First Real Day

August 15th, 2005, 8:34 AM

Bom Dia! Goodmorning! This will be an update on what we did the first day here is Brasil.

1. Breakfast was a 9:00am and included a lot of fruit like mango, banana, kiwi, and apple. Also scrambled eggs, cookies and bread. There were a lot of people there both that are staying in the house and from the community.

2. We had a worship time singing in both Portuguese and English. Then Lucas shared about how the college group works and the Brazilians asked questions.

3. There was an opportunity to go to the church for a skateboarding ministry so almost everyone went. The church is just a big open building that can be pretty much anything. Some of the girls were twirling with the children and eventually found a rope and played jump rope with them. Towards the end there was a small Bible study time.

4. We handed out flyers to the community telling of the service that night. It was all in Portuguese and we had to read it to them. Most everyone laughed with us through the whole thing since most of us at the time knew very little Portuguese.

5. We went to another church to attend a service that Lucas Bair preached at and Dustin Rankin gave his testimony. Shane translated for them. There was also some mime skits by the children. It was taught to them by a previous mission team. The building looked like it was a little school. The girls taught Sunday school too.

6. As soon as that service was over we headed straight to the previous church for it’s service. The previous skating rink was now a worship service.

In Brazil

We are in the airport now in Sau Paulo. We are on our long layover. We tried to get a hotel for cheap but once we got there we found that it was more than we thought. So we got a nice tour of the city for about 8$ for the group :) Most of us are just hanging out, most are VERY tired. Lucas just got done using a internet program called SKYPE to verbally talk with his wife and kids. If you download it and email me and I will add you and you can talk to any of us. We will be leaving soon for a couple more flights and will get to our final destination sometime tonight. So far we know we are not going to be going straight in to "the work". We actually will go to bed and start the next day. Pray for oppurtunities to serve God as we are very "actionless" so far. I did chat with a girl for a while about what we are doing and talked about John Leonard but didn't get into the gospel. She seemed to have a christian backgroud but only God knows. Again, please pray. Pictures will be uploaded now if it works.

- Doug

In Flight

We are currently flying over the Gulf of Mexico as I type this. We do not have internet on the plane but I will upload this the next time we have a connection. Everyone is doing well. We met at 4:00am at the church and Russ Mathews drove us to the airport. We had a pretty normal check in but with the many heavy bags we have that have items for the missionaries it was a little different. A few people had to go through the random detailed search. One was Dustin Rankin, his first time flying! We flew on a smaller plane from Des Moines to Texas but are not on a Boeing 737; A little more leg room and a turkey sandwich for lunch. Looking out the window all you see is water and boats. Lucas and I are on our laptops; Julie, Matt, Chris, Brooke, Paul, Rob, and Amalee, are all sleeping; Ashley and Julia are listening to music; I can’t see the others. The seatbelt sign was on for a while due to turbulence but just went off. When in Texas we went from one plane right to the other but had a decent amount of time to get there. We are planning on going to the beach in Miami during our approx 6 hour layover. I’ve taken about 95 pictures since packing last night. Hopefully I’ll have time and a good connection speed to upload them.