Muito Obrigada!

Jerica and the aborbora (pumpkin) we are going to try to make into pie today!

That phrase ("thank you so much!") was the first Portuguese I learned well, and the phrase we use the most every day. We are so grateful all the time for the good, good people all around us!

So many new friends have been so kind and generous to welcome us into their culture and help us experience so much here that there is to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.

The 15th of November is like independence day here.
They didn't do a lot to celebrate, but we were invited to a hotdog fundraiser that evening to help the youth go to FSY (a big church youth conference) in Manaus in February.
As you might be able to see in this, a lot of homes have outside kitchens.

We were invited to a group date at the nicest restaurant in town,
with seating outside along the Amazon (in the background on the left.)

What a fun pool and park,
the bigger kids were all so good to help the littler ones on the swings.

It's always awesome to stroll the river front streets along the Amazon, day or night.

A group of friends rented a bus and invited us to a cachoeira (waterfall) outside of town.
The water is colored by the minerals, and looks black. It's called the Rio Urubu (vulture river.)

 

Brazil won against Argentina in soccer!
Unlike the holiday, for the game victory there was much celebrating in the streets. Here's an impromptu parade of motos waving flags and honking horns. We could hear cheers all over the city when the final goal was made, and some let off fireworks. When fireworks hit and broke the water tank of our neighbor George, he was such a good sport, he just laughed and fixed it.

Time is going by so quickly, and we haven't posted as much as we hoped to. The internet isn't always working and we are also just so busy! Things often take longer than we think and all that goes into daily life takes a lot of time. We have been so grateful for the many shopkeepers and food vendors and service providers and other people that help us in so many ways every day.

Luzinete, our beloved friend who took on the job of doing our laundry.
She also brings us so many mangos from her yard, one night when she stopped by with some it was such a blessing because the beans we thought we were going to eat for dinner had gone bad, so we filled up on mangos.

This photo is terrible, but, the moment was sweet. We were having trouble with reliable transportation, so David went to Manaus last week to just buy a used van big enough for us. A very kind Pastor was selling the van he used for his congregation, he was very good to be very clear about all the problems the van had, though it runs great. Our neighbor, George, helps us all the time. He owns a car wash and was so meticulous when we hired him to clean the van, and when the tire blew a few days later, he ran around helping find lug wrenches to fit the varying sizes of the lug nuts and helped get the tire changed out. 

Our good friend Luis also helped with the tire, he always seems to be around when we are in trouble. He helped David know how to find vans in Manaus, woke up at 2 am to give him a ride to the bus, and here he took David to buy a jack.

Our girls have also been busy with so many youth activities, like seminary and preparing for a big musical performance the youth are putting on this month. This weekend there was "Evening of Excellence" for the young women of our church.  The personal progress program that has helped the young women set and achieve goals is being retired and a new program will begin in the new year.  I was so impressed with the goodness of these amazing young women and their leaders who displayed evidence of countless hours put into creating beautiful growing experiences for the youth over the last many years with the old program. They showed slideshows of awesome looking activities and sang sweet songs and shared tender expressions of faith and love. It was truly an evening of excellence.

All of us are also busy 3 nights a week teaching English. We were so grateful to our friend Robyn in Provo who took time to help us understand the vision and workings of the EnglishConnect program we are using. It's a fantastic and simple to use curriculum that many impressive minds and hearts have created, we are grateful to them, too. And to the local church leaders here whose great love for and interest in helping the people here have improved life opportunities helped to get the classes going. We teach the weekly lesson on Tuesdays, which includes themed conversation practice as well as a faith-based "self-reliance" message, which the class has really appreciated. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, we have open practice time. It's so delightful watching the determination and effort of our students, and they have been so great to also help us with Portuguese in the process!

The girls take turns running a "child class" so parents can attend
or coming in to practice with the youth and adults in the regular class.

We wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving!!

Bichos

The creatures here are good too. The urubus (vultures) here are always circling.
The Portuguese teachers taught us a song, that's where we learned
the word urubus.

You can't really see them in this piture, but there are a lot of bats!
They eat miscitoes!

We found a huge moth on the floor of the hotel we stayed at.
They are very pretty.

Here is a huge spider that we found. They are very fast!

You can not see them in this picture behind our house, but there are so many different kinds of birds
and they are so loud!!! It is nice to listen to them.

Posted by: Brenna Gilliland

Redes

We decided to sleep in hammocks, called redes (pronounced hed-gees) in Portuguese, because we think redes are fun, and also to save space in our house

Hearing that we were going to sleep on the floor the first night, some people ran all over the city to find spare ones for us to use for the night. Here are some of the girls that lent us their hammocks.

Some of our other friends stayed late into the night to help us put up hooks.  They helped us arrange the hammocks so that they would all fit.

While we were looking for hammocks to buy, we found a store that had tons of them. There was a lot to choose from! Some of us saw one and liked it, while others of us couldn't quite seem to find the one for them. The girl that worked there was very patient with us, and even helped us open them up to get a better look at them.

We finally all chose good hammocks and hung them up in our rooms. We all really like them!

We are still learning how to get into the hammocks that are up high.

WE LOVE REDES!!!

Eu amo suco!

 One our first day here, kind friends took us to their house and taught us how to make good juice (suco) out of the fruits here. When we came home we wanted to make juice again. So we did.

We gathered acerola (barbados cherry) from our tree in the backyard.
It is so nice that our landlord lets us use the fruit.

We blended the fruit after washing it first in tap water, then in bottled water.
(we have to be careful about the water here)

We had to strain the juice to get the pits and stem pieces out.

Since our family doesn't eat refined sugar, we added sugar beet juice to make our juice sweeter.
A kind man at the Feira (market) explained to Dad how he made it.

Yummy!

Posted By: Adira

The Amazon is full of amor.

Some of our new friends!  Luis (bottom left with thumbs up), his wife Giovana (tallest one in the back)
with their daughters Lousey and Paula who are the same ages as Hayla and Jerica.
Also Junior (bottom left above Luis), and Vanya (in the back with glasses.)

We are here in Itacoatiara and love it so much!  The people of Brazil are so beautiful and everyone has been so kind and generous! 
 

The Brazilian airline staff were all super friendly and cheerful!

It was a long few days traveling here. We first took an overnight flight to Fortelza with a layover in Brasilia. We tried to pack light, so each of us took only a carry on, and then we checked a few bags of family gear. It still felt like a lot to lug around through airports, but many people helped us.

Little Jerica was such a trouper at first,
but eventually preferred napping on her suitcase to dragging it.

Fortelza was a very big and tall city! In the brief afternoon we had there, we enjoyed food and a stroll along the beach front where people kept stopping to ask us about our many girls. They were always so congratulatory and interested.

The view from our 19th floor hotel room.

As we flew into Manaus the next day, the girls were thrilled with their first view of the mighty Amazon and the thick rain forest around the city.

The girls took turns having a window seat on the airplanes,
Livia got the best view of the river.

 
We had many delightful and accommodating taxi drivers picking us up and taking us to airports, it took multiples to carry all of us and our luggage and they worked to fit us all in. And when we learned that the first available bus from Manaus to Itacoatiara wasn't going to be until late at night, a few kind fellows offered to taxi us in caravan right away, which was much faster (a little terrifyingly fast, as they drove most of the way at about 90km/hour over the bumpy, jungley roads...) so we made it in only a few hours.

Gratefully, when we arrived after dark, the hotel had rooms with enough actual beds that everyone had a very comfortable place to finally sleep.

We really liked the hotel we called home for a few days,
the staff we so good to answer our many questions about how to find things
and we appreciated the air conditioning when we weren't walking in the city.

And while the electrical water-heating showerhead seemed sketchy,
we were grateful to get cleaned up!

And there were very impressive street entertainers we could see from our balcony! 
This one is juggling machetes while spinning a ball in his teeth.

Another juggler and a fire thrower.

The next morning we took our first venture to explore the city. Within minutes on the first block we met a sweet family at the doorway of a church building, we exchanged smiles and greetings and their little four year old girl and our four year old Jerica giggled at each other. On the next block we found a chapel of our own church! And there were people there!  What a tender mercy, it turns out that weekend was a conference for the district (all the local congregations gathered together) and some had come to prep the building and gave us all the details so we could attend that night and the next day where we met so many people so fast! One of the first we met was Luis, who told us later that he hadn't been feeling well in the morning, but felt he should go to the building to help anyway, and then while he was inside working on the sound system, suddenly felt a clear impression he should step outside, which was right when we arrived. We could feel God watching out for us through him and others. Luis and his family are full of light. They have been an immense blessing in so many ways and have become very dear friends.

The girls learned how to prep veggies Brazilian style.

Luis took us right away on a long walk past the other chapel of our church in the more north part of the city where we got to sit in some air conditioning for a minute (yes, the heat and humidity are as intense as you imagine!!) and then on further to his own home where his wife taught the girls how to make a delicious lunch while Luis introduced David to others who all began looking for houses for us. The leaders of the various branches (congregations) of our church were kind of competing over who would get us a place in their area, and they were all so generous to give us rides to see different spaces and tell us about the different areas.

The District President and his family helped us see a house after the conference.
Quick story of their goodness:
they borrowed a car (almost everyone just piles their families onto a "moto" --the streets are full of motorcycles) to get us home and it broke down, and then we couldn't get the doors open and David finally figured out how to get a window down to climb out of the sweltering suffocation. These good people just laughed and laughed and laughed, and their young son was quick to help push the car out of the road.
They are another family full of light.

We also walked around a lot getting to know the city and meeting strangers who we'd ask about housing, they were all so quick to offer directions or give us a lift to other people they knew. Such amazing people and a beautiful city.

That first day happened to be a holiday like Memorial Day, the cemetery was full of flowers.

We tried out the equipment at this outdoor kind of park/public gym.

By Monday afternoon we were already moved into such a lovely casa just a few blocks from the river, rented to us by a very attentive young landlord who has gone out of his way to see that we have everything we need over these last few days, including helping us get hooked up on wifi, which took some doing. By the time we got our stuff moved over from the hotel, thanks to one of our friends with a truck, several members of our church showed up offering all kinds of help and lending us things to set up house. The president of our new branch came over with his family and several other members of the branch, including the leaders of the primary (children's organization) and other youth who have accompanied our girls to seminary (weekday scripture study) every night since.

One night the girls taught the other kids who were gathered at our house to play "human knot",
and the adults thought it was fun, too, calling out help to untangle them.

We have very close access to the markets and have loved making friends with the vendors who have helped us know which things work best as we've gathered what we need to settle in. We're really feeling at home now and already have work to do--we've been asked to teach English classes which we are excited to get started next week. Gratefully, the people have been very patient and understanding with our Portuguese, which they are also helping us to learn.  We are super happy here and feel surrounded by love!