Bondade em Provo

It was a long and quiet week on the road once we finally left Florida, traveling during a pandemic was very different from traveling before. 

The snowy mountains as we approached Provo felt like a cold welcome home.

We were sorely missing warm life in the Amazon, especially when we drove over the Provo River and it looked so small. 

But so many good people warmed our hearts with such a loving welcome at our house!

 

  And we've had much good cheer and well wishes in our quarantine, 

even a a few socially distant visitors.

We've been very inspired by the many people who are using pandemic time to do good. We've enjoyed seeing humorous signs cheering up communities and the ways people are helping each other. Our wonderful church has so many amazing people working so hard to find ways to address needs, creating things like a massive project to organize thousands of volunteers to sew 5 million clinical face masks over the next few weeks.

We're still unboxing and settling in, but we had a little fun sewing up some fishy masks of our own for venturing out now when we can. 

It turns out that "glogging" hasn't been our forte, but thank you to all you good people who have taken time to read our posts and cheer us on!  We are praying for everyone everywhere who are struggling in all the challenges of this pandemic time. We are so grateful for our health and safety and much help though all our travels, and for all of the goodness we have learned so much from all along our way!!

We can still have adventures every day!

Florida has been a great place to quarantine,
we've never been in a place we could get real palms for Palm Sunday!

So many good people have been so kind and helpful to us as we've been waiting out our quarantine and adjusting back to the states. We've appreciated friends and family from both here and Brazil who have checked in on us and shared love and good cheer and family creativity. David's parents were abruptly released from their mission right before we got here, and they and the mission office were wonderful to arrange to let us stay in their vacated apartment awhile.  We've been grateful to have a good place to stay and good things to do!

We know there are many decision makers that are doing the difficult work of figuring out how to help minimize the difficulties of the pandemic, and we are grateful for the many caregivers and others working hard to keep communities going. We've had to get creative to get sunshine and exercise without a backyard, like exploring the nearby wilderness areas where there aren't other people. 

We appreciate all the brilliant people who have created technologies that we can use. The girls have tried to keep up on portuguese, sometimes they use group game tools like Kahoot to have fun studying together.

We were especially grateful for the technology to hear so many inspiring and uplifting messages from our great church leaders through a General Conference broadcast last weekend.

We've also been so impressed with the easy-to-use app from BillionGraves, and their great vision for helping preserve family history.  We've spent many happy hours getting sunshine by helping to document headstones. It's been a fun sleuthing challenge that's helped keep our minds and bodies working and has been a really satisfying and interesting project.

There aren't other living people around in the cemeteries,
and the dead people keep the 6 foot distance pretty well under ground.
It's been sweet getting to know some of the goodness of their lives,
evidenced by the loving words and memorial decor around the headstones.

Some of the cemeteries look like they haven't been cleaned up since the storms of the recent hurricane season, it's been good exercise to clear out debris and overgrowth.

David doesn't mind a chance to use his machete

Kalina calls it "3D family history"--when you first dig around for a birth date,
then dig deeper for a death date, it's literally digging

It's not easy trying to figure out names and dates from worn and weathered letters!

Sometimes a spray of water helps bring out the contrast and make them easier to read.

Some of them we've had to do a rubbing to decipher the engravings.

The really satisfying finds have been nearly unmarked spaces we've had to dig out several inches of dirt and sand and plants, and sometimes piece together broken parts of scattered stones--it's discovering buried treasures!

 The transcription technology is also very easy to use!

 

We still miss Brasil, but we are reminded every day that there is good to learn from and be part of all the time!  ONWARD!!

Mata!!

The "mata" is the thick jungley rainforest that surrounds our city.

Our friends Diego and Vania took us to the mata behind Diego's family farm.

First we had to walk through the overgrown fields that were already turning back to into mata.

Diego was an amazing tour guide. He showed us lots of cool things. He knew a lot about the plants and creatures.

Diego is pointing with his machete to this tree that can walk!

He told us these trees have been found to have moved up to 5 meters!

Mom really liked the colorful back on these trees.

If you stick your hand in this ant nest and then squish the ants, they can be used as an insect repellent.

That there on the tree is a bullet ant, Diego told us that it's sting is the worst in the world.

Diego helped us see these capybara footprints on the path.

An alligator had been through here recently.

Jerica was exited to see this armadillo hole.

Diego also pointed out cool things to taste and hear and smell.

He showed us how you can cut into one kind of tree to find water.

And these hairy blueberry kind of fruits.

It's quieter on this video, but we could hear howler monkeys!

They can be heard from several kilometers away.

There isn't really a way to digitize the hot green smell.

 

Exploring the mata with Diego was also a great challenge course.

There were vines to swing on.

A hunter's rack to climb.

Old rotting logs to cross.

Big spiders to avoid when going under other logs.

And big logs to find a way to get over.

We turned around at this beautiful lake covered in colorful lillypads.

Then it was a long walk back...

walking...

walking...

walking...

...it was worth it!

Fazenda!

Our wonderful friend Diego's very kind family were so full of light and goodness,
and they were generous to share the good things of their farm with us.

We got there in time for the morning milking.

It was warm deliciousness!

There were baby pigs....

and tiny puppies...

and tiny turtles....

and tiny new...

baby ducks! 

There were also interesting trees.

Some of them were full of  monkeys!

And some were full of fruit, like these giant jack fruit!

We were so grateful for a fun time with our farm friends!