Hello folks, team brazil here. We arrived here safely without any problems. After we made it to Sao Paulo, Brazil, we took a flight to Fortaleza. After that we had a 10 hour bus ride from Fortaleza to Teresina. In Teresina, Joel's parents were there to pick us up. We were able to spend 2 days at his parents ranch, chilling (ha! very punny!), adjusting to the heat and having some Portuguese lessons. One of our highlights being at the ranch was getting to run outside in the warm rain and get soaking wet. Not to mention eating mangoes right off the tree- so good. We think some of the Brazilians thought we were a little crazy :) 


After the 2 days, we joined a group of people from across the country for a 10-day mission, called Projecto Agua Vida (Living Water). Although not knowing much Portuguese, we have enjoyed getting to know everyone, with the help of Joel translating and a couple others who can speak English, and playing a life-size game of Charades. Everyone is very friendly and easy to be around. We have enjoyed lots of rice and beans. Every meal, except for breakfast. But really, it's great food!  Tomorrow we start our mission, having had 2 days of training. We are involved in different actvities, such as music, kids, doing hair and nails, sports, drama, and setting up and taking down equipment. Also part of the mission is visiting people in their homes, and evangelizing to them. Going just in groups of 2, it reminds me of what the disciples did, going out in pairs sharing the gospel. Pray that they go well!  Thank you for all your prayers. They are so appreciated! 


Victoria, Team Brazil




*funny story-When we arrived at the ranch, Karina noticed that she had swollen ankles. Lila and I were laughing at her and thought that was funny, but when we looked at our own ankles, we saw that we, too, had huge ankles. Cankles! We decided to call our terrible misfortune "traveler's elephantitus." Pray that we don't get this on our way back home, haha. Although we think it's just from the heat. It's hot here. 

Next stop

Just to keep you updated. We arrived safely in São Paulo. We had a really bumpy flight. Nearly through the whole flight we had turbulence. But we had a great time and enjoyed our flight.
Thanks for praying for us. God bless you

On the road again! er.. in the sky again?!

Good evening everyone! Karina here, a first time blogger. I am quite excited to be blogging, but mostly to finally be making our way to Brazil! Right now we have been sitting in the Chicago airport with a 5 hour wait (Spending our time wisely. I just beat Steven in a game of crib!). The flight from Edmonton this morning was quite eventful as it was Lila and Steven's first flight! Joel, Victoria and I  had fun watching them.  In a couple minutes we'll be boarding the next plane to Sao Paulo, a good 10 hour flight, arriving there tomorrow morning. From there we'll board our last flight to Fortaleza. We will keep you posted, and thank you so much for your prayers. We are in good spirits! Obrigada! 

Last hours

So we are in the last hours before we leave to Brazil. We want to thank you all for your prayer through out our prep. time. Especially in the time where we were waiting for our visas. We hope that you will keep praying for us and that we can keep you updated on our trip.

12 days left

12 Days left till we leave for our trip to Brazil. All of us are really exited for our trip. We want to inform you what we are going to do in Brazil. First of all you may want to know where in Brazil we are going. We are going to be in the state of Piaui. For 2.5 days we will stay in a town called Demerval Lobão. It is 30km south of Teresina which is the capital of Piaui. On the 6^th of January we will go farther south to a town called Barão de Grajaú. This town is not anymore in the state of Piaui but right across the boarder in the state of Maranhão. There we will join a group of University students from the São Paulo area. We will work together with them for 10 days. In those 10 days we will do all kind of work like VBS, evangelical work on the street, building doors and windows and other jobs like that. After those 10 days we don't know yet what we will do. There is at least two options. The first would be to stay there with the missionaries and help them or to go back to the town of Demerval Lobão. We will work together with a swiss mission organization called SAM (Swiss Alliance Mission) and a project called Agua Viva (Living Water). The project is the organization of the students that are coming from the south of Brazil. The homepages of both organization don't have english translation. The SAM homepage has German/Franch and the Living Water has just portuguese. But still we want to post the links to those homepages. For SAM klick here and for Living Water klick here.

We hope to keep you updated through out our trip. Thank you for your interest. 

Thank You God

Thank You oh Lord for providing our Visas that fast. And thank you all who were praying for it.
We were suppose to receive our passports back at the end of the month and we already got them today. It took the consulate just one day to go through our visas  and now we got them in a week back. Thank you so much God.

!!Prayer request!!

We got some issues with the passports we sent in for the tourist visas for Brazil. We received them back this last Wednesday without the visas. The reason was that we didn't provide enough information about what we are going to do in Brazil. We sent them off today again after we could get as much as information as possible. Please pray that our passports get back to us on time with the visas. Everything is in God's hands and we have to trust a 100% in Him now.
Thank you for praying

Team Brazil