View from My Front Porch

Today starts the beginning of a new series of blog posts. Every Friday I plan to put up a single video or photo shot directly from my front porch here in Sobradinho, Bahia, Brazil.

Today's clip is from last week. I was actually standing on the sidewalk and not technically smack on the porch, by the way. Our region of Brazil is very dry and receives a limited amount of rainfall every year. Once every forty years or so, that amount shrinks substantially making for extreme drought conditions. We have been in a drought of about three years. Imagine living in a place where it rains about one time on one day once a year. This January we had some of the biggest total annual rainfall of the past five years - yes, all in one month's time! There was much flooding to say the least. And our grass began to grow again after how many years? We water it minimally with run off water from the washing machine. But we rarely have to cut it. So for the first time in about three years, Byron had to cut the grass! And that's the view this week from my front porch!

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What's Next?

That seems to be the question every one asks us these days since we've arrived back in Sobradinho. What's next? What are you going to do now? Where are you going? A few people ask about how the boys are or things about my grandbabies or parents. But not too many. This week three people asked when I could start teaching English to their children again!

So what is next for The Athas in Brazil? If you were able to attend one of our furlough meetings, hopefully you have some sort of idea. If not, I'll try to give a brief answer to the big question.

Remember that trip we took all over interior Bahia back in the fall of 2017? We visited over 200 communities over the course of about two weeks all within a few hours of where we live. You can back to my post about it and review some of the details here...

Bahia Road Trip

Byron and I plan to begin evangelizing some of the nearest and neediest communities that we visited on our trip. We came back with evangelism materials. By…

Pressing On - Marriage on the Mission Field

That's us on our first furlough in 1998. Byron was 33 and I was 32. No gray hairs, no flab, two cute little MK's. We'd been married for about 10 years and on the mission field for 4. We stayed in Winston-Salem that year at one of the mission houses of Pleasant View Baptist Church. We stayed for a whole year. Byron worked some for a friend with a automotive repair shop that year and I stayed at home with William who was almost 4 and baby Dalton who turned two while we were there. We traveled together to visit all of our churches that year and made several big trips to Georgia and Maryland to visit with family.

Our first term of service on the mission field had been rough. Language school, learning the ropes, figuring out how to deal with colleagues, two new babies, low finances. Somehow we had made it through together. We were okay and things were alright. Now we were first term survivors on our way back.

Byron and I had met in Bible college. We had some classes t…

Our Graduate

This Friday evening the youngest of our clan will finish up high school and move on to the next stage of his life - summer! Oh, and then college and what not.

It's been an incredible eighteen years...

Greyson was always a cutie-pie with his blonde hair and blue eyes in a country where that was a rarity. Word is that when he was around five or six years old on the island camp people would ask to take photos with him and that he would oblige for a small fee. Cute and knew it?

For the most part he's been a joy, even though he doesn't comb his hair very often and making his bed doesn't come easy. Perhaps his musical right sided brain could never deal with the structure of making a bed each day? I'm hoping he'll learn at college!

As the last in the nest, Greyson enjoyed a few years of being an only child. Byron and I got to take a long awaited road trip around southern Brazil with Greyson in tow. We made some great memories and enjoy some sweet bonding moments...

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Cactus Flower

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