Our Trip to the City of Campinas

Well, it has been several days since I’ve written and several new things have come up. Not sure if I told you about our trip to the city of Campinas to shop. We took the bus and that was very uneventful, the bus had very few passengers on it and I thought to myself “this is easy”, one thing that Pauline doesn’t like to hear, especially when it is not J . It was a nice cool day so we dressed warmly and did a lot of our shopping and browsing. Anderson and Andre took us to a great restaurant, buffet style, BUT you needed to pay extra, by weight for any meat or fish. It was still a lot cheaper than in the states and so, so good! 7.68 in Reais about $6.00 American.

We saw some great sights and some sad sights, like the homeless sleeping outside the big Cathedral. They stay awake at night because it is too dangerous to fall asleep, one may not wake up. So, the homeless, sometimes with their dogs, sleep outside the big Cathedral, I wanted to snap a picture but out of respect I did not. This is where, in due time we will be doing street ministry with the team.

The meal plans here are quite unusual. Wherever we go for breakfast we always have bread, butter, either hot chocolate, tea or coffee. If the Tia’s(pronounced Chee a’s)now you like coffee then you can be sure you will get coffee! Speaking of coffee, maybe I mentioned this before, but the coffee here in Brasil is dark, strong and very sweet. One gets used to it and if you put some leite(pronounced leich)which is milk, no cream can be found trust me, I tried! J Lunch and dinner is always beans and rice, no bread is ever served with those meals, and that is ok with me, the portions are BIG! There is usually a meat and sometimes potatoes and/or pasta added as well, and praise the Lord, always a salad with this wonderful dressing that consists of lemon juice, vinegar and salt, wow, so simple yet so very good!

Back to downtown and our shopping day. We finished our sight-seeing and shopping about 3 PM and then just had to have some Acai and some smoothies, well that took longer than expected we had to be back to the CM by 4:30 to bus home with the girls, so we caught the bus at 4PM and that was NOT a good thing because unlike the bus ride to town the bus ride back to CM was, ummm how can I say this delicately? Nope I can’t so I will just say it was not a heavenly ride and NOT easy(Pauline well agree. We had some bags and the boys took care of handling those for us. The bus was already quite crowded and we had to stand up. Now, Pauline being short in stature and somewhat claustrophobic was not a happy camper because those all around her were much taller than she, thus we found her standing on her tippy toes to see. About 40 minutes later we arrived to our other bus stop and were happily on our way back to our “casa”. That was a Monday our day off.

Our internet access has been interesting to say the least. We do not get internet where we live, so most time we leave our computers at the boys house, where we meet each day at 8 am and have our team devotions, each day one of our team does devotions, it’s a great way to start the day! My computer was not being nice to me this week so one of the boys who teach computer class looked at it for me and he fixed it. I’m so blessed to be in a team of people that know how to fix things J We have a lot of “stuff” on our computer that we need to access daily so, it is a necessity to have a working one. We also will be doing online studies to obtain an AS in Ministerial studies, in 6 mo. And in 18 months we can obtain a BS in the same thing, we are very excited!

This is where I tell you about our schedule just to give you a little info on what our days are like.

Monday= DAY OFF. This is the day we do laundry, go shopping or just hang out at the boys house and do internet and catching up on e-mails, etc. We do have access to washing machine, one that you have to fill up with a hose. It washes and then we have to wring the clothes out and rinse them by hand then put them in a bucket with some softener and let them soak for a few minutes, then they are transferred to an electric spin dryer, they get spun out really good and then we hang them up to line dry. Now, this may seem like a lot but we have a process and it goes by fast we can do 4 loads of laundry in 1.5 hours, hung to dry(but not dry). We usually leave the clothes there to dry and pick them up the next day, the Lavenderia(laundry) gets locked at night, so our clothes are safe.

Tuesday= devotions, breakfast, bus ride to CM, devotions with team, classes(whatever they may be),sometimes we help out in the kitchen, if we have some free time. We don’t have all our team here yet so as soon as we do, things will be more organized.

Wednesday=same as above in the morning except every other Wednesday we have devotions and a service with the kids in church. After church we have a meeting about what we are doing that day, sometimes we meet with Pastor Sidney and Eli-Haumma, sometime PR drops by.

I won’t go through all the days because sometimes things change and you get the picture, we are busy, we hang with the kids and try to encourage them and show them the love of Jesus. When the school has events, we are there, helping and mingling with the kids. There are about 160 kids so it takes some time getting their names down J

We also have our house to keep clean and orderly and the girls to get to know.

That is enough for now, will continue with more soon.