As Christmas approaches we make a few suggestions to brighten the season for those in the south of England.

Amazônia – Young Vic Theatre, London

27th November – 24th January

This year, the Young Vic’s Christmas Show brings you a dazzling story of the Amazon and its people. The show is supporting Survival by calling on theatregoers to write letters for Amazonian tribes.

Amazônia by Colin Teevan and Paul Heritage is an action-packed musical of dance, laughter and adventure.

Deep in the rainforest, life is changing for the villagers of Todos Os Santos. Danger and desire are unleashed and the Amazon trembles. Can the spirits of the forest save our heroes? Will you be one of them?

This is Christmas, Brazilian style, featuring a stomping display of traditional quadrilha dancing. Year-on-year the Young Vic’s family show attracts exceptional praise.

The Daily Telegraph writes that ‘It doesn’t get more spectacular, sensory or right-on than the Young Vic’s bastion of first-rate Christmas fare’.

Visit www.amazonia-london.com and download movies for behind-the-scenes photos, music from the show and stories and videos from the Amazon.

To find out more about Amazonian peoples, order your free Amazon Tribes pack from Survival.

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Daniel Everett was once a Christian missionary, intent on converting the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon to Jesus.

He was part of an evangelical movement that thinks other people, and particularly tribal people, must be changed and made to believe Christianity’s teachings.

He has long since moved on from religion and the idea of ‘bettering’ people with the Bible, but has just released a book of memoirs about his experiences.

In it he tells how he lost his faith and family but found a new way of understanding human language, with help from the Pirahã who he lived with for many years.

Daniel is also supporting Survival’s Stamp It Out campaign to stop people using prejudiced and racist language about tribal peoples.

His book, ‘Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes’ is released this week. You can listen to parts of his story on BBC Radio 4.

In the last few weeks, a protest by the Enawene Nawe people of Brazil temporarily took a dam building site out of action. They are fighting the construction of the many dams creeping up on the river that feeds their community.

These photos show what was once the Amazon rainforest, now at the mercy of electricity consumers somewhere far away, whilst the dam kills the fish that the tribe relies on.

To some people, this is development, this is progress, it’s what ‘will help lift poor Brazilians out of poverty by creating the facilities the country needs for new jobs and good living’.

Dams and ‘development’ will, in fact, severely degrade the ancestral lands of Brazil’s indigenous people and make an underclass of the people themselves, bringing starvation, disease and misery along the way.

A horrific repeat of history

This is what happened to the Innu of Canada, who suffered as the government forced them away from their land and communities to ‘benefit from Western society’.

The ‘benefits’ left them with high rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, disease and suicide. This sort of integration is usually a forced social experiment with an unhappy ending.

The Guarani are another Brazilian tribe who are now in the grip of malnutrition, disease and ongoing strife as they desperately seek to reclaim their lands.

Living on roadsides, they are the victims of forced eviction as the economy has driven the invasions into their territory. So depressing is their plight that the Guarani now suffer one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

The Enawene Nawe have therefore taken matters into their own hands as the Brazilian government fails in its duty to protect them by encouraging the dams that will destroy their livelihood. This is a serious time for the tribe and they are running out of options. These are the results of their protest.

Earlier this year, Survival supporters Joseph and Daniel wrote about their trip to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana, home of the Bushmen. Here, in another extract from their diaries, they visit the Kaudwane resettlement camp, outside the reserve, where many Bushmen were evicted to. Read the first part of the diary.

I am woken early by the sun shining through my tent. It is still cold but the air feels nice and fresh. Outside, dogs and chickens roam around my tent.

We’ve decided to spend today meeting Bushmen in the Kaudwane camp, gathering stories about their experiences with our new friends and translators, Thuso and Ntyame.

We really want to ask them why so many of them have not yet gone back home into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, even though they won their court case against the Botswana government in December 2006.

We also want to hear about how they are treated by the government and wildlife officials – we know from Survival news reports that wildlife officials have tortured, intimidated, and abused Bushmen, particularly those trying to hunt.

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