Beans, Beans, Beans

Brazil is a very big country. Bigger, in fact, than the whole of Europe put together. As such, one bit of Brazil can be very different from the next. In fact, each state in Brazil is a bit like a separate country with its own kinds of food, its own kinds of music and dancing, and even its own kind of religion. However, one thing that all Brazilians love is beans! Here in the state of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil, where we are staying, people like black beans the best. The beans look like this:

But before you can start cooking the beans, you have to go through them by hand and pick out any bad ones. This is where Ezra and Willa come in handy:

Beans are very important here and people like to eat them everyday. To understand why people care about beans so much, you probably need to understand a little bit more about Northeast Brazil. While the coastal areas of Northeast Brazil are very fertile and lots of nice things like sugar cane grow there, the interior of Northeast Brazil is very hot and dry. It's called the sertao in Portuguese and it used to be a bit like the Wild West, with cowboys, Indians, and runaway slaves all fighting with each other. The worst thing about the sertao are the droughts which happen every ten years or so. This means that people can't grow anything, not even beans. All the people in the sertao have to flee to the coast or they will starve to death. Nowadays, there are better roads, and the government is better at helping people out when times are hard, but lots of older people remember the olden days when droughts meant that lots of people died. This is why beans mean so much to people!

We're about to go off to Recife for a week to spend carnaval there, so our next post will be about that.