After Saturday’s jam-packed schedule, our team took it easy today. Attuned to waking up early, we had our breakfast at our regular time at the hostel, before getting organising data and working on our upcoming presentation. This morning, we were also briefed on our schedule for the rest of this trip. We’ve just been getting into a nice routine, but it seems that our days here are numbered! Monday’s elicitation session is likely to be our last, before our trip to Rorainópolis.
At around noon, the professors picked us up (still a little lethargic and sluggish in general) at our hostel. We were driven to Marina Meu Caso, a rustic waterfront eatery, where we shared tambaqui assado (grilled fish) and baião de dois (rice with black eyed peas). The food, like almost every meal we’ve had so far, was super tasty. After lunch, we hopped back into the car. We drove past the Boa Vista office of Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) (an NGO that works on the protection of Brazilian indigenous peoples’ rights) — we had touched on ISA during our Brazilian Indigenous Languages course, and had made use of their Encyclopedia of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil for our own research at some point, so that was pretty cool!
We then made a short stop at Porto do Babazinho — where we found ourselves on an unused boat with a view of Rio Branco and the Macuxi bridge. After a few photos, we were dropped off back at our hostel, where our food coma set in. All of us dozed off for a little while (Octavia on her hammock, Guilherme on his rocking chair and yours truly horizontally on my bed), before we continued to work on our presentation on the indigenous languages of Canada, that we will be presenting on Tuesday and Wednesday. At 5pm, our team spent some time doing a dry-run of our presentation for Suzi, which turned out quite well! I think I can speak on behalf of the team to say that we’re all excited to be presenting this for the local students later this week.
We then ordered take-out from Verde Mix (salads! because we’ve been over-eating!), and worked a little more for the rest of the night. As I mentioned earlier, tomorrow is going to be our last elicitation session — we can’t believe how quickly this trip is flying by!
By Greg Antono
Research Excursion Program 