Mussel collectors in Rio

I've now stayed a week in Rio de Janeiro, a city of many millions –second largest in Brazil after Sao Paulo - considered by some the most beautiful in the world with plenty of nice beaches and rocky protruding mountains and forest and also 500 favelas – slum areas.
I grew up by the Mediterranean Sea and I've always felt attracted to the ocean and everything that surrounds it and walking along the numerous beautiful beaches of Rio – Copacabana, Ipanema, Botafogo, Flamenco, Urca, etc.- I befriended a bunch of Cariocas –this is how people from Rio are called. They make a living out of collecting mussels and deliver them to the nearby restaurants.

The two mussel collectors I talked to most were Fernando and Ronaldo. The team is composed of twelve people in total, but just a few dive into the sea to pick up the mussels using a spade-like tool to wrench them out of the rocks at 5am!!! It doesn't matter how rough the sea might be, day after day they put on their goggles and dive bare-skin to bring up bucketfuls of mussels.
Once on the rocks above the sea surface, the mussels are placed into metal buckets and boiled to edible point. Then they are placed on a flat rock and the mussel collectors take the seafood out of the black shell. I helped them two days – one day Ho and Kiki also did- and I found crabs that ate the mussel before we could get at it and some other seashells.

The shell-less mussels are put into a big cloth bag and then divided into smaller plastic bags that are sold to the local restaurants at 10 Reais a bag (around 6.2 USD). The restaurants sell portions that are less than half a bag for 50 Reais!!!
Fernando just had a bicycle accident in which he lost the sight on one eye. He has been collecting mussels for restaurants the last 35 years, 'living entirely off the sea' as he calls it. I asked him how he intends to live once he can't dive any longer at 5am every day, when he is too old for that, but he doesn't seem worried in the least.

He replied the government gives a minimum salary – around 430 Reais-to everybody once they are 65 years old even if they haven't done 'anything registered' in their lives. Now he makes 1200 Reais per month, a salary that is more than acceptable in Brazil.
Ronaldo doesn't sound so confident about his job though. He talks with deep nostalgia about a Canadian girlfriend he had who keeps asking him to go to Vancouver and change his lifestyle forever. He was there once he says, but the weather was so cold he had to sleep with his clothes on with the heating on full blast.
  
No I don't think Cariocas can survive their personality in the Canadian weather. On the other hand, he also talks about how tired he is at times. He has to give a fistful of mussels to some heavily armed bands to just come through a certain favela on his way home, like violence is spoiling the beauty of the nature and people in his native Rio.
   

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