t of the much-desired cacao plantations. With or without divine intervention, the weather cooperates: from the heavy uninterrupted rainfall that marks the planting of cacao seedlings to the need for the monsoons to stop and bright uninterrupted sunlight to return so that uninterrupted harvesting might take place. The weather has to cooperate so that Ilhi¿½us might not turn into a ghost town.
             Ilhi¿½us also offers a haven of hope to the inhabitants of more northern villages in Brazil known collectively as the backlands. These inhabitants suffer under the hardships of a perennial drought, while a little south the inhabitants of Ilhi¿½us revel in the riches that the skies and the earth have to bestow on them. These back-landers trek many miles over many days to escape certain death from where they comei¿½leaving their pets to die, braving a difficult journey made worse by a chronic lack of nourishments that takes the lives of the old and the infirm, in the hope that they might earn a living. There is also the hope, perhaps
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