Always Listen to Your Mama

This week I was thinking about the last time I went into a little interior place called Madeira Cortada {Cut Wood} in the Brazilian state of Ceará.  I found an old post I made on my big blog about one of my trips.  Maybe Aaron would like to read the whole letter.  Today I'm just going to tell you about one part of the trip that I was remembering this week.  Here's the link to the complete version below:

Interior Trips 

William finds girlfriends wherever he goes!

 

Once when the boys were all very small and we still lived in Fortaleza, I was invited during the big, end-of-the-year holidays to go to the interior farm of one of our church members.  It seemed like a fun idea and something good for the boys. Greyson was just a baby.  William was about seven or eight and Dalton would have been about six.   

To get there we went with other ladies and children on a big Sprinter van that ran once a week to the particular little village.  I was told the trip would take about two to three hours and I had been to the place before by car and knew that to be true.  But when it comes to traveling in Brazil, always listen to your mother and add about two times the estimated amount.  We left Fortaleza around 9:30 am and got to the house where we would stay around 6:30 pm.  How many hours is that?  ____ That's exactly right!

The next morning as the boys got up at the call of the "galo," I decided it was good to establish some basic rules.  All the little boys that we saw had slingshots around the necks. William and Dalton had brought theirs.  I said, You better remember - Don't kill something you don't want to eat!  And I told them they should let someone know before they ran off somewhere.  And to remember to be careful if they saw a snake.

Off they went into the wild...

One day while the adults were all sitting on the porch one afternoon, a man on a horse came by and said he had just seen two little white boys walking out in the bush.  He was concerned and had heard the missionary's family was staying at a certain farm and came by to let someone know.  He said that he asked if they were lost or needed help, but they wouldn't even open their mouths to say a word.  He figured that neither one spoke any Portuguese.

I smiled and laughed! They were just obeying Mama's rules!  In the big city where we live whenever we would go out and about I would remind them to not speak to strangers.  I wondered if that was why they did not speak to the man.  Sure enough, when they came back later on the man of the house asked the boys why they didn't speak to his friend.  William said, Well, we didn't know him and we can't speak to strangers!  The old farmer laughed and laughed.  He sat them both down and told them that while they were on the farm they could speak to everyone because everyone was a friend of his and thus theirs, too.  And we all had a good laugh.  I was also a happy mother knowing that even in the middle of the interior scrublands my boys had been obedient.

Moral of the story:  

Always obey your Mama - 

no matter where you may wander!