As the team was staying at Acampamento Shalom, I moved everything back out to the camp, and prepared for the possibility of staying for a while longer, or the possibility of leaving very soon.

Yet another update on my trip in Brazil; The team from Valley View Church arrived on Sunday afternoon. This team also included Frank Gorsline's wife, Lyonie, who has not been to Brazil for the past 5 years or so due to medical problems. She is now able to travel here again. This is very nice for her, as she and Frank served as missionaries here starting in the very late 1960's. All of the luggage arrived just fine, although apparently one of the people had a lot of trouble with a bottle of syrup that showed up on the x-ray machines as a very suspicious shape. They brought us all some Tillamook Cheese, and other goodies. Joe also managed to get us one of the Bibles for one of the English teachers, and also the book "501 Portugese Verbs, Fully Conjugated in all their tenses" for one of the American missionaries.

For worship we went to the Central Missionary Church, where Julie goes to church. We stayed after the service until nearly 10 talking to some of the Brazillians who speak English.

The team has bonded extremely well. Of course, this is likely to happen considering that we are all from the same church. We started work on the field of dirt that used to be a sidewalk ( and will soon be a new sidewalk ) today. It has rained quite hard all last week, and so the soil here has turned into somewhat thick muck. ( Mom, I wish you were here - the experience you have digging the clay in our yard would probably be helpful. ) However, it was the perfect weather for doing this - it wasn't rediculously cold, or raining, or horrifically hot. It was partially cloudy most of the day, in the 60's, and it got much clearer as the day went on. We made a fair amount of progress, especially considering that the team only got about 1 collective hour of sleep on the flight down here, so that they are all still suffering from sleep depravation a bit.

One of the first activities needed was to compact the ground under the old sidewalk a little bit, in order to keep it from compressing over time. The problem is that in this tropical climate and with the red clay that makes up the soil in Londrina, an American-style ground pounding machine ( which belongs to the seminary ) doesn't work that well. It simply keeps pounding the same spot over and over and no progress is ever made as the soil simply oozes around under the machine. The Brazilians showed us how to avoid this problem: attach a rope to the machine and have one person guide it along. Most American concrete workers laugh when they see this and say "But your not doing it right. You need to let the machine pound the ground until it is stable." That may work in most areas of North America, but Daryl and Jerry ( the two men in this picture ) are experienced concrete workers, and they could not get traditional American methods to work in Brazil. It is part of the missions experience: you have to adapt to local circumstances.

Someone donated money to the seminary to have them hire someone to paint the outside. This is a very good thing, as it is starting to look very bad. Also, last week, during the heavy rains, it started raining on us in the Webb language school's office. The seminary needs a new roof, and they hope to be able to afford that soon - or find a work team interested in doing it. I wish I had time to write more, but it is after 11 here. Please note that I have changed e-mail addresses again. -Glenn

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