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Well, folks, water, sun and pepper: a spicy solution for chronic poverty.
Only TEDx would make me think of this title
for my talk and for what I saw in Baixas.
Actually, I am deeply concerned,
having heard here many times,
about the problem of the Amazon water levels.
The water level dropped even more. We are going through a dry season,
and it got me confused,
because we are in a floating auditorium!
If I swing like this it may even shake.
Let's get to know how harsh the dry season can really be
by looking at our semiarid Northeastern Region.
This is most extensive dry vegetation in South America.
We have the caatinga biome
representing a forest with almost no water.
We barely see water here.
This is the environment through which we are going to walk today.
To find water in this area,
to have a little water, don't even think about water for floating, no way;
this picture shows this very clearly.
These people didn't pose for me.
They were in the middle of the way.
This is the role of women in the semiarid region.
Women and children often go out with their animals
bringing along all their buckets and containers to carry water.
Here they are on their way to collect some water.
Those who do not have a donkey sometimes use a cart,
the community's bullock cart, which takes all the water it can to the community.
Who can't use either takes their buckets on top of their own heads,
like this 70 year-old lady, who walks the same path daily just for some water.
That is the water she is going after. Its quality is usually really poor.
It comes from holes made in the ground to hold the water
during the rainy season. They share this water with the animals.
There is cattle dung. It's actually a fecal coliform soup.
This is the water people from the semiarid northeast consume to survive.
This water dries up. Here is one of the holes without anything, it's barely wet.
There is just a tiny bit of water at the bottom which those people collect.
This is the semiarid region. There are 1 million km², 1,228 towns, and 25 million inhabitants.
It is the most extensive dry forest and the most densely populated in our South America.
50% of the population has an income below US $164.
Child mortality still reaches 49 in some communities, in every 1,000 live births.
Child mortality is even higher in other towns of the same area.
In Alagoas, where we are working,
the figures were around that 4 years ago, when we arrived there.
Here is the Baixas community in São José da Tapera, Alagoas.
This is the village. There's no electricity, no water, no sanitation,
and people survive on less than US$ 50 a month,
from the sale of brooms made of dry licuri leaves, a native palm tree.
This is the region's typical house.
It's called tapera because it's quite small.
That's what São José da Tapera is.
Now let's walk in through the front door.
Here is the living room, the door.
These chickens are hung in plastic bags from the ceiling,
like that hammock, so that the foxes don't eat them up.
Right next to this room is the dining room,
with a small table, a small flour pot,
and two packs of cookies we had taken with us at the time.
Here is the kitchen.
The stove, which is down here, is two rocks on the ground.
The lady was washing the dishes.
Don't ask me to show you the bathroom because there isn't one.
It's in the back behind the bushes.
This is an image I like to show
because it portrays the typical family of the northeastern region.
It was very well described by Graciliano Ramos
in his novel entitled Vidas Secas - Barren Lives, which has been translated into several languages.
and portrays a woman with her 8 children, 3 grandchildren and a little dog very well,
which, different from the novel, is not called Whale, but Piaba, an anchoveta. However, they bear some resemblance.
Here is where we found a well, it's there, further ahead.
It was a totally forsaken place.
The pump wouldn't work, the solar panels had been stolen,
and it had been completely abandoned by the government.
We got there and managed to recover the well,
bring water to the surface, but it's brackish.
We built a solar desalinator and put it to good use.
Water evaporates, then condenses on that ceiling and drips into those gutters,
recovering 250 L of water a day.
We also tried to do something with this water.
We managed it by making the brackish water available for common use
and a small tank with desalinated water.
Based on this, we created the H2Sun Project,
which we nicknamed solar water.
At the time, we built a hydroponics system, the only thing we could do,
to recirculate the water to try to grow something.
Now with the hydroponics system made of PET bottles and rice hull charcoal,
we asked: "What shall we grow? What should we produce with this?"
Everybody agreed, a "community garden".
Hang on a minute. Not a community garden, no.
The community will eat up all the produce. I need to generate income.
It's not a safe food program.
Here is when the third element of this talk comes in.
Now we start to discover, the pepper.
We had already covered the water and the sun,
and now the pepper came into play.
This plant could generate added value and some income.
The project worked out so well that the gardens are heavy
with the amount of pepper produced.
During the first year of administration, we had already set up another structure,
and implemented five other systems.
We went after water on top of that hill,
where we found a small spring and developed another five gardens for family farming.
The system is modular and can and has been replicated.
We went after water on top of the hills
channeled the water with a hose and supplied the community.
This is how it worked. Perfect. The harvest.
Then we trained people,
adding more value to the pepper by preparing a vinaigrette dressing with it.
We stabilized the entire production. There was no waste.
All the pepper grown there either became vinaigrette or
was dehydrated in a solar oven, becoming dried pepper, which can be kept for more than a year.
The product is bottled and labeled there
arriving on the market shelves looking like this.
This is what they look like. We really wanted it to be simple.
We wanted a simple label. The idea was to improve people's self-esteem
by having their own product on the market,
the product of a community which was literally dying
from hunger and thirst 4 years ago.
The product was so successful that we started to look for market niches.
We didn't want this product on a common supermarket shelf.
We wanted it to be arranged on special shelves
or in special areas of the supermarkets.
We introduced it in 5 hotels in Maceió.
Maceió is an important tourist destination today.
In each room of these hotels, there is a jar of pepper
with information on its origin and reason for its production.
It's not only the product that is sold, but also this socio-productive inclusion project
that is negotiated with the tourists who stay at one of these hotels.
The community, which looked like this
when we got there 4 years ago, now looks like this.
Obviously, this wasn't the result of the pepper project only.
It was the result of the work carried out by other NGOs
that were present there and took interest.
The project's visibility caused other people to join the effort to help,
including the government by extending the Light For All Program to the region.
That picture that we showed a bit earlier - symbolic of a northeastern family.
The same woman with her children and nieces and nephews today living in a pretty decent home.
The only one that didn't survive was the little dog Whale.
She didn't get to see this new change.
Finally, "It's not the new home or higher income!"
But the smile on the faces of these people that measures the quality of life".