I have decided that I am going to start a new category on our blog titled “Things I Don’t Understand” and I will just share a couple sentences about something that has happened that I don’t understand…This is nothing elaborate or in depth, but sometimes less is more!
#1 – I don’t understand why there are grown men running around the streets of Niteroi today dressed in women’s clothing (this is not made up).
To celebrate the completion of our first year as missionaries we are releasing a special “Annual Report” which looks back over the past year. We hope you enjoy reviewing everything that has happened over the past 12 months and we look forward to sharing more with you in the future!
You can view the report in your browser below or you can download the PDF to your computer by clicking here. (WARNING! The file is very big!)
Our Portuguese teacher showed us this clip today in class and I thought I would share it. I was unaware of Zé Carioca, but for those truly dedicated Donald Duck fans, you may remember him. Anyways, this clip is of Donald Duck meeting Zé Carioca, a parrot from Rio de Janeiro. Zé is a short form of Jose in Brazil and Carioca is a term for people born in Rio. Here’s a few things I enjoyed about the clip…
1. Donald reading Zé’s business card and then Ze reading it back in perfect portuguese…I know I sound like Donald Duck alot…
2. Donald Duck going for the hand shake while Ze Carioca goes for the hug.
3. Donald Duck looking up words in the dictionary trying to keep up with the conversation…let me just tell you know, you can’t keep up!
4. Donald Duck calls Ze Carioca “Joe” through out the entire clip, instead of calling him Ze.
The first 2:30 minutes are all music, so you can skip that part if you would like…enjoy the clip!
Here are some pictures of Zane dressed up as Santa for our team Christmas Party. I found the costume at the last minute and he a true trooper for wearing it! He looked great and it was so funny. We had him dress up and answer the door when our teammates arrived. They all got a kick out of it and the best part was when he answered the door dressed as Santa when the pizza arrived. The delivery man thought it was hilarious!!! I am sure he thought, crazy Americans! We also built gingerbread houses and watched a Christmas movie together. We all had a wonderful time!
Below is a time-lapse video of the walk which April and I make to language school each day, sometimes more than once a day! It takes about 15-20 minutes, but you get to enjoy it in only 1.5 minutes, so sit back, relax and enjoy (the relaxing part might be hard because its a little bumpy…)
“Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” (Phil. v. 15-16)
For some reason, as I was reading today, this verse really touched me. For several reason I find this verse meaningful, but the most startling aspect of it is how Paul treats the current situation he is writing about. Paul says, “perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you,” and in this case, “separated” is a nice way of saying, “he ran away from you,” but I think it is amazing how Paul is able to look at the situation and treat it as supreme guidance at work, not simply as a slave running away from his master. I wonder if Philemon was so easily able to view this situation as a blessing. Could he understand how God has taken a bad situation and used it not just for good, but for eternal good? Was Philemon able to welcome back his run-away slave as a beloved brother? I can’t help but wonder if I would have been able to do so, could I examine a situation in which I experienced lose and consider it well worth it, because God’s kingdom had gained something, while I personally had lost something? This is a very deep passage (the entire book) as we consider how we are to treat those who wrong us and how we should expect and accept personal loss in order to benefit the heaven Kingdom.
Sometimes its the small things in life that get you through the day, and today is one of those days. I’m not sure that I have told you all, but one of the things I like about our apartment is that it has three pronged plugs (just like in the US) in addition to the Brazilian plug, which means there is no need for adapters, converters or any other gizmo’s, anything and everything we brought with us can be plugged in and worked great (except for toasters).
Sorry we haven’t written much lately, not a whole lot is changing in our lives right now. We are taking language classes everyday of the week and when we aren’t doing that, we are sitting at our apartments waiting on people to come who really won’t be coming, so its alot of sitting and waiting. We did find somebody to paint our apartment, so that process started this week and he is doing a great job, we just couldn’t handle the plain white walls all the time, so he should be done with the painting in a couple days. Other than that, we still have no furniture, it is all supposed to be delivered sometime in the next couple weeks, so until then we have two folding chairs that we bought and a small kitchen table, enought to get by with. Well, just wanted to give a quick update. Thanks for talking…
‘Twas early yesterday morning that I got a hankerin’ (yes, hankerin’) for a good ole American classic, some peanut butter and jelly toast. Now this morning was a special morning because all of the stars were lined up just perfectly, and we actually had the four necessary ingredients: (1) Peanut Butter, (2) Grape Jelly, (3) Pão de Forma (yes, sliced bread) and (4) a toaster, only recently purchased from Carrefour. For many days I had desired a slice of PB&J toast, but each morning I awoke to find that we had overlooked at least one of the ingredients every morning (most notably, we had no bread the day before…). So with great excitement and jubilation I get out our toast, bread, jelly and smuggled peanut butter and set about my task.
As I plug in this brand new toast, I decide to make a “dry run” at the toasting process, just to insure that any excess chemicals from the factory may be burned off, and to my delight, there is instantly a little smoke which quickly ceases, signally for me that the time has come. I insert into the toaster two fresh slices of bread, set the darkness scale to the perfect setting, push down the lever and go about the business of getting ready for the morning.
It is about 4 minutes after this process as I am contemplating which shirt to commit to for the day that April turns to me and says, “Do you smell something burning?” At this point I realize that in my excitement I have failed to share with my wife the delight of this fine morning, so I proudly say to her, “Its nothing, I’m just making some toast…” as I turn my head, in slow motion, towards the kitchen, just to make sure that everything is up to snuff. In our kitchen, the refrigerator is about 10 feet from the kitchen door, and to my horror, from where I am standing, I cannot see the refrigerator. All I can see is a cloud of smoke pouring through the kitchen door into the living, and impenetrable cloud of smoke which has complete obscured my view of the rest of the kitchen.
I immediately begin running to the kitchen and to my amazement find that our toaster has turned into a military grade smoke bomb, with amount of smoke erupting from it to the amount which I never dreamed possible. I think to myself, “We need ventilation!” and I run to the kitchen window to open it, only to find that it is wide open, smoke rolling out of it, and it still has no effect upon the kitchen. I grab the toaster, run to the balcony and through the toast out, run back into the kitchen and April and I grab a bed sheet and start fanning the kitchen. As I’m thinking to myself, “Its a good thing we didn’t install that fire department alarm yet, cause this could be embarrassing”, our phone ring, and it is the dreaded phone call from the door man, who hesitantly says, “…ta bom?” (is everything okay?). I try with my best humor to laugh it off and tell him that everything is fine, but I can tell that he doesn’t quite believe me, and since my limited portuguese skills become almost nonexistent on the phone, I decide it is probably best to go downstairs and talk with him. To make a long story short(er), he told me that somebody outside of the apartment had seen the smoke coming from our apartment and had called him to tell him that one of his apartments was on fire. At the end of the day, we all got a good laugh from it, even though some of us may have been slightly humiliated and disappointed at not getting our toast for the day.
On Thursday our team celebrate Thanksgiving together. It was a great time for us to relax after everything we have been doing over the past several months. Our apartment has a room called the “Espaço Gourmet” which is basically a large nice dinner room for entertaining larger groups, since apartments are typically small. This space was perfect for our team get together, and added a nice change from sitting on Tupperware boxes and using cardboard boxes as tables! Below is a little video of our time together.
