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Brasil: Summer of 1998

To Londrina, with two days in Rio de Janeiro

Our primary work during two summer weeks of 1998 involved replacing the old roof at Acampamento Shalom - the church camp near Londrina, Paranà, Brasil - with new tiles. The work involved a team made up of six single men from Churches in the Willamette Valley: Greg ( area near Dallas ), Dave Petrequin and myself ( Valley View Evangelical Church ), Tim, Dan, and Matt (all from the Oregon City Evangelical Church). Our team leader was Frank Gorsline, who is in charge of the Team~Link short-term missions portion of OMS International, and is also a member of the Oregon City Evangelical Church.

This is a picture one of the old tiles. Note that the ridges that channel the water to the next tile down are quite small. This was one of the problems: after 20 years of weather the tiles had a habbit of plugging up and thus the water flowed over the sides and into the room below.

Here is what the new tiles look like. The ridges are all much deeper, preventing many problems.

In the traditional Brazilian tile roof, there isn't anything between the tiles and the room below. This means that if there is a problem with the roof, the rain simply comes in on whatever is inside. In order to protect the electrical systems and lights that are in the chapel, we removed the ceiling fans and put plastic over the more sensitive areas. Replacing the roof was somewhat tricky due to the under-roof structure being small slats that could not take a lot of weight. By spreading their weight around during the task, the crew on the roof was able to keep from falling through.

David, who has his own roofing business in the USA, finishes off the top of the roof. For the most part, the tiles simply sit on the wooden slats, but the peak of the roof is held together with concrete. In order to accomplish this, without disturbing the fragile structure of the rest of the tiles that were simply laying on top of eachother, David put a ladder on one end of the peak of the roof, and slowly worked his way across the top. The rest of us moved on to painting a few of the rooms inside of the camp manager's house, which badly needed a new coat.

We visited a coffee plantation located just down the road from the camp. They showed us around the plantation, and tried to show us how they filter the leaves and twigs from the coffee beans. Here, one of the women working at the plantation is spreading the coffee beans onto concrete pads to dry. The coffee must be dried for several days. Note the mound in the foreground covered with plastic. This was because it recently rained, and now that the rain has gone the coffee beans may be spread back out to dry in the sun.

We also visited the church in Maringà. This church is quite large, with several daughter congregations scattered through the city. It is difficult to tell how many people worship in the church each week, as it is filled to capacity and then some, with people sitting in the aisles and standing in the back. The total number is several thousand. This photo is of one of the daughter congregation's buildings. The opening ceremony had been held the previous week. The street in front of the building was closed and several hundred people enjoyed the festivities in front of the church.

The trip wasn't all work, however. We got a chance to spend the night with the youth of the Igreja Missionarià Central - the Central Missionary Church. Here we found that some of the Brazilian youth are extremely interested in learning more about God, and it was a wonderful way to learn of how our ministry was effecting those who live in the city: of those we met who were most interested in becoming Brasil's future pastors and missionaries, all of them had their most vivid experiences with the Spirit moving in their hearts at Acampamento Shalom - and we had just done our small part to make that ministry more effective.

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