Cactus Flower

We needed milk.  At least that's the excuse I stated to my missionary man.  We live in a small interior town.  Our milk comes in boxes like the one of the right with Betania written on it.  It's long life milk.  Fresh milk is not available.  A liter of box of milk here in town is almost BR$5.00, but in the big city!  It's much cheaper, you know! So off we went!  My hubby really knew that I just needed to go.  I needed to walk about the air-conditioned mall and eat at an "American" restaurant!  There are two malls within an hour of us. One with a big grocery store and lots of other neat shops, Burger Kings, McD's and even a Subway.  The other with some interesting stores, a BK and a Subway.   We had our lunch in one at Burger King, cruised the stores and made some purchases at the big grocery store.  Then we stopped downtown to buy a new Bible for me.  Oh, I've been needing one desperately as James and Peter ar...

March 2019 There's my babes!  Chase and Mariyah.  My Stateside grandbabies. When we travel people here ask about them and about my sons.  And I enjoy telling about them, but I don't say too much.  Just don't want to monopolize any casual conversations.  If the questions are specific and if someone seems genuinely interested, out pops the cell phone and I hunt for my file of photos. Often I hear new grandmothers closer to where we live chatting about recent visits with theirs.  I keep quiet and enjoy the thoughts of my recent phone conversations and video chats.  I don't speak up too much about how I make YouTube videos for my babes, send them regular real paper cards and pray for them every day.  I don't share my hopes that when they are big enough they can spend their summers in Brazil with Mama and Papa.   February 2018 Nope, I just wait.  That's the life of a missionary mama.  I can be patient.  I send gifts fro...

This past Saturday morning we geared up and headed down our route towards the interior town of Lage dos Negros.  We've been down this dirt road more times than I can count now.  We go by group after group of houses with no church at all.  Some little are little communities with 5 or 10 houses.  Some are small towns with 25 to 50.  The bigger places often have a small church of some sort. We're visiting the ones that don't. Some of the roads have patches where years and years ago there was pavement.  Most are just rutted, sandy, sometimes rocky paths. Byron has mapped many of the roads and we have all the towns and spots where we have visited marked on our tracking GPS.   Saturday evening we showed the Jesus Film in Bicas, a community with a primary school and about 50 houses in the main group and a few nearby.  They have a small Catholic chapel, but no priest of their own.  Someone tried to build a Seventh Day Adventi...