Sunburns, Dehydration, and Bee Attacks: Team Vacation in Recife (Plus the week spent in Goiania)

Once bible schools had ended, it was time to start our team retreat in the Northeast.  We spent the first few days in the MCC house in Recife, then left for Porto de Galinhas to hit the beach.  We spent about four relaxing days there, where we discussed how the program had been for us and how we had been seeing God in our time in Brazil.  Porto de Galinhas is a beautiful beach with a reef about two hundred meters out from the shore.  The reef is not only an interesting place to swim to to see lots of bright, tropical fish, it also acts as a barrier for the waves, leaving the water calm up to the beach.  The days were passing us by in the most uneventful and relaxing way, until we decided to enhance our time of reflection with an all-day fast on the beach (there may also have been a financial aspect to this decision.  The locals had been keen to take advantage of four naive gringos, and the team card had also stopped working).  As it turns out, lying in the sun all day while abstaining from food and drink is not really a good idea.  We discovered this later that night, when it was time to break the fast with some tradicional northeastern tapioca and everyone got sick.   Other than this, our stay at the praia passed without incident and we returned to the MCC house in Recife by bus.

We then had the opportunity to travel into the interior with a Brazillian MCC worker Andrea, and two SALTers from the States named Mike and Joel. (For anyone is confused by all of the acronyms in this blog, MCC stands for Mennonite Central Committee.  It's a Mennonite organization that offers social assistence to communites in need around the world.  SALT is a program that's pretty much like Radical Journey, but through MCC instead of MNN, which stands for Mennonite Mission Network).  We spent three days traveling in and around the town of Brejo da Madre de Deus, (in English this means Swamp of the Mother of God), getting to see the work MCC was doing there.  We slept in the apartment of Betty, the MCC volunteer who leads the work in Brejo, and spent the evenings playing Rook and watching soccer games.  It was a great chance to see another, more rural part of Brazil and to get to see how MCC is working in the Northeast, which is the poorest region of Brazil.  

On our last full day in Brejo, Betty decided to take us to see a friend of hers who was raising bees.  We were all eager to go and meet the bees, it just turned out that the bees weren't really all that happy to see us.  To make a long story short, I was stung four times, David twice, Sheralynn had at least six and also fell while fleeing the bees, and the MCC workers all suffered a few bee stings; only Dani was able to escape unscathed.   Luckily, no one was seriously hurt and the swelling in my face receeded after a few days (I don't think anyone got a good photo, though).

The following day we returned to Recife to spend the rest of our team vacation relaxing and exploring the city with Andrea and Mike, but too soon it was time to say goodbye.  Our retreat in the Northeast ended when our plane landed in Brasilia.  We then spent a few days visiting with our host families and staying with Betty and Ottis (retired MNN workers and our leaders here in Brazil) preparing to leave to spend a weak in Goiania, a city two hours to the south that has three Mennonite churches.

I won't say much about what we did in Goiania; our time was mostly spent hanging out in houses of church members and with Nata, Dani's boyfriend from Argentina who had come up to visit for the week.  I'll just say that during our week there the team had the opportunity to, among other things, assist in some exorcisms by praying with the pastor performing them and to visit some homes for homeless children that the church worked with.  We also got to shooot volleyballs from a cannon at children as they tried to cross a bridge at the biggest birthday party for a four-year-old that I've ever seen!  (All these things are hard to explain in a blog, so I apologize for the lack of details).  The team then returned from Goiania to be separated again and to begin our two months in our respective towns.  Dani and I are currently in Ceilandia and David and Sheralynn are working in Samambaia.  We will stay here until the end of April.  

Photos, starting from the top: 1)Goiania, 2)Brejo da Madre de Deus, 3)A cistern built by MCC near Brejo.  MCC is working with the Brazilian government and other NGOs to build cisterns in the Northeast, where water is scarce during the dry season, 4)Andrea, a Brazilian MCC worker and Mike, a SALTer from the States, in a historic section of Recife.  These two where our "tour guides" in the Northeast, 5)The beach at Porto de Galinhas

Bible Schools!

Continuing with the theme "Things that Happened Months Ago", I have finally found time to write about the month of January.  We have been moving around so much since the year began that it has been hard to find time to sit down and blog, but now that I am stuck in the same town (Ceilandia), at least until May, I  hope I will be able to write more regularly.

After the holiday festas in Samambaia came to an end the team was reunited to begin working with  the bible school in Gama.  Monday and Tuesday were spent planning and spreading the word around the town.  We went door to door distributing information to the households with children near the church.  Bible school then began on Wednesday and ended with the Sunday evening church service.  The team and I, with lots of help from the Brazilians, helped to lead music and with the dramas and games.  Our theme was "Heroes of the Bible" and the stories were about Moses, Ruth, Peter, and Jesus.

The following week we moved on to Samambaia to do pretty much the same thing again, except the theme there was the story of Daniel.  After Samambaia we came to Ceilandia where we stayed for two weeks, first helping with the bible school of the Mennonite church here and then with a church plant in Sol Nascente.  There were predictions of close to three hundred children that were going to attend the bible school in Sol Nascente, but I don't think we ever had more then eighty,  while at the other towns we had between 30-50.  In general the turnout was lower than expected at each location, but there were still enough kids that we were all ready for our team retreat when January came to an end.

Photos, from bottom to top:  1)Kids watching a drama inside the church at Gama.  2)Playing capture the flag in the street in front of the church in Samambaia.  3)Acting out the story of Daniel in Ceilandia.  4)Most but not all of the kids in Sol Nascente.  5)Keeping the smaller children entertained in Sol Nascente.