This is Camping?

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Lesson #153: camping in Brazil is not like camping back home.

I took Ella and Ava on what I thought would be a relaxing camping trip to the beach. We went with a group from a church here in Altamira. I should have known when a large (I stress “large”) speaker box showed up to be loaded onto the boat (it was brought on a horse drawn cart along with a car battery to power it).

Once at the beach (after an hour long boat ride with music blaring at one end and the monotonous sound of an unmuffled, single cylinder diesel motor banging at the other), I began putting up my tent. As I did so, I noticed the arrival of two other large boats with enough people crammed on board to make the coast guard flip out. By evening the crowd had grown enough that I soon realized this was going to be no quiet getaway.

That evening, I lay in my tent reading a book titled “On Being a Missionary”. The chapter I was ironically reading was talking about how all new missionaries inevitably struggle with some aspect of the culture that just annoys them. As I read, the group next to ours was having a fullblown party. The sound system was cranking and they even had a microphone that someone randomly yelled into. Our group’s sound system was cranked all the more in defiance of our neighbor’s (not unlike some giant, twisted version of dueling banjos). Just outside my tent a crowd had gathered, I’m not sure what they were doing but whatever it was it must have been hilarious. Over all this, I was able to hear some wailing – there was a group of young people singing worship songs and someone was really getting into it. This, or some amalgam thereof, went on pretty much all night.

In spite of this foreign and uncomfortable world, I was able to have a conversation with the pastor. He shared with me about how his father drowned on the river, not that far from where we were. He was a fisherman and he was out by himself. They looked for him for 3 days before they found his body. Through my partial understanding of Portuguese I was able to understand the pain he was sharing with me, and as a result, made a real connection with him.

I’ll never understand the Brazilians’ affection for loud and obnoxious music. But I know that deep down they are the same as me. And I guess that’s why cross-cultural missions works, not because of the differences, but because of the similarities.

Our group's arrival at the beach