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!!