Cactus Flower

  What do good missionaries do when the road leads into a nicely flowing seasonal creek?  They wade out to check the water depth.  They check out the slope on the other side.  They remove any limbs that others have placed in the way to warn of potential danger.  They put their hubs in position and make sure they are in four-wheel drive.  They move ahead.

  In the dry, hot Northeast region of Brazil where we live, we get very little rain except for the months of November, December, and January.  During those months we usually see about five good rainy days with a few sprinkles in between.   Last week it rained for about an hour on two different nights in Sobradinho, but other nearby interior communities got much more.  In Lage dos Negros it rained on three consecutive days.  One of the rains last almost the whole night. Rain for the interior farmer means run out and plant hoping to reap the rewards if another rain comes before too long.  It also means that all the plants and trees that looked brown and dead come to life overnight.  It's a Northeast Brazilian version of Spring!  From one day to the next trees bloom, green leaves sprout, and grass that you never even knew about pops out all over like a carpet of green on the khaki-colored sand. Trees that looked like old dried-up thorn bushes we...

  Yesterday someone in Lage dos Negros asked me what it is that I do...  Good question!  Every day is different!  My Fridays as a missionary don't look much like the other days of my week.  I don't take as many photos of people.  We travel in a dune buggy, and our visits are in homes, a little more personal.  I do often find willing goats just dying to get their picture taken. We leave our house in Sobradinho early in the morning and make various stops visiting people along dirt roads.  In some places Byron tells a Bible story for adults and prays.  In others he presents a more formal interactive Bible study.   My job is to take lots of snacks, help navigate ("Watch out for that...") and entertain kids along the way.  I take a Bible lesson and songs, but I never know exactly who I may find in each place.  Sometimes the crowd is small, sometimes it's big. Over the past two years that Byron and I have been traveling the dirt...

On December 23, 2020 Byron and I enjoyed an "early Christmas" with the children of the small community named Abreus.  Six young people from Sobradinho went along to help us with a special program for the boys and girls.  Each child received a small gift and a little Christmas sweet bread called a panetone.   I've been making "video letters" for our grandchildren to learn a little more about what Vovô Byron and Gramma Michele do in Brazil.  Watch and see a little of our Wednesday adventure.  

This Sunday, July 19, marks four months of quarantines and lockdowns, travel restrictions and regulations that have kept us mostly at home, and hesitant to visit our interior Bible study students. Intermittent internet hasn't helped much with keeping in touch with our interior friends, but we are exchanging regular messages.   This week we decided to check out another nearby dirt path not too far from home.  Our county's regulations are opening up.  Sadly several of the county's on our old route are still closed. So Sunday afternoon we went off to find the petroglyphs or ancient wall drawings of São Gonçalo da Serra.   There are not a lot of signs!  You can't find it on Google Maps doesn't tell you everything. But for the persistent, there is success. We had to turn around a few times.  We had to stop and ask a few times.  We just had to keep moving along and hoping. Even after we found the entrance of this mountain pas...

Yesterday was the annual procession of cowboys in our little town of Sobradinho, Bahia.  It's a Catholic tradition.  Our town has three Catholic chapels, one in each of our three neighborhoods.  The parade starts at the far end of our linear town at the first church and heads down the main avenue with all the cowboys on horseback following the statute of the Virgin Mary on donkey drawn cart.  They make their way to the main church in the far neighborhood where all the cowboys participate in a special mass to bless their year. Regardless of the religious connotations, the parade is lovely to see.  All types of horses and all types of "cowboys" big and small.  Some years there is even a man riding on a old Zebu bull.  Sadly this year the bull did not make his appearance. We see real, live cowboys in their full leather outfits at least once a week riding down the avenues of our town, in the fields near our house herding cattle and goats ba...

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...

You know that road you see every day but you've never been down it and don't know where it goes?  That's how our trip started out, heading down a path less taken and coming home by a road few would dare to pass.   On Tuesday, November 14, we headed out to find as many "unreached" communities within 150 miles of where we currently live.  Our method was simple:  Stop and Ask!  Most of the places where we visited are not marked on any of the maps we own.  Some are identified on Google Maps.  Most all are on dirt roads - either roads that have always been dirt or old highways in need of repaving.   At each group of more than ten houses we stopped to ask the name of the community, took note of how many houses there were and asked about churches.  We visited about 200 such communities over the course of our trip of seven days.   Going was slow due to the bad roads and all the stopping.  Few places have any sort of sign id...

In February I had a toothache during a retreat out on the island.  Got home on a Tuesday...   On Thursday I went to the twice-a-week-comes-from- the-big-city dentist.  She was nice and took an x-ray but said that it looked complicated and root canal-ish.  Told me to go to the "root canal" dentist that only comes on Thursdays and Fridays.  She told me to take the name of a good pain killer.  It was too late to go right then...   On Friday morning I called the "root canal" dentist only to be told that their schedule was full with no available appointments until March.  My husband called them back and convinced the secretary to see me quickly for an evaluation in the late afternoon.  I took my x-ray from the day before.  The dentist saw me after an hour and a half wait for five minutes only to tell me that she could only do any work in March.   On Saturday I called a friend in the big city, who called his family's dentist.  ...

The Broken Finger ....When all of a sudden my middle son started screaming, hollering, and doing some sort of war dance.  He had been jumping with his skateboard and bar on the front sidewalk.  Ah, ah, ugh, ugh, arrrr!  Seems he had fallen, but I could make no since out of his squalling to know what he had hit.  He ran into the house and collapsed on the couch.  This kind of thing happens a lot in my house.  So I passed on by to get a drink of water before coming back to ask what was the matter.  Then I saw blood and a bent finger!  Broken finger!  The bone poking out was causing it to bleed.  Oh joy! We live in a small interior city of Brazil.  No hospital.  There is a small emergency clinic.  They have no  x-ray machine.  Often they have no doctor for the day.  Frequently they don’t even have simple supplies.  What to do?  My dh was in the big city an hour away with the car!   That w...

I plan to post some old letters about our trips across Brazil over the years.  Traveling here is always an adventure.  Once when we lived in Fortaleza and all the boys were little I decided it would be neat to travel with some of our church members to the interior village where many had grown up.  Every year in January there was a mass exodus of people from our church being the month of vacations here in Brazil.  As I have been going through old photos lately, I also found this old letter about one of my trips to the backwoods of Ceará.  I believe the trip mentioned in this note took place in 2001.  The boys and I went back a few other times as well.  Each time was a wonderful experience for each of us! William, Taiana, and an interior cousin This was taken on another trip to Tia Neide's wedding. Dear Ones, I was invited to go interior with some of our Joao XXIII church members. Many of the people in our work all come from in and around the same ...