Brazil in Two Weeks
Brazil Mission Trip 2006
July 21-30
A time to weep and a time to laugh,
A time to mourn and a time to dance,
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
A time to embrace and a time to refrain,
A time to search and a time to give up,
A time to keep and a time to throw away
Ecclesiastes 3:4-6
Tuesday, July 25
In the middle of the night, I woke up and smelt one of the worst odors ever. My sleeping bag very excellent in cold weather, but in a non-air conditioned room in Brazil, it proved to have too much warmth. I was drenched in sweat, my finger was throbbing, and the odor from my bag wasn’t very pleasant. Pulling the top of my sleeping bag off me, I went back to sleep and tried to forget about the heat.
We woke up the next morning and my sleeping bag was moist from the night before. I got out of bed faster than usual because it just felt disgusting to stay on the top of the bunk bed. I put on some shorts and a shirt and then went outside to spend some time with God. It felt weird spending the very first moments of my day in God’s word, because I’m used to doing it after school or right before I went to bed. This was probably a better because I could start my day in the right way. We ate breakfast, got changed, and walked to the work site for another day of work.
There was a little more work for us to do before we started to mix concrete. I helped dig a trench that morning. It was more fun than the work yesterday, because all we were doing was digging down about sixteen inches. The trench kept disappointing us because we found we still a little more to go every time we measured how deep it was. We finally completed it and were ready to start mixing.
It was about eleven o’clock when Marzio showed us how to use the mixer. He warned us that it was very dangerous and we had to be very careful when we were using it. We had to experiment for ten minutes to see how much of the rocks, sand and concrete we were going to use. Lunch was only a short time away, so we were just trying to get used to the machine. Everything was going well for a couple minutes.
In the middle of mixing a batch, Marc was trying to get some of the concrete off the inside wall of the mixer. He stuck his hand in the mixer and used the other hand to balance himself. I was only two or three feet away when I saw Marc jerk back his hand that was keeping his balance. I somehow knew that he had injured himself really bad.
He looked around for a couple seconds and then walked away in silence, just as I had done the day before. I saw him take off his glove to the hurt hand and went to go find Mrs. Mullet or Virginia. We were short a man at the mixing station, and it took some people a minute or two to realize that Marc was gone. Mr. Barnes came over and took control of the operation. We were in the middle of a batch when I heard screams coming from the shed. I looked around and knew that I wasn’t the only one who heard it.
I looked up to see Tim and Dr. Dan hopping over the trenches and dirt piles and other adults running towards the shed to see what had happened. The worst part about it was that we couldn’t stop working while the cement was mixing. We continued to hear screams of pain from the shed and all we could do was wonder what was going on. Dr. Dan came out and assured that Marc was going to be fine, but they were going to take him to the hospital. Lunch time was nearing and we decided to clean up the mixer and continue after lunch.
We walked back to the house while Marc was still in the shed. Uncertainty filled our thoughts. We had no idea what was happening. I took off my shoes and let my feet breath a little. It felt good to walk barefoot on the cool tile. As we sat down for lunch, it seemed as if our spirits were low and there was no appropriate way to lift them back up. We prayed for our meal and Marc pulled up in a car with Dr. Dan, Mrs. Mullet and Carol in the other three seats. Vanessa brought them lunch for the car ride and they took off towards the hospital.
Lunch was quieter than usual. It went by very fast and it was time to head back to the work site. I think that we were all little frightened of the cement mixer after the morning’s tragedy. I was nervous about it, and the only thing I was doing was filling up buckets full of rocks to be thrown in the mixer. The adults must have been a little nervous about it also because they built a covering over the gear and pulley to prevent any other accidents on the mixer. Tim had also started to hand-mix cement on the ground in two different piles to speed up production also.
There was some unexpected help when the kids of the village came by to do some labor for us. They had literally taken our jobs and started to shovel rocks and dirt for us. While they were doing my job for me, I went into the shed to help Marzio, Daniel and Shiro. There were about fifty to sixty bags of cement powder in the shed all stacked up in about six or seven piles. Our problem was that the bags at the bottom of the stack had gotten wet and the dried a little bit in the bag. This meant that about half of the bag was useless when we needed to mix concrete.
We had to move all the bags to one area of the shed, take out the useless bags, lay down a tarp, and then move the bags back to where they were. It would have been a lot of fun if the bags hadn’t weighed fifty kilograms each, or 110 pounds each. We had stacked the bags so high after the first move that when we tried to take the bags down, the entire pile started to lean. Marzio and I quickly stepped in front of the leaning tower of cement and stopped a complete disaster from occurring. As we were holding the stack from falling, Marzio was yelling something in Portuguese and then called out in English, “Help! Help!” People threw down there tools and came to aid us in relocating the bags safely. I learned a new phrase in Portuguese that day; Quasi calle. It means, “It almost fell.”
We went through the rest of the day without any major mishaps. Our group grew comfortable with the mixer, but we were still a little uneasy around it. We walked back to the house with the only comforting sign from God was the beauty of the mountains surrounding the village.
Vanessa made us, yet another, outstanding meal. It was chicken wrapped in bacon. I probably had about a pound of it for dinner. After I finished eating, I saw some kids with a long piece of bamboo trying to get a pipa (kite) down from the electrical wires. They were a lot shorter than me, so I asked them if I could try to get it down with the bamboo (keep in mind when I say “ask,” I mean that I motioned them to hand me the bamboo so I could try and retrieve it). The bamboo was a little short and I tried to tell the kids that. I think that they somehow understood me, because they came back two minutes later with a longer piece of bamboo. Just as I was about to reach the kite, one of the local men, who had been watching us the whole time, said something to me in Portuguese and then signaled an explosion with his voice and hand motions. I immediately knew what he was trying to tell me when his threw his hands up and said, “Ka-Boom!”
We walked to the hotel for another time together as a group. Kyle led us in prayer and asked us to say what we were thankful for while he was praying. I felt like God wanted me to say something about His grace, but I like I didn’t need to say it at first. However, right before Kyle was about to start playing the songs, I said that I was thankful for God’s grace and how I never deserved it, but it was still given to me. It couldn’t have been more appropriate because Kyle played “Grace Like Rain” afterwards. It’s strange how God can use words out of your mouth to set up a time of worship.
Kasii talked about the second part of Micah 6:8, which was to love mercy. We broke up into our small groups that we had the night before. The cool part was that Angelica led our group in discussion. This was better because she was trying to learn English, and this was a way she could read the question and understand it better.
Our time had ended and we walked back to the house to get ready to finish the concrete footers the next day. We were all wondering how Marc was going to be alright, and we were all excited to hear that he was going to be back in Ariri the next day by lunch time. Our spirits were definitely hurt that day, but we never let that get in the way of our service to the community.