Hello, friends who are supporting me in prayer here in Brazil;

We received some very good news last week: it looks like there is a possibility there will be somewhere around $35,000 coming soon to the churches here in Brazil for the purpose of funding new daughter churches. The money is coming from the fund called "Every Creature Crusade" that was started by industrialist Stanley Tam some years back. These funds will probably go to help the Central Churchís year-old daughter congregation in Imagawa, and to the proposed new church in a small community outside Foz do Iguaçu. This is the place I wrote you about a month and a half ago, that became interested in Protestantism in general, and the Igreja Missionaria in particular, through their contact with a soccer player involved with the church in Foz do Iguaçu. There is now enough people there interested in the Igreja Missionaria that every week the church hires a bus to take the people from this town into the city of Foz do Iguaçu to worhship at the central church there. The town is remote enough that it would be best for them to have their own church there. They essentially already have a congregation. There isnít any local money in the community at all, and so funding from outside sources would be necessary for them to have a church there.

The church in Imagawa, which is in an area of Londrina that didnít have any churches previously, is currently renting a structure. As mentioned previously, they have purchased land for their own building and hope to start building something soon. Naturally, having access to some money is going to help them a great deal.

As far as expanding the reach of the word goes, I should also let it be known that the Wycliffe missionaries taht have started Portuguese classes here are not going to be working directly with a stone age native tribe, as it may sound. The fact of the matter is that it is illegal for them to do so, because the anthropoligical community wants to leave the native tribes in an ìuntouchedî state. While the vast majority of the particular people group they are working with live on a native tribe reservation and do live with almost no modern conveniences, a few of them have discovered that life is a lot easier with refrigeration and electricity, and have therefore moved into the nearest town with such conveniences. These people, who can hardly be considered to have an anthropologically pure native culture, but still speak a language that has no written form, are the ones who Wycliffe will be working with directly. Naturally, once they have a written language of their own, it will probably spread into the rest of the community, just like chain saws, coca-cola, and Purina dog chow has ( You may find it amazing that dog food would spread into remote areas of Brazil, but there is a place a few farms away from Acampamento Shalom that, despite it being remote from everything, makes dog food for export for the USA. In a place where the economy is still very much agricultural, animal feeds is a vital component of what happens. ). Also, if you look at the Copel web site ( http://www.copel.com ) you will find that they have all sorts of interesting plans to use solar power for providing electricity to remote areas of the state of Paranà ( yes, there is an English language version of the site ñ you donít have to read it in Portuguese.). Therefore, electricty and refrigeration is already reaching these remote areas of Brazil. It is only a matter of time before the primitive cultures here demand that they not be primitive anymore.

In any event, if there is any question if the Wycliffe missionaries that are here will disobeying Brazilian and international regulations concerning indiginous populations, the answer is that they will not. The culture of the people they will be working with, despite the language being as yet unwritten, is somewhat 20th century. However, I am not convinced it is possible to preserve these cultures in an untouched state.

The new church in Veneza that I helped with a little bit back in August has been experiencing some new visitors >from the local community. It is a very good thing to see happening. However, there are still some problems there that are probably natural for such a new congregation. Please pray for David Roof and Conce and Andrew, as they work out there. I visited there on Sunday evening, November 5. Things seem to be slowly coming along out there.

I experienced yet another interesting product: Acerola juice. I was told that it is good for keeping healthy here. It should: one tiny Acerola fruit contains as much vitamin C as about 40 oranges. It tastes pretty good too. I am also told that it is very productive. The waitress told us that the Acerola tree outside her front door has new fruit on it almost every day, for 8 months of the year.

Iím still teaching two halves of Jan's classes for her. Iím not feeling particularly adequate to the task of >teaching either of them, but one of them is particularly difficult to teach, because it is the most advanced of the classes we have here. Jan was having to develop her own materials as time went on, and it is not going to be very easy for me to do that, considering that I donít know a whole lot about that level of teaching English. I am finding it very difficult to find good materials. The advanced materials that I have access to are still too advanced for them to deal with effectively, and the out-of-box classroom materials are too easy for them.

The other item that I am running into that is difficult in both classes is trying to explain prepositions. In Portuguese, the prepositions that are used with certain verbs are similar, and in some cases they are very different. In some cases, prepositions are used in Portuguese and none are used in English. When I say ìI will call youî, a Portuguese speaker will say ìI will call to you.î The most difficult question to answer is always "Why?" There are many questions about language that there isn't an answer to that question - it is just the way it is. With many students, it is very difficult to try to explain the lack of explanation to them. Then, try to explain why a package or a letter can have either "For" or "To" someone written on it, but when you answer the phone and it is for someone else, you can't say "It's to you", you have to say "It's for you." Yet another case where you can't explain why something is the way it is, but it just is. I think at some point we are going to have to develop a list of warnings for incoming students that talk about what they can expect in learning a new language. In Londrina, everyone and their dog owns an English school. It's quite competitive, and so quite a few schools exaggerate how easy it is to learn English in their advertisements. The Webb school does not, as near as I can tell in reading the advertisements. However, there are still quite a few students that have the impression (Maybe >from reading other schoolís ads?) that they are going to come in to a class twice a week if they feel like it, and somehow magically they will learn English by the end of the semester.

Last week, I was also involved in the saga of the movement of the ISBL drinking fountain. If you look at a globe, you will find that Londrina is about as far away from the equator as Mazatlan, Mexico, and Havana, Cuba. Therefore, it should not be too surprising that there are a number of places that have refrigerated drinking fountains. The location of the drinking fountain in ISBL was causing some problems, particularly now that they have a grade school operating there during the days. Therefore, the decision was made to move the drinking fountain outside, into a much better location. However, there wasn't any water supply or electricity at this ideal new location. Therefore, I helped David Roof with the project of trying to obtain water and electricity. This involved getting up into the attic of the ISBL library, drilling holes for the pipe and electrical conduit, and then running the pipe. In order to run the pipe, it was necessary for David to get on the roof over the parking area that sits in the center of the ISBL campus. The flimsy nature of the roof between the parking area and the library meant that David was very careful about not getting on any part of the roof that wasnít supported by anything. Even so, we wound up replacing a section of this roof because some stuff did manage to fall through it. We did finally get pipe and electricity to the desired location. However, the desired location was also on particularly non-level ground, and so David wound up building a concrete form and making a concrete platform for the thing to sit on. We then looked at the drinking fountain. In Brazil, it should be known, they donít have the tradition of >providing shut-off valves near many plumbing fixtures. The drinking fountain was no exception: the pipe simply came down the wall from the roof of the building, and into the drinking fountain. We did find the shut-off valve for that set of pipes: it is located one and a half floors above the ground on the outside wall, above the awning that connects ISBL to the parking area (water pipe is run outside the outside walls here in many cases, since no one here worries about pipes freezing). Getting to this would mean, at the very least, removing the awning structure. We therefore determined that it was much easier to simply shut off the water to half of the ISBL building than to try to use the shut-off valve. Getting to this shut off valve means a visit to the water box in the attic of the building, which can only be accomplished by a ride in the ISBL elevador. Now, I should point out that ISBL has been in Londrina since 1954. Therefore, when it was built, there wasnít much around in the way of elevator manufacturers in Brazil, or at least easily available in the Londrina area. What is in ISBL defies description, but I will attempt to do so: Imagine a giant wooden packing crate with two sides missing. This is suspended by a steel cable from a steel strucutre in the attic, that contains a large electric motor. The entire thing is operated by two ropes. Pulling on one rope runs the motor in one direction, and pulling on the other rope runs the motor in the other direction. However, doing this means the platform moves. Therefore, you can pull on the ropes and stay on one of the floors and exert a constant pull on the rope to keep the platform moving upward. However, if you are riding in the box, you need to make a hand-over-hand motion in order to keep a constant force on the rope, as letting go of the rope shuts off the motor. All of this is housed in a brick chimney- like shaft, with two wooden rails running down the sides to keep the thing from swinging back and forth. The shaft is closed to the rest of ISBL by two wooden closet doors that, when closed, make it look just like a storage cabinet from the outside.

Jennifer Noah, the daughter of one of the missionary families here who is going to college in the USA, sent a copy of what I can only describe as a program that is the universal cure to all computer problems with the IBM PC. It has proven to be quite popular here. Let me know if any of you who have IBM PC computers would like a copy of it, so that I may e-mail a copy to you. It is somewhat large, but quite entertaining, and useful if you have just experienced a major problem with your computer and feel like breaking it into tiny pieces.

There will, of course, be more later. God bless all of you,