Posted November 20th, 2008 by Carrie
I wanted to send a quick update to all of you to let you know how things are going in “Brasil.” We are doing well and are still living in the hotel because we, or should I say “I,” am having trouble choosing an apartment. We had to move rooms last night at our hotel and ended up having to sleep together in the smallest hotel room I have ever seen, with a twin bed—it was a funny night! We are back in a regular room tonight. Please pray for us about the apartment. We really want to live where God wants us to and where we can best do our ministry. But, in the meantime, God has blessed us with getting to know the people who work here at the hotel—they are precious and are trying so hard to help us! Last night before we found the “mini suite” room one of the girls here offered to let us stay at her house!
A couple funny stories:
It has been overcast all week–they said this is pretty unusual. It is springtime here and has been raining quite a bit. We went on Monday to look at this GREAT apartment that is on a street with a little canal through the middle of it. On the way there our taxi driver told us and Georgia that that particular street floods often when it rains and that he lived by there and ended up moving because of the flooding. We went to see the apartment and agreed that it was so great. We said, “how bad could the flooding be?” We went downstairs with Ron and Georgia and looked outside to see it raining pretty hard……it kept raining….and raining….The street filled fully and cars were getting stuck! Eventually the canal began running over into the street! We had to stay there for 2 hours and wait for it to go down enough to walk back to our hotel! I love when God gives us immediate answers! (We aren’t getting that place)
Wes and I have been enjoying trying to speak Portuguese. We find ourselves trying even to speak to each other. Today we had been feeling pretty good about how our language was going. We have been able to order more easily at restaurants and even have some basic conversations. Then, tonight we were riding in a cab and the guy said in Portuguese,”You guys speak really slowly.” Thank you?? We just laughed. Brazilians can be brutally honest. Then we got back to our hotel and were talking with a girl who said, ” You guys sound like you are speaking Spanish.” So, no need to feel overly confident yet! We have a lot of work to do!
We will keep posting as things progress. Please also pray for us to find a good language teacher who will bless us and help us to communicate our best.
Posted November 17th, 2008 by Carrie
-
-
Here we are on our way to DC--then on to Rio! Our faces are saying, "I can't believe this is really happening!"
-
-
Here are the guys on Ben's balcony. Ben and Ju have found a wonderful apartment! We may all be staying there if we don't find our own soon!
-
-
Here we are at Parque de Sao Bento--this park looks like a rainforest in the middle of the city! Look at the beautiful green water
-
-
We have already had several questions about what this is that Wes is eating....It is our favorite fruit called Acai--we love it! It is blended into something like a smoothy and is delicious.
-
-
Here I am with the huge Christmas tree at Niteroi Plaza Shopping (The malls here are simply called "shopping")
-
-
The view from The Belvedere building
-
-
Just a typical taxi ride
-
-
Enjoying the "boa vista" beautiful view!
-
-
April, Jill, Carrie and Georgia around the bay looking back at the center of Niteroi
-
-
Here are Brent, Zane, Wes and Ron--now known as "Brente," "Zanao," "Weslinho," and our mentor, "Ronaldo"
Posted August 25th, 2008 by Wes
Carrie and I had a great vacation to Gulf Shores, Alabama with our Seat family a few weeks ago. We spent a lot of time on the beach and at the pool. On our last night there, the family competed in the first annual “Thunder on the Track Racing Series” and I’ve posted a few pictures below. Mary was my logical driving partner and below you can see us hugging a turn and bracing for impact with the conservative driver in front of us. The second picture is of David shortly after the first race. David, although hesitant at first, loved the go-kart experience and possibly found a new hobby.
Thunder on the Track
Possibly my favorite David Seat picture ever!
The trip to Gulf Shores was a lot of fun and very memorable.
This past weekend Carrie and I drove down to Fort Worth to visit Nic and Jennifer in their new city. We had a great time with them and enjoyed spending time downtown as well as at their country club. Nic and Jennifer have only been there for a few weeks but they already have some friends in FW and Nic is really enjoying his job. God used Nic and Jennifer in Stillwater to help make a difference in the lives of Micah and Marcel and I’m anxious to see how he will use them in Fort Worth. Below are a few pics of our time with Nic, Jennifer and Mitch.
Nic & Jennifer in Fort Worth
Carrie and Nic
Posted August 5th, 2008 by Wes
The last two weeks have been very busy for Carrie and I. On 7/23-7/25 we attended the Global Missions Conference in Arlington, TX. It was great to meet up with our team after being apart for 3 weeks. We got a lot done in our team meetings and had a lot of fun spending time with our teammates and meeting people interested in Brazil.
Last week Carrie and I had the opportunity to work as counselors at Camp Pettijohn, which is located on the surface of the Sun in Southeast Oklahoma. We had a hot great experience and had a lot of fun with the Park Plaza Youth Group despite the record temps. Carrie and I both got to teach classes individually using the books “Wild At Heart” and “Captivating” as our guides. We had such a good time at camp and were encouraged by the 6 campers that were baptized during the week.
We are two months away from moving to Brazil and it is hard to believe that it is almost here.
Posted July 14th, 2008 by Wes
Gonna set my watch back to it
’cause you know that I’ve been through it.
Living on tulsa time.
- I posted “Living on Tulsa Time” as the title of this blog simply because we are living in Tulsa for the next 3 months and because it’s the only song I know that is about Tulsa. After completing the 6 month internship with our team in Dallas, we are in Tulsa where the air is cleaner, the grass is greener and even in rush hour, traffic is never bad.
- Because of the Owsley’s generosity, Carrie and I have a great house that is only a few blocks from the church. It’s good that it is close because I sold my truck a few weeks ago and we are now down to the Montero and riding bikes. Our first few weeks in Tulsa have been great, working at the church during the day and meeting members for dinner, activities at the church or participating in Bible studies at night. One of the activities that we participated in last week was filling in on a volleyball team that was in the semi-finals. Some of the regular team members couldn’t play so Carrie and I were asked to step in. Neither of us are good at volleyball so we pretty much submarined the team we were playing for.
- Over the 4th of July weekend, we were blessed with sunny skies and good times with our family at the lake. It is hard to imagine not being at the lake for the 4th next year but it will make us even more excited to get the family down to Brazil.
- This past weekend we went to Beaver Lake with our KC friends and enjoyed golfing, skiing and boating. Our time in KC and our friends there are very special to us and we had a great time hanging out this past weekend.
- Yesterday we had the opportunity to go to Memorial Rd. COC in OKC and participate in their missions Sunday. Memorial Rd. is a special place and they have been generous with us by contributing to our one time moving fund.- I am anxious to see how God is going to use us while we’re here at Park Plaza for these 3 months, and I am hopeful that we can set up a weekly Bible Study at the Normandy Apartments near Park Plaza. Please keep this possible opportunity in your prayers.
Posted June 19th, 2008 by Wes
Our time training with our team has quickly come and gone. On June 30th Carrie and I will be moving to Tulsa to begin 3 months of work with Park Plaza before heading to Niteroi on October 13th.
The last several weeks of training have been very busy and in keeping with our Gotcher family tradition, we have traveled during the last 5 weekends. One of those weekends was spent with our entire team in Tulsa visiting Park Plaza. It was great to be able to introduce our team to the church and I preached for the first time in my life. Actually for the 1st, 2nd & 3rd time in my life because there were 2 AM services and I gave a team report during the evening service. You can hear the sermon at this link below if you scroll down to 06/08/2008.
http://parkplaza.org/pages/sermons.html
We will attempt to be more active in the blogosphere now that we’ll be moving to Tulsa. Also, you can see our first team newsletter at the link below:
http://www.niteroimission.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/The_Bridge_Vol_I_Iss_I.pdf
Posted May 14th, 2008 by Carrie
Everything is still going great here in Dallas! The crazy part is that we only have about 6 weeks of our training left. Then we will head to T-Town! This past weekend we had our team’s “Friends and Family Weekend.” It was a weekend for us to inform our families about our work and discuss different aspects of living in a foreign country. We had a wonderful time! Howard and Jane Norton, long time Brazilian missionaries, were our facilitators. They did the best job. It was really fun for us to meet all our teammates families and for our families to meet each other. We got to have all the Seat family here and all the Gotcher’s, except Austin. (Austin was celebrating his college Graduation in Hawaii with his girlfriend and her family. I can’t believe he didn’t want to be in Dallas, TX. He can make it up to us.) We had lots of wonderful food together, learned a lot about Brazil, Wes and I and all our teammates got to do presentations about different aspects of our work, and we ended the day with a blessing time with our family. Overall, it was a wonderful weekend. We took our families to a Ranger’s baseball game on Saturday night. Wes and I have decided that we are a curse to baseball teams. When we lived in Kansas City they were about the worst team in Baseball. Now that we are in Dallas, the Rangers are pretty much holding that same title. I am not sure how the Redhawks in OKC did the past couple years, but I feel pretty confident I can say, badly. Hopefully we won’t have the same effect on the futebol teams of Brazil….they take there sport a little more seriously. We finished the weekend with a visit to Saturn Road Church of Christ and a wonderful Mother’s Day lunch. I am now starting to think about packing up our apartment and organizing things for our move to Tulsa and then ultimately–Brazil!
Posted April 22nd, 2008 by Carrie
March 2008 Training ReportWell, it has been far too long since I have posted an update on our fantastic website. I have many excuses, but the main problem is that it appears that all blogging responsibility has been laid upon my shoulders. Wes apparently has sworn off blogging. So this means that all our loyal readers (Mom and Dad) are going to get to be blessed henceforth with my flowery language and over-the-top descriptions. I am still plea bargaining with Wes so we will see what happens.
Since our last post, SO MUCH has happened! March 7-24th we took our first trip to Brazil! Thankfully, we absolutely loved it! See our attached report from March for more details…But here are a few random fun memories from the trip. God blessed us so much. We really enjoyed getting to practice our Portuguese. The Brazilians were really patient with us, but still seemed interested in talking, even with our limited vocabulary. We had a fun taxi ride one evening in Rio where 4 of us had to try to describe how to get back to the home we were staying in with very limited directions. Thankfully, we were blessed with the nicest driver who didn’t take advantage of the naive Americans. We loved meeting all the missionaries and getting to hear their fun stories…they all have some great stories of Portuguese word mix ups! I am sure we will have a lot of those ourselves very soon. We loved the food–so rich and wonderful! There is so much wonderful fruit. Wes and I found a fruit that we absolutely love called acai. It is dark purple and is served as sort-of a frozen smoothie. It was a great treat and break from the intense heat. Getting to Niteroi was so exciting–it is the most beautiful city! I can’t describe it. We loved getting to explore the city and get a taste of life there. As most of you reading know, Wes has a wonderful way of striking up conversations with strangers. This made our trip a lot more fun and God definitely used Wes’ outgoing nature to bring us some contacts on the trip. At a soccer game in Rio, Wes had some interesting conversations with some inebriated locals. They were anxious to practice their very limited English vocabulary which most consisted of foul words. Once they heard we were coming to work for a church, they toned things down. We met a precious waiter at a restaurant in Niteroi who wants to help us when we move there. When we When we arrived in Brazil, Wes began talking with a gentleman in line. He was from the Rio area and was really friendly. The evening we left Brazil, we were back in line getting our boarding passes, and there was the same man, Nico. He was taking his daughter to the states for schooling and shared a lot with us. His family was there seeing them off and we got to meet them. It turns out that they all live around Niteroi. We got Nico’s contact info. and look forward to getting in touch with him in October.
Our trip was so wonderful, but it did end in a difficult way for us. Wes’ Grandpa Petty passed away on Wednesday, March 19th. We are thankful for his wonderful life and that he did not have to suffer. We ended up coming home 48 hours early from our trip and got to be with our Gotcher family for the memorial service. It was a great blessing to be with family and remember such a precious man. All the guys spoke at the funeral (Wes, Nic, Austin and Greg). Their stories and the emotions they shared were really touching.
We have a really big weekend coming up! All of the guys on our team are running in the OKC Memorial Marathon! Wes, Brent and Nathan are running the full marathon and Ben and Zane are running the half marathon. We are so proud of our guys for their hard training for this. Please pray for God to bless them with strength and endurance.
Hopefully I will get more up here soon! It shouldn’t be another 2 months!
Posted February 22nd, 2008 by Carrie
Posted February 22nd, 2008 by Carrie
