Guest post by Josh's dad, Tom Pflederer...
Our first week in Altamira is highlighted by watching and participating in Josh and Brin’s ministry to the people who live in this remote town and by funny experiences and random snapshots of the curiosities of the culture.
Some of Josh and Brin’s activities are planned. Josh is responsible for maintenance and improvements on the boat, so one day we make the 30-minute run over to Vitoria where it is docked, taking diesel fuel with us and working on the installation of a new generator. One night we get to see the last Alpha Circle of the semester, where the English students from the school where Brin has taught get to show off what they have learned. Another day we visit a small orphanage where each child gets a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste from the USA, and a lesson in proper brushing, and a young woman named Lica teaches the children songs about Jesus.
Loading diesel fuel to take to the boatOther times the ministry comes to Josh and Brin’s house. On our first full day awake, I am sitting and reading after breakfast when two young people come to the door. Brin introduces them, Flits and Aniele, students from the CDR English classes, who often stop by just to visit and practice English. Brin turns them over to me and we enjoy more than an hour of getting to know each other. They are high school students, so we talk about their hopes for college after high school. Flits lives with his parents, but Anaeli has left her family in the village where she was born, to continue her education in Altamira. She lives with her grandmother. She touches my heart when she says plainly that she does not know who her father is.
Sunday afternoon, nine friends come over, bringing their own TV, to watch the USA-Brazil soccer championship game, a tournament leading up to next year’s World Cup finals. Brazil is the only nation to have won the world Cup five times, and it would be hard to overestimate the place soccer holds in the national psyche and its view of itself in the world. This is an opportunity for relationship-building and honoring this culture. Josh feeds them coke and popcorn and chocolate chip cookies, which they have never had before. They bring a Brazilian flag and cheer raucously when Brazil scores, which doesn’t happen until the second half, when USA is leading 2-0. I cheer with equal fervor for the USA but am privately pleased when Brazil scores the winning goal in the final minutes of the game.
The funny experiences started before we even got here, being denied seats on our flight from Rio to Belem, even though we had an itinerary and ticket receipts in our hands. So we spend an extra eight hours or so exploring the Rio airport. We are exhausted, of course, falling asleep sitting up, walking around today scoping out the airport for a flat place to lie down. Connie looked longingly through the window at a padded bench at a booth in what appears to be a high-end restaurant, deeming it beyond our means, and finally we find a little chapel with cushioned pews where we take turns lying down and sleeping, until people begin arriving for Mass and we are shooed away.
Curiosities so far include huge, free dental floss dispensers in the restrooms at the Rio airport, an odd amenity, I think, but I press the lever and out pops about 8” of string. So I do what I can to melt into the culture, as if I am perfectly accustomed to walking around the airport flossing my teeth. Or, it occurs to me later, was I supposed to do that in the restroom?
On day we take Ella and Ava to the ranch for an overnight youth activity. The ranch, where I had spent a day with team of Brazilians in hard physical labor pouring concrete floors, is now complete enough to use. The grounds—I would estimate several acres—are neatly mowed. In a hardware store with Josh yesterday I saw two very small lawn mowers for sale. One of them looks almost like a toy, a miniature machine with cutting width barely half that of typical mowers in the states. I ask Josh if they use such mowers at the ranch, trying to imagine cutting such a large area with a 12” mower. No, he says, they mow the entire thing with weed-whip trimmers.
Sunday morning we walk down to the market. All the churches in town meet Sunday evening because the weather is cooler. The market is a sensory overload, an explosion of color and texture and smells and sounds and sometimes a taste, where you can buy vegetables and fruits, some familiar and some that we have never seen before, such assorted items as live chickens and peacock bass, blankets (OK, could you sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo…?), gaudy watches, spices, coarsely ground grains of all kinds, T-shirts and hats with impossible English wording, women’s tops of every conceivable size and color and degree of coverage, cows’ hooves and jowls and other better-unnamed parts that you will probably not find at Schnucks, the fruits of the Amazon.
Many things remind us of Japan, in spite of stark differences in geography, culture and, most strikingly, population density: so many people want to practice speaking English, the refreshing excitement and chaos of young churches, the passion of new believers, the creativity with which they reach out to unbelieving friends, their determination to plant God’s love and truth into the hearts of children.
When Lica was teaching the songs about Jesus to the children at the orphanage the other day, I was reminded of Hidemi in Japan, and Brin translates as I tell her story. The first time Hidemi came to church with us, she sat and wept as we sang. Why? we ask. She tells us that for one year when she was five she attended a kindergarten run by Christians and learned children’s songs about Jesus. For the next 25 years she had never heard those songs again. But tonight when she heard people singing again about Jesus, she remembered, and her heart was opened. Later in the evening, she prays to receive Jesus.
I thank Lica for teaching the children songs about Jesus, and Lica weeps.
