Feliz Natal!

Love these Amazonian gifts to the baby Jesus of water, fish, and a soccer ball!

The people here in Itacoatiara are wonderful. They have very little, but they make the most of it.

We have seen all kinds of things reused, recycled, repurposed--like old nails hammered into boards for a garden rake, banana crates stacked for shelving, a tv casing used as a plant pot. And we were delighted when the city decorations went up on the main avenue, mostly made out of old cds, plastic cups, water bottles and things.We came home and tried to make some like theirs.

We like the reminder that with a touch of love, junk things can be made into loveliness, much like junk moments in our lives.With the Savior's love gracing our junk, it can be made into loveliness. 

We pray this season for all of you wherever you are to feel abundant love and the power of Jesus Christ  helping you through challenging days, and the light and peace and joy He was born to make possible.  

Many Gilliland hugs to you!

Love, Tamara & David & Girls


Here are some of our favorite samples of creativity from our stroll on the "avenida":

Our friend Vitória came to help us create "decoração" at home with water bottles for bells and stars, bags for garland bows, old cardboard for a nativity. She also cut snowflakes for her first time!

 

 

And the younger girls made various nativities from scraps of old banana crates:

 

We love celebrating our Savior!  Ó vinde adoremos!

#SejaALuzDoMundo

Today's suggestion for Light The World is to visit a small business and meet the owner, then consider leaving a positive review online.

This morning, our friend Joy took us to meet her father, José, who owns a small farm. He doesn't exactly have an online review option, but we're happy to write a post!  We were impressed with how hard he works, how much work he does there, and his love of the land.

He first took us down to his bank of the Amazon, where he launches to fish and gather shrimp.

 

 

It was interesting to see his shrimp trap and the area where he cooks fish, in the high-water season he puts his cook fire up on the slats there off to the other side of where David is pointing out the water line on the stilts of the house. David would love to go fish off the porch.

 He also showed us how he turns his fields, burning the weeds out from time to time. With all the rain here, weeds grow fast.

He grows melons, corn (here off to the side) and sugar cane (you can see some here along the road).

And he grows macaxeira, a root that he let us sample raw and take home to cook later.

 He also has fruit tress and a pumpkin patch you can see here in the background.

He just harvest some pumpkins, and his dog just had puppies. Joy is showing the girls where the momma dog is nursing them. The girls really loved those puppies.

 

It was a lovely brief trip--we had to cut short and make a run for the van, it was starting to rain and we would not have been able to get through the windy dirt road had it turned to mud. Gratefully, we made it out!

 

 

The macaxeira we boiled at home, it tastes a lot like potatoes. 

We are grateful for all the good people who work hard to grow and distribute the food we eat every day!

Se Não Chover

Storm clouds are rolling in, the amazonian rainy season has arrived!

"Se não chover" is a saying here that means "if it doesn't rain". The people here are so flexible always cancelling activities when it rains. And it rains a lot in the Rain Forest. 

The rain is so hard that if you
went out in it you would be
soaked through within 30 seconds. 

The flowers that come off of
the trees during the rain
are very pretty.

The rain knocked down one
of our banana leafs.

We've seen lot's of people offering shelter for people out in the rain including the workers at a restaurant we were eating lunch at who offered for us to stay until it let up. We decided to leave anyways because our house was only like two blocks away.

It was fun walking home in the rain, but very, very wet.

Sometimes, even when it rains so hard that the road turns into a river, or a rio rua, people just have to go out, and they take it well.

Some guys splashing through a rio rua hiding from the rain in the back of their truck.

It was raining one Sunday before church,
so our branch president asked us to
help him pick up people with our van so that
they could make it to church that day.

When it rains and you can't do much, the people taught us to make the most of it. Adira made a paper boat and wrapped it in a banana leaf so that it would float. If the banana leaf hadn't ripped and the boat sunk, it would have continued down our street and into the amazon river.

Here the girls are using flip-flops as boats.

The other reason why we really like the rain is because it makes it so much less hot here.

If the rain keeps up, maybe dad won't have to use
this method of cooling down with the fan anymore.

WE LOVE THE RAIN

#LightTheWolrd

The awesome missionaries serving in our branch bring so much light with their smiles and love,
we love when our girls go out with them to do their work, our girls learn good things with them.

 To celebrate the month of our Savior's birth, our family is participating in the Light The World initiative (doing simple acts to share light each day) and are inviting others we meet around town to join us!

(You can join, too!  https://www.comeuntochrist.org/light-the-world for English or https://www.vindeacristo.org/seja-a-luz-do-mundo for Português)

Today's suggestion was to post highlights of an example of someone giving Christlike service. We felt to highlight some of the missionaries we have met here from our own church and others who generously volunteer years of their lives to share love and light with others.

Today we met with the president of the Manaus mission for our church, which includes our city. What a good man! He has a very complicated job, which he does with his heart because he loves the Savior. He and his wife left their home in Sao Paolo for three years to be here overseeing 180 missionaries and multiple congregations in a very large and difficult-to-travel geographic region. He could use so much more help--any of you who speak (or willing to learn) Português available to come serve here?

Also, this weekend, we met a Baptist missionary from Mississippi who has spent the last 10 years here living on the river and teaching Bible English to the river people and helping them with medical needs. He recently got back from helping get a young man to Manaus who had a flesh-eating bacteria infect his brain, and was happy to report the boy is healing well.

And here is our friend Kennedy. We have been very impressed with this young man. We met him as the carpenter who was selling a table big enough for our family, and hired him to also build us a few other pieces. He told us his story of spending 6 years of his life, beginning at age 15, as a missionary for his church helping the indigenous people deeper in the rain forest. He's now diligently attending our English class to help him with other opportunities to do good in the world.

We are so inspired by the selfless service these and other missionaries of many kinds give all over the world!