Day 41: The Sao Francisco River Valley

Passion Fruit

Breakfast this morning was SO good! French rolls, cheese, and some sweet bread with coconut that reminded me of the pan de coco that my family loves to get at China Town in Seattle. Mmmm…it was one of the many highlights of my day.

We left the house around 9:00 to meet up with a friend of the Reiner’s who would take us to a grape plantation. The man’s name is Marceu and we picked him up at the place where he works. He took us to a plantation, and the owner of the plantation, Renato, gave us a personal tour of the vineyards! Read Full Post

Day 40: Pettttttttttttrolina!

Today we left Exu for another city in another state- Petrolina, Pernambuco. It is home to the Reiner’s, but it is my first time outside of Ceara since coming to Brazil. We woke up around 7:00, packed our stuff, and ate a breakfast of French rolls and butter, cheese, goiaba juice, hot milk, and cake. We quickly ate and loaded up, moving on to our next destination which was several hours away. Read Full Post

Day 39: Jesus, Our Very Best Friend

Violin in the Car

Today was such a great day of ministry. It started when we woke up, ate a quick snack of bananas, and left the house shortly after 7am. We drove about an hour away to the small town of Ouricouri, the location of our morning ministry.

On the way there we practiced our music for the service. In the back of the SUV, William pulled out his guitar and I got out my violin and we started playing and singing together with the girls. When we had finished practicing our songs, we started playing other songs just for fun, and the Reiner’s joined in with us as we sang “I’ll Fly Away,” “When We All Get To Heaven,” etc. Read Full Post

Day 38: Sad Day

Today was a sad day for a couple reasons. First of all, it was sad because we left Crato today, my home for the last five weeks. It only took five weeks for me to become fairly involved in several ministries and begin to develop many friendships with both Americans and Brazilians. But the next phase of our ministry requires us to move to Petrolina, so we started in that direction today. Read Full Post

Day 37: The Expo Interlude

This morning I woke up around 7:00 to go running. I thought about going earlier when it was cooler, but when I woke up around 6:20 and saw that it was really cloudy, I decided to sleep a little longer because I figured it wouldn’t get too hot with the sun blocked. Fortunately, I was right!

Unfortunately it was a little humid due to rain during the night, but it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t near as humid as Iowa is during this time of year. I didn’t want to run for a whole hour like yesterday, so I decided to work on my anaerobic fitness (instead of my aerobic fitness) and do some sprints up the road on the hill. I ran up the hill and back down five times, taking a short break between each one. It was quite the workout. Read Full Post