DaytonDailyNews.com

BELEM, Brazil — Once again, the tent city springs to life overnight, just as it has for the two previous trials in the murder of Sister Dorothy Stang. From every corner of the Amazon they come, to bear witness to their beloved "Irma Dorothy."

The buses rolled in around 2 a.m. from Anapu, Dorothy's village, after an 18-hour drive through the mud and the dreck of the rainy season in the Amazon. Red crosses are staked in the ground to represent all the victims of land-grab murders in the state of Para. The villagers have lugged them on the bus from Anapu, from a site near Dorothy's grave, where there are more than 700 such crosses.

They set up camp in the lush park directly across from the courthouse where Vitalmiro Moura, the man known as Bida, is standing trial for ordering Stang's murder. The "tents" resemble gigantic Glad bags held aloft by makeshift poles. A concrete fountain in the center of the park is designated the "women's shower" and modestly partitioned with tattered sheets.

Despite the solemn occasion the tent city is a festive place, the religious equivalent of a Grateful Dead concert, with people strumming guitars and cooking on portable grills. They wear colorful yellow bandannas with a single word: Dorothy.

Stang's image is everywhere, with her silver-rimmed glasses and ever-present smile, as if she were some aging rock star, some unlikely survivor of Monterey and Woodstock, Janis Joplin grown white-haired and bespectacled.

Raimunda da Nonata Araujo dos Santos explains the phenomenon this way: "She is loved by everyone, especially me." Through the government-backed Project for Sustainable Development, Stang helped the tiny Brazilian woman, and hundreds of other families, to claim a plot of land and wrest a living from it. Dos Santos planted cocoa trees, rice, onions, peppers, bananas, and she raised her six children and sent them to school. "Dorothy has never really left us; she is still walking with us," she says.

Now, the people are walking with her.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or

mmccarty@DaytonDailyNews.com.