ENERGY - Odebrecht Informa

fire in the open air. They get someone
to roast the meat for them and
it’s an enjoyable lunch for them. They
don’t want to go to a cafeteria to eat
rice and beans with potatoes and so
on. So you have to respect that.
Roque: “I was born to
be an engineer”
Air Force plane, and that was when I
saw my first hydros, Paulo Afonso 1
and Paulo Afonso 2, and went down
into the caverns. That impressed me
too. It was unforgettable.
Just one thing
On that project I only insisted on
one thing: that my family go there
with me. The team at the time was
very surprised and said, “Damn,
Roque, you’re going to take your
wife there?” “That’s right. My wife
is from Uruguay. We’ve only been
married four years, and she’s going
to live with me on the jobsite.” “No
way!” “Don’t worry, I’ll find a way.”
My wife was the only woman at the
jobsite, and there were 3,000 men
there. We lived in a brick house that
wasn’t plastered over on the outside.
It was all improvised. Our first child
was just over a year old.
Cultural differences
In Malaysia, there is a fruit that, if
someone comes near you with it, you
have to leave the room. To give you an
idea, they have signs at the entrance
of the international hotels saying: “Do
not enter with durian fruit.” It smells
like ammonia mixed with jackfruit. If
someone comes near you with that
fruit, you have to get out of there. But
for Malaysians, it’s a delicacy. A spectacular
thing, a treat. It’s their culture.
Uruguayan workers’
cafeteria
The Uruguayan workers just want
to get a piece of raw meat, bread, lettuce,
tomato and onion, and make a
Malaysian indigenous
chief sends a message
The site of the future Bakun
Hydro on the island of Borneo, in
Malaysia, was surrounded by indigenous
tribes. A few months after
I got there, I received a message
from the head of the indigenous
tribe, saying he wanted to meet me.
It was like a movie where I was the
leader of the white men and he was
the Indian chief. I had to go alone,
and my main concern was how I
would communicate with the tribal
chief. We ended up communicating
through gestures. And I had to eat
something I was absolutely sure
was some part of a monkey. To this
day I don’t know what it was that I
ate. It made me really nauseous, but
it was part of the job.
Record concrete pour
The construction of Los Huites
in Mexico was such a massive project
that we beat the world record
for monthly concrete pours. We
made the cover of ENR-Engineering
News Record magazine. It was
a high-visibility project for Odebrecht,
carried out in partnership
with Mexican companies. But what
caught my attention was the words
painted on the cemetery wall,
which read: “Fuera los brasileños”
(“Brazilians go home”). It took a
little time for the Mexican workers
to understand our philosophy, but
after about four months we noticed
that the wall of the cemetery had
been painted white.
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