Well bom dia my friends !!! Tudo bem !! ( Good morning ! How are things?)

This is a long one as it's setting the scene so bear with me, or else go and make a cuppa tea!!

Today we have managed to get access to our friends home so we can sit in great comfort and log on to catch up with the blog and emails to family and friends - total bliss as we have a fan too ! It's 39 degrees outside - even the locals are suffering !! So let's have a catch up with what has been happening here.



On our last Sunday in Church, with those of you who were there, you may remember James ( our curate ) felt that God was telling us to read Philippians on our journey later that day, which we did at the airport. Coincidentally, that morning on our way to Church, we had been trying to remember a verse that we had forgotten, about Jesus giving us the strength we need. We were starting to feel a bit anxious about the trip and needed to feel that we were doing the right thing. Well, as we read Philippians we found that verse, Phil 4 v. 13 "For I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need". Spooky huh??

It was a night flight, leaving at 10pm, and took about 12 hours. We should have slept but we were blessed to be on a plane full of Brazilian teenagers returning home, who were just delighted to find out that they had two English speaking people with whom they could practice their broken English on !!! Deep joy - well it was only for 12 hours.......... don't teenagers have a lot of energy during the night, and boy, can't they talk !!!!! So when we landed the next day we were feeling a bit 'punch-drunk' and could hardly form a sentence in English, let alone Portuguese.

I forgot to tell you that those clever Brazilians had cameras on the plane that showed images of under the plane, and also of where we were heading. ( a fact that our friends Matt and Bob, as pilots, had failed to warn us about! ) And, if you wanted to, you could log onto the web-cam any time to see what was happening - how fascinating! Well for someone like me who is terrified of flying, particularly take-off and landing, you can imagine that it was the last thing I wanted to look at!!!! Unfortunately, the very lovely and helpful Brazilian lady seated next to me, was desperate to show me how all the buttons on my video screen worked and insisted on putting the cameras on to show us leaving Heathrow. In her excitement to point out the wheels lifting off the tarmac, and the slow climb into the clouds, and articles flying past at an alarmingly slow speed which made me feel we were going to plummet like a stone, she failed to notice that my face was contorted into an agonizing grimace and tears where starting to well up in my eyes!! But, as we came into the descent it was pitch black in Sao Paulo. So when my new friend put the camera on again, bless her heart, I couldn't see anything. But a few seconds later we both noticed an incredible sight. There on the run way we could see a load of lights which got brighter and brighter. We then saw that they formed a HUGE brilliant cross, it was just breath-taking, and the lady and I just turned and looked at each other then back to my screen, then she just pointed at me and said in English, 'For you'. I had not told her I was a Christian during the flight.

We were met by our friend at the airport who drove us to the street to greet the children and their families. We got there late afternoon and felt quite hot and tired, but as we got out of the car we saw the children running to us with their arms outstretched !!! It was a wonderful and humbling moment, and we spent some time just hugging them and them kissing us frantically! It suddenly felt so right to be back with them seeing their faces. We remembered that our friend Colin Waterman, had told us that he felt we would be answering one child's dream, to return to show them that Jesus did in fact love them, by sending us back to be with them.

Well after all that frivolity it was down to work. We stayed up til midnight putting the finishing touches to our first English lesson. Just before we left England we had completed a TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) course in Brighton. Having not been to school for many decades it was like learning Chinese - and in fact one day the teacher only spoke Mandarin to prove that we could teach without knowing much of the local language!!

So onto the first day in class !! We met to discuss the day at 8.30am with our translators, Andre and Gildo, and to pray for the children. We then drove to the flavella to start at 10am. It was quite surreal driving along roads we recognised, and then going off-road through the terrible squalor of the shanty homes. So many wild dogs just roaming about with horrible skin disorders, children with matted hair and grubby faces playing in the dirt with no shoes, the small dwellings made from an assortment of discarded rubbish, plastic bags, old planks of wood, battered pieces of corrugated metal. Piles of rubbish everywhere, women hanging out washing on lines strung across all the rubbish, and mounds of earth, disco music blaring out from the homes who have electric, (diverted from over-head cables), cows tethered to gates along the track.

The classroom we are using is, in fact, house number 11 which was now complete and awaiting a new family to be re-housed. We had twenty children arrive, ranging from 2yrs to 14yrs. Very encouraging, as we had butterflies that no one would come!! So we began with, 'hello', 'good-bye, 'my name is.....', 'stand up', 'sit down', 'book' and 'pen'. We got them to repeat all the words, individually and together, over and over, and louder and louder, (well you know what John is like !!) After about an hour we moved onto the craft session. We got them to write 'my name is....' on their exercise books then we gave them oodles of glitter, stickers, foam, material, glue and scissors and got them to decorate their books......to a startling effect, and a mountain of sweeping up afterwards. But lots of happy smiling faces, and lots of shouting for attention and showing off their finished books !!!! Huge thanks to all of you who gave us craft materials!!

Then they went off for their lunch, and returned at 2pm when we did a full review of the mornings lesson. This entailed more shouting and pointing, and general Charades to elicit the English out of the kids. Andre then showed them a short cartoon with a Christian message of 'Punchinello and the green noses'. This was showed on the new projector which we presented to Andre that morning. Thanks to the over-whelming generosity of you guys, we were able to buy a fabulous high-spec projector capable of being used in daylight, which we had very carefully carried from England. We can't tell you how grateful Andre was for this wonderful gift which he will be able to use to reach more children to spread the Gospel. So another HUGE thank you to those who know who they are!!!!

We made a huge screen from a piece of white material, and nailed it to the wall. (all very high tech as you know how UN-gifted John is at DIY !) The kids sat down to wait for the cartoon to start. When it came on a silence descended over the room ( the first we had experienced and concerned us slightly as we thought we had gone deaf !) and they stared open mouthed at the picture. It was a highlight of the trip for us, to see them all engrossed and the look of wonder on their little faces!!

When it finished Andre encouraged the kids to share what they thought the message was about. That it was not right to follow the crowd in order to 'conform', and paint your nose green, because this is turn caused the people to become 'deformed' as it caused fights among the people who did not have green noses, but that Jesus came to 'transform' us by accepting others who are 'different' to us. Sweet message, and the kids seemed to love it, shouting out their thoughts.

Then at 3pm we went down to a boggy field to put up the volley ball net for a rousing game, of pretty much 'any thing goes' volleyball !!!! The field is used by horses and cows, who every now again would race across the pitch being chased by a rogue dog!! Quite unnerving, as all the kids would scream and scatter, with the added risk of stomping into large, stinky cow-pats !!! This was all interrupted as a storm began, with really heavy rain, thunder and the most amazing fork lightning I have ever seen.

There endeth the first day.

We got back to our accommodation, which is a converted out-building belonging to a friend of Andre. It is slightly un-loved to say the least, and not been lived in for some time. We have a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. It would have been fine if Andre had not told us that they had used gallons of paraffin to scare off the brown spiders which inhabit damp wood, which had infested the building. We enquired why such extreme methods were necessary. He told us that there was no known chemical which could kill them, they just don't appear to like paraffin. But if one bit us we would need to see a doctor immediately as we would swell up and be very sick !!! Great timing for our first night in a huge thunder storm !!!! Sleep, we would learn, was to be a precious commodity here !!