Day Six August 8th, 2011

Whoa! What a day! Today by far had the most variety of activities! I got up at 5:55 am to shower and hop on the computer to email someone special... and to do some blogging and other emails. I ran in to a bit of a challenge when I turned the knob to the shower. The water wouldn't come out! All houses in Brazil rely on gravity for their water pressure. There is a big tank on the top of every house that water from their well runs into. I guess the circuit broke last night and prevented any re-filling of the tank. Just another small adjustment in Brazil! Oh, another adjustment, we can't flush our toilet paper down the drain. It would mess up their system. So we have to put our used paper in a trash can next to the toilet! I never thought I would do that! Anyways, after email time, I had a good breakfast of eggs, apple crisp, and squash bread. Next was
putting make-up on for the drama we would be performing three times today at a local school. Random fact: There is 80 public schools in the city we are in and the population is 240,000! Doesn't seem necessary to me. We got to the school and performed the drama and Pastor Tom shared the Gospel with them and we handed out pamphlets to each kid about how to get saved and about Pastor Tom's church. Afterwards, we were able to interact with the kids a lot. I was very surprised at how aggressive the students were. Especially the girls. Screaming and yelling and giggling. Very overwhelming! I'll have a ton of new Brazilian Facebook friends within the next few days I suppose. I pray that God opens the door to witness to them. What a blessing to be able to share the gospel message in public schools! Some places in the world are still doing it OK! After our drama, it was time for my first wrestling practice at a different school than the one we were at for the dramas. Wrestling is one of the avenues he uses to reach the youth in the city. He has found it to be his most effective form of evangelism. Praise God for the passion he has for the Brazilian people. When we got to the gym, Tom mentioned that this will be the gym that I would be coaching basketball in. It's sort of a piece of junk. Roof leaks everywhere and only to baskets but the Lord provides how He sees fit. It will be so much fun! Anyways, I got to try on my first singlet today! The wrestling gear designers need to find a new design for those things! They are ugly! Nevertheless I got to get my first experience of wrestling on a mat.
Got dominated in every way by a 17 year old. Not my sport. After packing up the van after practice. The whole group went out to eat at a pizza place in town called Roda Pizzeria. Roda means wheel in Portuguese. In the restaurant, the waiters kept coming around like a wheel with the most unique pizza I have ever seen! Corn pizza, beef strogenoff (spelling??) pizza, salmon pizza, broccoli pizza, chicken heart pizza. Crazy stuff! Then most of the dessert pizzas had some sort of chocolate as the first layer and then cheese on the top. Very different but I guess that's how they do things in Brazil! After dinner, we came home and had missions class where we are learning about Tom and Penny and their lives as missionaries and why other missionaries quit the ministry. It has been very informative. I love learning this stuff because God has really placed long-term missions work on my heart. So it is really a blessing to learn from one of the best in the world. Today is much of the same
as today! It's been a tiring day! Time for bed! God bless!

Jonie s house for dinner. He is in the front in the red shirt.

Kids at the school. Joe and Mustova

My attempt at wrestling...