‘Starting to look a lot better’: Rain aids Mosquito fire battle, but brings flood, mudflow risk
A woman watches an action film on TV outside her home in the Mosquitia region of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil on Wednesday, June 23, 2013. In drought-stricken parts of the Amazon basin, it may be months before rain falls as the year progresses. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)
MOSQUITI, Brazil (AP) — In a village deep inside the rainforest, farmers harvested bananas by hand, then went into their mud-walled, mud-topped homes and slept through the night, fearing an attack by an angry bear — or maybe even a hungry jaguar.
The people are like the inhabitants of Brazil’s Amazon, where a third of the human family lives in the rainforest. But compared to the rest of the country they live a life of relative luxury and comfort, shielded from the violence and despair that have devastated entire regions of Brazil.
In the village of Nhamundá, known as Campo Grande by the indigenous Shuar people who populate the surrounding area, it was raining, not in an exceptional downpour, but in torrents and rainstorms. The farmers had just harvested bananas, and the villagers were sleeping through the night in preparation for the next morning’s planting season.
Outside the village, in the village of Tupaia, it was raining hard. The rain was coming down in buckets. It was a scene like the one in a movie, like the one that unfolds in this small, mountainous village that is about 150 miles from the rainforest.
It’s a scene that has played out across the Amazon rainforest — an onslaught of floods and mudflows that is expected to worsen by the end of the month.
The rain is not the only reason that the rainforest has been battered this year. The Amazon rainforest is also