News from the Amazon

I’ve always been so curious to know what it really is like to be a missionary in a foreign country. I expected life to be harder and your days to be consumed with ministry activities. How wrong and yet how right I was. Day to day life is harder down here in Brazil. Due to the contaminated water we have to boil whatever water we need for whatever drinking or cooking needs we have for the day. Vegetables, which are very scarce, have to be bleached and washed in purified water. There is no glass on the windows, only screens so the floors have to be swept every day due to all the dust blowing in. Most houses don’t even have screen though so we’re blessed to at least have that. Ants are not a maybe problem, the question is always when they will get into things. It rains almost every day so drying laundry is a rather difficult thing. Mold likes to grow on everything (even the wooden doors, furniture and ceilings). For this reason books don’t do to well down here. Everything’s always damp all the time so the Peaces have to keep all their books in a closed room with a small air conditioning unit always on. The pets are great though. Lloyd said that growing up he and his brother found there interesting pets when they were out hunting. Sloths, parrots, giant beetles, stray dogs and cats, tapers, and monkeys were all fair game if you could find and catch one. Not long after I arrived at the Peace house a neighbor came by with a bucket of baby parrots that had been knocked out of a tree. The kids really wanted to keep a couple but the parakeets they already had didn’t like them so we gave them all away to various neighbors. Besides Amarelinho and Berdinho, the parakeets, the Peaces have a black lab named Shadow and Jacob has now takes to collecting bugs and has a pet beetle named Jeremy Agustus Peace 1 as well as a few other unnamed insects. Meals are pretty simple for the most part. In the morning Lloyd goes to the bread shop and gets a bunch of fresh made rolls for breakfast. I haven’t seen any cereal in the stores here so Athena makes her own granola for us as well. Nescaou is the morning treat (Nestles chocolate milk powder). Lunch is the main meal of the day and though it can vary rice, tough beef, a fried bread crumb mixture, and kale mixed into everything, are the main staples. Dinner is generally cheese and meat sandwiches or leftovers. Fridays are family night in the Peace home so Athena usually makes pizza and we play games or watch a movie all together. The people here must not sleep much because they are out late every night and up very early every morning. Everything seems to start at 8pm even church on Sundays. Shouting and fireworks always come from the quadra (town gym, where they have soccer, volley ball and other sports activities) late into the night. The night life can’t interfere with the work of the day though so people are up bright and early heading down to their boats, out into the forest to their garden plots, or to whatever job they have to do. The fun thing to do around here is to go down to the port down the street and swim in the Amazon. We have to be careful though and watch out for sting rays. Piranhas stay away as long as you have no open bleeding wounds. The most exciting thing about the port is seeing the dolphins. So far all but one time I’ve been down there I’ve seen them jumping and once there was even a pink dolphin jumping around. The locals are very superstitious when it comes to pink dolphins so the kids all ran out of the water as soon as they saw one jumping. Every night of the week there are different Bible studies going on at the church or in the Peace home. Everyone is greatly encouraged to be in a study during the week. Each class is treated like a school class and the students are given homework and a grade (of sorts). If they fail to pass the class they have to take it over again. I wonder how that would go over in our churches in the US? Social dynamics and issues are pretty much the same here as they are in the US. Humans seem to deal with the same issues no matter what part of the world they are in. So there’s a bit of a peak into life down in the Amazon. I hope it was informative and interesting. I’ll have more stories to tell later.