Holiday & Boxing

This weekend was back to Lagoa De Itaenga!! But I (Jeff) was sick. It was very frustrating because I really wanted to go and help out but my stomach was bothering me a lot. That morning a group of people from the Alcance went to a lake in Paudalho and had a picnic for Karine Moraes. She will be leaving soon to go to England and then to Word of Life Hungary in August. But, I was not able to go to that either. I am feeling better today but please pray for health. I haven't been nearly as sick as everybody else has been recently so I most likely got the tail end of the stomach virus thing going around.

Lindsay and Emily were still able to go to Lagoa De Itaenga. They were 20 mins late so they only had 4 kids at the English class, but the class went really well and they have decided to do it every Saturday now.

Lindsay & Emily teaching the English class

The Youth program will still only be every other Saturday. By having the English class every Saturday it will help a lot more with the comprehension of the kids. It was just to much time in between classes to retain English that have no other outlet of learning it.


At the end of this month Gary Wright the president of World Renewal Intl. will be coming to Brazil. The month marks the 15 year anniversary of the Ministry in Brazil so Gary is coming down to be apart of the celebration. He is also bring some things down for us, which will help a lot. The current internet here is really bad with only 15kps download speeds which is about 3x faster than dial up. Then there is usually about 5 or so people online at one time which makes the internet nearly impossible to navigate. So after talking with Tele we are hopefully getting better internet this week. It should be going to about 60kps download speeds and then Gary will be bringing down a Bandwidth control router with him. Basically it will be able to set programs on a priority list and gives more speed to the things higher on the list. So I will be putting things like Skype on super high priority and downloads as a low priority. This should solve most of our internet problems.

When Little Kids paint.

Lindsay has her hands full sometimes with these young artists.

We are doing well here and it has been a big blessing to have Emily Taylor here now. Lindsay and Emily are becoming friends fast, as for me I am happy to have another Settlers of Catan player. The school schedule is changing a lot because of Rachel Winzeler leaving at the end of the month. Emily has taken over David's classes and David is taking over Rachel's classes. It all is a bit weird, but the transition seems to be going well.

We will be going back to Lagoa de Itaenga this Saturday to teach an English class and help with the youth group. This time I will bring the camera! Pray for this time, that God will bless it.

Sickness & Work

So, it seems that some type of stomach virus has been going around and has made people like Tele not eat for a long time. The funny thing is, neither Lindsay or I have gotten the stomach virus. But, Lindsay did get sick. It is more of a bad cold. This is partially why I haven't updated this blog for a while. Too many sick people making me feel down also.

I have been working on the Brazil website and it is pretty much done for now with the content part. I just need to get the outreach section complete which is actually going to be called Church Planting Strategy... section. This last Saturday Lindsay, Emily Taylor, and I went with Ricardo to Lagoa de Itaenga (The town which has one of the newest church plants in it) and we had an English class for the youth there. We also helped with the youth group later on that night. It was awesome to finally be able to use my Nintendo Wii for the ministry again. We really tried to get the youth group going with the Acacias church here at the Alcance but only one kid ever showed up. Anyway, the weekend went really well and the kids loved both the English class and youth group. We had one kid that was new who was very interested in the Wii and then came the next day to help out with a street market sale the Church was participating in. He also showed up to Church that evening.

It was good to see the Church raising money to make it a more Church like building. Right now the Church is a house that they are renting and it is pretty small. The Church sold about R$85 worth of clothes and items at the Street market, which is a huge deal for them because most of the Church members are not employed and they only give about R$6 a month in tithe.