Pentecost greetings!

Greetings from Cubatao. I realize that many of you have been praying for us but lately you probably have not been sure of ways that you can pray for us. I want to send something out before you wake up and head to church. I sent this out as an email but then I had so many of them returned from undeliverable addresses I thought I would make a blog too.

• Just over a month ago Samantha had a regular check up with her Doctor down here and she was beginning to show symptoms of a cold. Two weeks later the cold had gotten much worse and we have one month after we pay for a Dr.'s appointment that we can go back for free, the only problem was the Doctor was on vacation. We decided to go to a public hospital (read 'free') and after driving around from 11-3 we finally arrived back in Cubatao in line to see the Doctor. Samantha had "a lot" of mucus in her lungs and we were given other medicine and sent home. Now, about 2-3 weeks from that public hospital trip, Samantha is much better. She's been eating more than normal in order to replace what she lost while she was sick and she's also been sleeping much better.
• We finished buying furniture for Samantha's room. We'd been talking about getting her furniture and decided when she got sick that it was time because of how often Samantha was waking up in the middle of the night. When Samantha would wake up the only thing that would calm her was to lay on Mommy, Samantha would come into our room and I would go downstairs to the couch. We wanted a bed for Samantha so that Izabel could put her back to sleep in her own room. The night that we finally had her bed installed was when Samantha started sleeping all through the night again.
• There is an important soccer match today at 4:00 our time. The team I cheer for is playing against the team that our missionary pastor cheers for in one of the local championships.
• We went up to Sao Paulo last week hoping to return with a car. We had a successful trip, we bought an almost new car that we were able to get inside out budget. It's a very basic car but it's the car that most taxi drivers use so we figured it was a safe bet. Also on that trip we were able to splurge a little bit and we ate lunch at Outback Steakhouse and then Izabel and I went on to a Starbucks.
• I've been asked and have agreed to begin teaching English for a student, Renan. His current semester is about to end and in June I will begin doing classes with him. You can pray about the classes that I will be having with Renan and also for our future ministries.
• Yesterday morning we found an abandoned kittten, with all the dogs on the street it wouldn't survive so we gave it a safe place to stay. We're hoping to find someone who wants to take in a kitten.

Thank you for your prayers and encouragements. Feel free to share these updates around.

Time really flies

We've been here 4 months already! That's hard to believe. I remember on my 6 month trip in 2007 the time seemed to go by much slower, not that I wasn't enjoying myself. To think that if Izabel and I were only going to be here for 6 months; and to know that 4 of those six months would be already passed, makes me happy that we know we have a lot longer to be here.

It is easy to see how quickly time is moving by watching Samantha. She has changed so much since the day we arrived 4 months ago. One of the most encouraging things is that Samantha has remained healthy since we have arrived.

I look forward to getting started with some ministries. What is taking up most of my time right now is reading and studying. I've been assigned some books to read by Aaron on subject of missions and Brazil history. I'm also a couple months into my Portuguese lessons with Raquel. I have had some good opportunities to get to know some of the students at Life English Center, where Raquel and I are using one of the classrooms.

Every Saturday morning, Aaron and Cristiana Brakefield lead any English students who choose to come to practice their English. I've been attending these discussion times simply to participate and introduce myself to the students. I brought my camera this morning and forgot to take pictures during the first session. I took these pictures during the second session.

 

And because no blog is complete without a picture of Samantha...

 

Samantha is showing off the traditional Easter candy. Large chocolate eggs usually with toys or other candy inside.

Here are some issues that you can be praying with us about.

• Pray for us to be sensitive to God's leading about future ministries. We are excited about some ideas but unless God is with us in this we will not be successful.
• Pray for us as we (re)adjust to life in Brazil. Both of us are experiencing some of the many differences between the countries.
• Pray for Izabel's mom who is experiencing difficulties getting a needed surgery scheduled.

Thank you for your involvement in the work here in Brazil.

Speaking in tongues

I had the huge discovery about a month ago that my understanding of Portuguese and Samantha's understanding of language were on about the same level. That's not the case anymore, so I was about 1 month late in sharing this.

It is easier to understand what someone says in another language than it would be to say that same thing correctly in that language. The reason is that when I am trying to think of a sentence to say in Portuguese I need to put so many different things together. First I have to think of the words, after I know what word to use I need to think of how to conjugate the verb(s) and then finally I need to know the correct order to put all of these words in. The goal is to be able to have all of that come naturally so everything simply rolls off the tongue without needing to think about it. It's easier to understand than speak because when I hear someone talk in Portuguese all I need to do is listen to the words, which should already be in the correct order.

Now, a month after I had realized that my daughter's and my comprehension was at the same level, I think that Samantha's comprehension is well ahead of mine. In situations where there is only one person or conversation to listen to I feel like I understand roughly 60% of what is said. I understand enough to have a good idea of what is being said but not enough to feel like I'm able to contribute to the conversation in any way. It's difficult in Sunday School and small groups where I know the direction of the discussion and it's expected that I contribute, but I have a hard time understanding everything that's being said. I could say something but I always have the fear that I misunderstood the question or what the person before me said. In instances where there are multiple conversations going on at once I am well behind the 60% understanding.

Samantha, when we have her attention (rarely happens) she'll understand what we are asking her. We ask her to go find her chair or a specific toy and she'll go searching for it until she finds it; and she's able to do that in both English and in Portuguese!

I have completed 3 weeks of Portuguese classes now and it has been a good opportunity to ask some dumb questions in a safe atmosphere. I have about 5 hours each week in the classroom studying under the guidance of Raquel. Thank you to Life English School for allowing us to use one of their classrooms. Hopefully it won't take me long until I'm able to effortlessly put sentences and paragraphs together.

What time is it?

I'm reading a book about missions assigned by Aaron Brakefield and I hit one of the chapters on culture. The book tells a story about the different understandings of 'time' in different cultures. The story is told based around a meal where the missionary feels disrespected because his invited guest arrives an hour late. On the other hand is the guest doesn't want to arrive on time because to do so would give the impression that the meal is only about business. A true friend will arrive 'a little' late to show that the meal is about friendship rather than business.

This story reminded me of some of my experiences here in Brazil in the past. A friend invited me to eat lunch with their family multiple times. The appropriate response for an American to this request would be to ask "what time?" and "is there anything I can bring?" Each lunchtime I arrived when stated and became a little frustrated that the meal wasn't ready yet. In fact it hadn't even been started. Imagine me showing up ready to eat and learning that I still had to wait for the meal to be prepared.

It took me a while to learn what the invitation was about. The invitation wasn't about eating, which I had originally thought it was. The reason to go to their house was about the time that we would be able to spend together. What I had learned though this was that I should have felt honored about this family wanting to spend time with me and getting to know each other. The time that I had to wait while the food was being prepared was time that we were able to talk and build our relationship.

What ways in your life with friends are you able to show them that what you really enjoy is the time you spend together. Take some time to smell the roses, your relationship will grow with the time spent together.

After all of the rain that happened last Friday afternoon we've had a couple more days with thunderstorms. It's sad walking the streets of Cubatao and seeing all of the furniture that people have had to throw away because of the flood. There are some parts of town that are using bulldozers to deal with all of the garbage.

Last night the weather was becoming ominous while I was getting ready to go to Portuguese class. During class the rain came down hard for a few minutes with some close lightning and loud thunder. Once, during class, the power flicked off only to come back on right away. Walking home I heard some people on our street say that "this house has it but that house doesn't," I wondered what they were talking about until I got home and realized that our house didn't have power. We finally had power again at 4:30 this morning. I guess it's the stormy season.

And the rain came down

The rain began at about 3:30 yesterday, it started trying to come into our house from about 4 until 6pm through somewhere above the window. I had to stand by the window holding a towel to soak up the water before it would flow inside. Early on Izabel asked if our car would be ok out on the street instead of in our elevated parking area and I said, "there's no way the water will get that high. About an hour later I waded out in knee high water to bring our car inside. There were cars and buses stopped outside our house because all of the roads were flooded. Aaron Brakefield said that our road is not known for flooding, it's a few blocks down that get flooded easily, so I guess we were lucky that at the crown of our road it was only about 4 inches deep. Other people (including Aaron) inside Cubatao proper had to abandon their cars in waist deep water or worse. News showed residential areas in Cubatao where water went over 6 feet high inside a house.
We are grateful that we only had to worry about a little bit of water trying to come inside our house when so many other people lost so much. Please pray for those who lost items in their houses due to the flooding and also pray for the families who lost loved ones. 
These pictures were taken early on. The water came about another foot into our garage and shortly after this the top picture would have a few cars and a bus included.

I finally figured out what this hole in the stairs is for. It has kept Samantha and I entertained for hours with me throwing a ball through it and watching it bounce down the stairs.

The rain stopped around 6:45 or 7 and the water slowly went down. Our neighbors were not home but we were able to see water a few inches up the door. By the time one lady came home the water had gone down so there was no standing water in their house but everything was wet. She lives with her elderly mother who had gone to Santos and finally returned at 2am when the buses were able to get through the traffic and mud. I shared one video of downtown Cubatao area on my Facebook but I invite you to search out other videos either through news in the Baixada Santista or on youtube.

3 weeks in

One of the things that I thought I would be prepared for as we were beginning to put our house together was that things go at a different pace than Izabel and I were used to. In my previous months living in Brazil I had seen it first hand and it's also something that I've heard from many different people. Knowing that, however doesn't make it easier to handle delays when they come.

We have had an advantage of having a car available to us on the day that we arrived. Because Shelly Fuehrer was on vacation in the States we were able to use her car to go around and run errands that we needed to do. With Shelly's car we have been able to make a couple trips to a nearby beach town, Mongagua, where Izabel's sister lives to spend time with her and her husband. We have been able to drive to Santos to visit the Federal Police so I can register myself as a permanent resident and we've been able to go to Praia Grande and do some shopping for our house. I was a little uneasy about driving down here but now that I have done it quite a bit I actually enjoy it. As Aaron Brakefield said, "you just do what needs to be done" while driving.

We've had some frustrations while getting our house ready.

Our kitchen cabinets already being put to work.

• Our Brita water pitcher was cracked in transit from the U.S. to here. We bought a water filter at the mall in Praia Grande so we could finally have drinkable water at our house. When we bought it we were told that someone would come and install it for free, we just had to call the number for the installers in Cubatao. When Izabel called, she was told that they don't have authorization to install the water filters in Cubatao. After talking to many different people and losing her patience after being given many different numbers to call we aren't sure someone will come by to install the water filter.
• Speaking of installers, we bought a kitchen table and cabinets before Christmas and they were delivered as promised on Dec. 29th. We were told that they would be installed on Jan 2nd or 3rd in what would be a two day installation. On Jan 2nd, Izabel called the store to find out what time they would be installed and was told that the earliest they will be installed is Jan 8th with no explanation. I encouraged Izabel to call back and remind them they told us the 2nd or 3rd and how much money we spent at their store and we were told that their three installers quit at the end of December and they need to hire new guys.
• We went to the Federal Police as instructed in the visa I received to register myself as having arrived in Brazil. The first time, we arrived 7 minutes after they stopped helping foreigners for the day. The second time, the lady handed us a paper that listed everything that we needed to bring with us, copies of documents, passport style pictures.... After gathering all of those things Izabel and I went the next day thinking we had everything we needed only to be told that we were supposed to have scheduled an appointment, which is now scheduled for Jan. 7th.
• To receive our Brazilian copies of Samantha's birth certificate and our marriage license we needed to go to the official records office in Cubatao (Izabel's ID card here in Brazil still has her maiden name). They required a more recently issued copy of Izabel's birth certificate in order to give us the Brazilian wedding license. The one Izabel has was issued at the end of 2011.
• The people that lived in the house before us did not take very good care of the place, making it a good home for small critters. We are currently waging a war on these critters and at this point it's hard to tell who is winning. We've spent some money buying things that will hopefully get rid of them but we keep seeing others come from other places. This means we need to keep a constant eye on Samantha while she is playing.

Despite all those we have had some success.

• Our couches and bedroom set were delivered and installed. We now have the ability to have guests over and not make them sit on the floor.
• A lot of the things we brought from the U.S. were made to go into a 110 volt outlet. All of the outlets here in Brazil run on 220 volts, meaning that unless we want to burn our our appliances we need to get converters. I couldn't figure out why my coffee maker kept shutting off while brewing coffee until I realized that it took twice as many watts to brew coffee as our voltage converter could handle. We finally found a converter that can handle 1010 watts which will be enough for my coffee maker (Finally!!!!) and will hopefully be enough for our blender.
• We had a merry Christmas (even though I've never had to wait so long into Christmas to open my presents) and we hope that you did as well. It was 107 degrees here and we went to the beach along with many other people. For the first time ever, Izabel said that I had good taste while choosing a clothing item for her.
• Thankfully Samantha has begun to gain weight. We bought a scale and 10 days after Samantha's Dr.s appointment she had gained half a pound and is still gaining. I plan on keeping everyone updated on her weight gains for her next 23 years.

I don't know why the pictures are so hard to place in the area that I want. I've not had that problem before.

Thank you all for your interest in the ministry here in Brazil. Feel free to contacts us if you have other questions.

Hey, We're here!

We've had quite few changes the last week and more and I want to keep people updated on them. We've finally made it down to Brazil, arriving Thursday Dec. 13th. The weeks before we left were scheduled busy and we knew that we would always find more to do once we completed our to-do list. Then, less than 2 weeks before we were to leave for Brazil Samantha got sick which caused a whole new to-do list. Thankfully she's acting better and now that we're in Brazil she is eating quite a bit of food.

The couple days before we left for Brazil were spent purchasing last minute things that we thought we would need, luggage tags for all of our luggage, TSA locks, misc. baby supplies, games for our Wii, you know, the important things.

Tuesday was a very busy day and if we ended up getting any free time we would have gone to Clackamas Town Center. Knowing what we found out later that day we're very happy that it was a busy day because that was the day the mall shooting occurred and we would have been there at the time it happened.

After packing everything but Samantha's pack & play which we were still using, we went to bed late Tuesday night only to wake up at 1:30 Wednesday morning (a little earlier than we planned) to tend to a crying Samantha. Thus begins the long day of travel. With all the luggage we had we discovered that we should have arrived at the airport more than 2 hours early as we barely made our flight. A big thank you to the guys who showed up at the airport to get us out of the country. I don't know if their motives were to help us or to get rid of us, either way we appreciated it.

Now that we're here we've spent a lot of time with Izabel's family (they love having Samantha with them), going through our luggage (all of the suitcases arrived, but not everything inside arrived in one piece). Friday we spent the afternoon shopping. We planned on first buying things to set up our kitchen, then our bedroom, then our living room, then our guest room. After doing some browsing we saw two couches (very comfortable for Brazil standards) and the pair of them was $500 cheaper than one of the same kind we saw at an earlier store. After negotiating with the owner we agreed on a price and he told us he had kitchen stuff at his other store down the block. Instead of getting kitchen stuff we saw a closet (there are no closets built into houses in Brazil) and we quoted a price we got earlier from another store and he dropped the price by a large margin to match our previous quote. Both our bedroom set and the sofa's will be delivered either on Wednesday or Thursday, along with our appliances which will be delivered on Thursday. When our things are delivered I'll post pictures

There is a lot more to share but I think I'll keep it for future blog posts when I have nothing better to write about. Thank you all for your interest in the ministry and for your prayers.