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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

surprises


Life here is full of pleasant surprises. Our yard has a variety of trees. Off the back porch there are banana trees, a mango tree, a papaya tree and an orange tree. Although we are in the midst of a Brazilian winter, some plants have beautiful blooms on them. The days are pleasant, in the 70’s and the evenings are a bit cooler but none of us have been cold. We open the windows in the morning. There are no screens so it is very different to have such a feeling of openness. But, as evening approaches, we close the windows to keep out mosquitoes.

We have a couple of additional house guests. Two small lizards have taken a liking to our home. One resides in the kitchen, hanging out up by the beams. He comes out later in the day and watches the activity. I cannot imagine why he would choose to live in such a noisy room. The floor is tiled and the sound reverberates off everything. It is not a quiet, peaceful place where one might think lizards would want to hang out. Lizard #2 has chosen to live in the closet of one of the bedrooms. He talks at night and adds to the chorus of animal sounds we’ve gotten use to hearing during the time God designed for human beings to sleep. Remember that confused rooster? Still confused.

None of us mind our little house guests. We actually look forward to them coming out. The other day, some of the team saw a lizard outside that was a bit larger…too big to have as a house pet. No one really minds. But, it does raise a question. Last night, I woke up around 2 am. Once awake I had a really hard time going back to sleep. I began to think about the fact that our windows had been wide open all day and that anything could have crawled inside. Although I haven’t seen any yet, I am convinced that there must be some very large varieties of spiders here. I mean, we are in Brazil! Honestly, what would it take for a spider or an ‘outside’ lizard to come in and hide in our rooms…under our blankets? I took a lot of prayer and probably an hour of tossing and turning before I went back to sleep.

Besides the fact that we don’t have lizards roaming about freely in our homes, there are other things are done differently here. Take making coffee for example. In the morning, we put a pot of water on the stove. Then we put a filter in a basket. The ground coffee goes into that filter and then the basket sits on top of a thermos. The water is poured into the basket until it is full. You wait until it has dripped through the grounds and then add more. In about 10 minutes, we end up with a thermos full of coffee…very good coffee. It is much different than filling my coffee pot at home and setting the timer so it is ready when I get up in the morning. It is amazing that something we might, at first, see as an inconvenience becomes an opportunity to be mindful and slow down the pace of your life.

Tomorrow I will highlight some of what we see God doing in both the students and in the team.

Until then,
Deb

1 comments:

i_am_4given said...

Sounds awesome!!! Even with all the spiders and the confused chicken...hehe

Blessings,
Ronnie