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Sixty-year-old Deuclides sits together with his two brothers Dilço (62) and Dilo (58) on the shady veranda of his house; the three talk about their lives. The brothers still live together with their youngest sister in the area they came to as children with their parents and farm here. Settled not far from each other, all three have worked with gebana Brasil since the beginning. They switched to organic farming 15 years ago, when the first company came to Capanema that traded in organic soy. Dilo still remembers well: „We were laughed at because we took on this extra work in the field.“
Emigrating, moving on
But the Peraros do not shy away from hard work. The journey described to Capanema was not the first and by far not the most arduous in the family history. Deuclides points to the charcoal-painted portrait of a married couple hanging in the living room: they are the grandparents who emigrated from northern Italy to Brazil at the end of the 19th century in hopes of a better future.
In the 1950s the family moved on to benefit from a government colonization program that granted land to settlers free of charge. The land was then still covered with rainforest, which the colonists had to clear by painstaking manual labor. How it looked back then can be seen by looking across the Iguaçu River, barely one and a half kilometers away: thanks to the national park, the original forest there has been preserved to this day. "When the tiger roared in the forest, our father gathered us in the house to protect us," Dilço recounts. They would light fires and release the dogs to drive the animals away. In popular speech “tiger” refers to the jaguar, which today lives only in the national park.
To school with eight liters of milk
At first they only grew food for their own consumption; it was only later that the family began to sell milk and pork as well as corn and soy. “Our mother had sewn us special vests so that we could carry three liters of milk on our backs and three liters on our bellies to take into town when we went to school,” Deuclides recalls, “and we each carried another liter in each hand.”
When the mother was pregnant with her tenth child in 1965, father Peraro died. “From then on our mother was on her own with us. Nevertheless she decided to stay in the countryside,” Deuclides, Dilço and Dilo say, not without pride. And despite hard times the woman has remained to this day: together with her youngest disabled daughter the now 89-year-old lives with Deuclides and his wife Salete, who care for her lovingly.