Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Green Music in the Rain Forest" by Suzanne Charlé, which appeared in the Fall 2002 Ford Foundation Report.

OELA is an acronym based on Portuguese words rather than the English words used in this article. A luthier is a maker of stringed musical instruments.

The Amazonian Workshop School for Fabrication of Stringed Instruments (OELA) is a small part of a larger effort to create a sustainable harvest of the great Amazon forest and to give employment to the region's burgeoning population.

"Few people know that the Amazon is one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions of the world," observes José Gabriel López, a Ford Foundation program officer in Brazil. The city of Manaus, for example, has grown in the past decade from 850,000 to 1.5 million. "This rural-urban migration and the resultant urban shanty-towns stand as living symbols of failed or nonexistent rural development policies," López says. "In many places, small-scale rural producers have been abandoned—devoid of health and education services, credit, technical assistance and opportunity. What Rubens Gomes, founder of the workshop school, and his colleagues have created in Manaus is hope."

Gomes knows how to build hope. The school, he notes proudly, is the first to make stringed instruments in the Amazon. And it is the first in all of the Americas to construct instruments exclusively of lumber harvested in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

"Officially, there are 30 million cubic meters of wood cut in the Amazon annually," Gomes says. "Twenty million of this is wasted—sawdust, scraps, unwanted wood left to rot. And those are the official numbers. The motive of this school is to transform what is lost into things of value. Many people could do this—but there are no schools teaching carpentry in the Amazon."

OELA is meant to help fill the void. To graduate, each student must make a stringed instrument. All the guitars are made from certified wood. Gomes explains that traditionally, Brazilian rosewood and ebony were used in the construction of guitars. But because of intense harvesting, these trees are close to extinction. "I've been working for years, trying to find Amazon woods that are unknown on the market, that are in plentiful supply and that can be used in instrument making," Gomes says. He experimented with dozens before he found types that have the right strength and sound. (Like other master luthiers, he can tell by touching the wood whether it will reverberate well.) Once he identified the woods as possible substitutes, he sent them to a laboratory to be tested for the right grain and density. Today, Brosimum rubescens is substituted for rosewood, Aniba canellila for ebony, and Protium species for Brazilian mahogany and cedar. These and some 25 other undervalued tropical hardwoods have found their way into the luthiers' workshop, taking the pressure off the better-known woods.

For the past year, master luthier Raúl Lage from the Fernando Ortiz Instrument-Making School of the Cuban Music Institute has been working with the students. There are hurdles, he cautions, a number of them technical. The high humidity in Manaus means that the wood will crack in drier climates unless properly treated. Glue frequently doesn't hold. These problems are slowly being resolved.

There is also a major obstacle outside the workshop: The resistance of buyers to new woods. Thus far, most of the instruments have been sold to environmentalists, some of whom "adopt" a student by paying his or her tuition; the student's "project guitar" is then given to the donor as a gift.

There is also the possibility of contract work from outside the Amazon. Gomes's hopes were raised recently when the president of a well-known guitar company based in Nashville, Tennessee, ordered 15 guitars to be auctioned off for the Rainforest Alliance.

Lage cautions that it will be a long time before any of the students can command a master luthier's fee. "There is a saying," Lage says. "Anyone can make one good guitar; it takes a master to make one every time."

José Lucio do Nascimento Rabelo, director of the technical school, says, "By learning this skill, students come to look at the forest in a new way; there are ways other than logging for plywood and firewood to earn a living, to better the life of the people." One of the woods being used as a replacement for the precious rosewood, he notes, is typically used to make charcoal.

Such an appreciation for the forest, says Rabelo, could have a huge effect on the survival of the rain forest; some 80 percent of the students come from other parts of the state of Amazonas, and virtually all of them return to their home towns. "Some," he adds, "go on to become politicians who will have a direct influence on the future of the forest."