lived in Macapá, right on the equator. Why would a web designer give up his career and take his family from their comfortable life in Columbus, Ohio, USA, to live on the Amazon River? We came with a vision to save the Amazon, to tell people about Jesus, and plant a Vineyard church. We have planted a church, and we are turning it over to the national leaders, heading back to the States in Sept. 2009.

 
Here are some important driving tips for Macapa. Indeed, most of these will apply for all of Brazil.

One thing that you really want to watch out for are manhole covers. Many are broken down, or gone completely. Sometimes concerned citizens put a stick or a piece of wood sticking up out of the ones with no cover, to keep people from hitting them. They can be fatal for people on a motorcycle.

Tcheco, a friend of mine, was driving his big Mercedes truck when he hit one without a manhole cover. Ripped his truck apart. And the police wanted to give him a ticket on top of it. In fact, if you notice when you are here, most people just completely avoid them altogether, even if they look ok, just as a matter of principle.

Another thing you really want to be careful with, especially if on a motorcycle, is kite string. In front of our house right now, there are the pieces of about four kites, broken skeletons flapping in the wind, wrapped around the electric lines. What looks like an innocent little kite string can kill you.

There is a sport here, of waging war with kites. The kids take glue, warm it up, and break and grind glass into little tiny pieces. From what they tell me, fluorescent lights work the best. They then mix it into the glue, and grab a handful, then run the string through their hands. They will sometimes wrap the string back and forth around some trees, or have a friend help them by pulling it and wrapping it around a can as they put the glue and glass, called serol, on the string. They repeat the process for the tail of the kite also.

When they are flying their kites, they will then try to either cross strings, and let the string out very fast if there is a strong wind, pull it in quickly, or do a sawing motion up and down very fast to try to cut the other persons string. Once the kite is cut, it is fair game, and you will see boys come from everywhere, each trying to claim the kite as their own, so that they can then put it up and join the battle.

It is a very addictive game, filled with suspense, and adrenaline. Making the kites is an art, and they often spend hours making the kites for the next day. The kids collect some kind of light wood, I think it is called balsam wood, and dry it out in the sun. They buy tissue paper to cover them in custom designs, gluing them together in strips. That is it, they use the balsam wood, tissue paper, glue, and tie the frame together with kite string.

They are phenomenal with the kites, and exercise an amazing control over them. I once saw my nephew Joao dive a kite down over electrical lines after a kite that was fleeing, wrap around the line of that other kite, and then bring it up fast to cut the line. I couldn’t believe it that he could pull that kind of stunt off with one string, on a kite that he made himself.

There are often competitions, and kids from one street will have ongoing and continuous battles with the kids from the next street, or even with kids from two or three blocks away. Often there will be five or ten kites in the air in a two or three block radius. Well, the fact that there is all of this string flying around, coated in glass, presents a real problem for public safety. There have been numerous cases of a motorcycle rider catching a kite string on the throat, because it really is so small that it is hard to see especially as you are flying down the street on your bike with your helmet on, they get it on the throat, and it cuts their jugular, or completely cuts their head off, and there is another dead motorist.

If you observe the motorcycles here, many of them will have big stiff antennas on the front of them. No, there are not a lot of hams on bikes, that is not for a CB, though it looks like a CB antenna, it is to keep the kite string from their necks. It is important on a bicycle also, to be very careful, as it can be almost as bad on a bicycle if you are going down hill or something, and can also be fatal.

HEADS UP: my holylamb (at) bigfoot.com address has been getting hit hard by spam, and has been going over the daily limit allowed by the greedy scumbags at bigfoot.com. Just so everyone knows how greedy those scumbags are at bigfoot.com, they want 9.95 per quarter to use their mail service, which is just forwarding. But with that outrageous price, you don't even get spam filtering. You have to pay extra for that. My advice- stay away from Bigfoot.com. The only thing big about them is the price for their services.

Please use my holylamb (at) pobox.com if you get a message that your e-mail was undeliverable.

For the spambots, please send your spam to help@bigfoot.com and abuse@bigfoot.com and stop sending it to me.



posted by Eduardo Buck at Thursday, June 26, 2003