Ladies Retreat

We had a ladies retreat on the 7th of March. We have wonderful ladies at our church and we had a great time of fellowship with the men cooking. We were able to have this retreat at the training center. It was the first time we had used it and the first time many of our people had an opportunity to look around. Our people here were amazed! The people who were not at the retreat were able to go Sunday morning after church and see the facilities.

This is Oziel. He is the caretaker of the training center. He professes to be a Christian but does not attend any church. Pray that we can have an impact on his life.

This was our guest speaker, Josenisia Viana. Her husband pastors a regular Baptist church here in our city. For those of you that are here in Brazil, she has a CD and has a beautiful singing voice. We got to know her through a teacher in our church that works with her. She was a blessing and an encouragement to us.

These are the ladies that attended.

This is Adilson and Jerri. I do not know if they are goofing are working. They actually had a really good time. I did not get a picture of Walber and he made the rice.

This is Stephen. I do not know why he had this on his head because he has such little hair.

10 Years

We received and e-mail from missionary friends of ours. They have been in Brazil one year and she was talking about how God has been with her and some of the struggles but also joys that they have experienced on the mission field. I started thinking and realized that this month (March) makes 10 years that we have been on the field. We left the states for Brazil in March of 1999. At that time we only had Philip and Hannah and they were little. Philip was only 2 1/2 and Hannah was a little over 1 year old. I was so full of big dreams, little did I realize how hard it would really be. Studying the language. I thought to myself, "I am fairly intelligent how hard can this be?" It was much harder than I thought and my pride got bruised more than once. I also remember when we first came to Brazil we did not even have internet access. Now I cannot imagine living without it. The small city where we started our first work had much more mud than pavement. Now it is the opposite. We had for a while a 1974 jeep and it could get us anywhere we wanted to go. I remember when our 3rd child Joshua was born in a small public hospital. What an experience. There are so many memories. I guess the thing that I have the most memories of are the people. The Brazilian people have become our family. We have seen God work through these people time and time again. 10 years seems like a long time but at the same time a short time. It has certainly never been dull!