Preaching to the Masses

Things have been going well for us thus far in Samambaia. The church here, as well as our host families, have invited us in with open arms. We are currently involved in teaching music and English classes at the church and we are helping out with English classes and a Christmas program at the school. We attend church every Sunday and Thursday, and have young adult meetings on Tuesday and Saturday nights. This past Tuesday Dani and I "led" the young adult bible study. It went fairly well and wasn´t very difficult. It was just a short devotional and not lengthy sermon so it went fairly easily.

Oh, and speaking of lengthy sermons, that´s what we´re supposed to do tonight. We are in charge of giving the message at the Thursday night worship service. That´s right: 45 minutes, in Portugeuse. Given the fact that this is not a language that I find myself to be very familiar with (it´s coming, but slowly), this task has been placed on Dani´s shoulders. I think maybe we are going to sing a song (in english) and I´ll read some scripture (in portuguese) and then Dani will give the discourse (in faith). She is nervous about it (who could possibly blame her?), but I´m sure it will end up fine. The church here is so supportive of us that I´m sure it will be well recieved, no matter what happens.

Moving on...

I´m writing this blog entry in the living room of my new host family´s home in Samambaia. We´ve finished our portuguese classes in Gama, and now Dani and I are working with the church in Samambaia. Tommorow we start teaching our first classes. We´ll be teaching English and Music classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and spending our afternoons helping at a local school. My portuguese is still at the point where I have some trouble communitcating with people, so trying to teach kids and to understand teachers will probably be... it will be a new experience for me. Right now, it looks like we will only be in Samambaia for a month before we go to Ceilandia, and then changing each month after that. I don´t know when the change was made from spending two months at a time in each place to one month, but thats the way the churches have our schedual set up right now. I think (and I think that the team agrees with me) that it would be better to spend the two months that we have in each town back-to-back, but it doens´t look that that will happen right now. Tommorow night we are going to Betty and Otis´s to watch the electron results live, and we will talk to them about it.
I enjoyed Gama alot and was just starting to get settled in, but its time to move on again. I am looking forward to getting started with the classes and with the other things that we came here to do. Plus, it will be nice to start getting more real-world portuguese practice, since no-one in my house speaks English very well. My host mother, Marisneide, lives with her three sons, her sick mother, and her brother. We live in a house about a block away from the church. Dani´s house is a just five minute walk from mine.
We spent some time with the youth group after worship Sunday night, and they are very freindly. We played charades, which is suprisingly more difficult when you don´t speak the language.
I will try to post some pictures of brazil soon. I left my camera at my house in Gama, but hopefully David will bring it to Otis and Betty´s tommorow.