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be much more severe. It also helps to stabilise the
climate, producing essential rainfall, while the Amazon River is the
source of one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. Amazonia is the largest and richest ecosystem in the world, containing millions of species of insects, plants and birds. Many of its plants are used to make important medicines.
Born in 1958, Marina grew up in Seringal Bagaço in a village called Breu Velho in the state of Acre. She was the second oldest of 11 children born to a poor family of rubber tappers. They lived in a wooden house raised on stilts to protect it from the daily rains. There were no schools. Boys usually worked with their fathers, while girls helped at home. However, most of the children in Marina’s family were girls, so when she was nine, Marina became a rubber tapper, walking many miles each day to ‘tap’ trees to collect the rubber sap called latex. She knew her trees well and made careful cuts that were not too deep, to make sure they weren’t harmed, before collecting the milky liquid in a container she carried on her back. At the end of the day, her father heated all the latex they had harvested, forming it into balls that his boss sold in the city.
Marina loved being in the rainforest. It felt so alive. The trees rose high into a dense, leafy canopy that shaded the forest floor. Creepers and flowers twisted around their trunks, and birds, from colourful macaws to tiny hummingbirds, flew among their branches, while monkeys swung overhead. The chorus of frogs, birds and insects was often deafening. Some days, she would hunt armadillos and pacas, a kind of rodent, or catch fish from the river. They were paid very little for the rubber they collected, so relied on the forest, the river and their vegetable garden for all their food.
Rubber tappers suffered many hardships. There were no doctors and their only medicines were plants from the forest. Travelling
to the nearest city, Rio Branco, meant a long boat journey via the river, but when Marina was 12, a road was built through their area bringing new settlers – poor farmers who had been forced off their own land. The settlers brought new diseases that had a devastating effect on the isolated forest communities. Sadly, two of Marina’s younger sisters died from malaria and measles, while she, too, suffered five attacks of malaria. When Marina was 15,
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