Today we will be saying an official "goodbye" to a great Dutch couple who have been working with us here. It´s a very sad occasion but also a great opportunity to eat a different type of meal. We have a mini team that are preparing pizzas and also a group of 6 making traditional Dutch apple pie (it was a huge task to peel 8 kg of apples). It´s the first one I´ve made, so I hope it´s nice. I currently have a queue of apple pies waiting to go in the oven (and our house smells amazing).

Imagine this:
You are walking through your community and you see a crippled man, profoundly crippled. He is also filthy and smelly and he spends his day sitting by the road next to his house - he cannot go far because he cannot walk. You decide to stop and sit down next to him, asking him about his life, his daily routine etc and you learn that he does nothing with his life although occasionally he gets the opportunity to sit on a pile of rubbish and sort through it. Also on a few occasions in the past he has been able to go to the city center and beg but he doesn´t like it.
As you get to know him more you learn about his dreams. He dreams that he will be able to work one day standing on his feet and as he is saying this you look again at the disfigured shapes on the ends of his stumpy legs which may have been intended to be feet. He also tells you that he is angry...but not because he cannot realize his dream but because of how people treat him. He gets beaten round the head a lot - when someone is angry annoyed or just wants some sick entertainment and they happen to be walking past where he is sitting they go up to him, hit him, maybe laugh at him as well and then just walk on by. He cannot do anything to stop them. This is also why he is dirty and smelly because he has given up on himself. He says something like this "Why should I wash if no-one likes me anyway?" Then he continues by saying that it is his fault that he gets hit. People hit him because of what he is like, because he is crippled and therefore it is his fault. So...what do you do? How do you help this man? You want to do something but feel helpless as his situation seems impossible.
Do you know that God is the God of the impossible? Is He able to help this man? What would you do knowing this information? Feel free to respond.

Last night I (Dave) went to a Spiritist gathering at Lake Pampulha (a huge lake in Belo Horizonte) with 4 others from this YWAM base. The spritists were there to celebrate the incarnation of their God of Water and there were many of them, all dressed in white, playing drums with a samba rhythm, chanting, swaying and generally being fairly weird. We were there to evangelise and pray against what was going on.
This kind of thing attracts people from all over the city as it is quite a cultural experience. It is possible for the ordinary citazen to go to one of these Macumba groups where someone can pray for them to receive power, receive healing or just to be blessed. Then the person praying would invite spirits into the person for them to receive what they are asking for. It was an intense atmosphere, thick with the action of the unseen. We stayed there for about 2 hours, arriving back home around 12.40am. It is difficult to know how much detail about this to put on the blog because I am aware that this is open for all to read, therefore if you have any questions then please ask it in the comment section and I will respond fully to your enquiry as best as I can. But one thing was for sure: I learnt a lot more about waging spiritual war and about the hold that this form of spiritism has on this nation of Brazil.

A good friend of ours has just left.....she is returning to the US and will be studying about social injustices. I think this is the worst part of this kind of lifestyle. We get to meet lots of great people but we have to say so many goodbyes. It is hard, like we have to adjust to having part of us missing, and it keeps happening.

OK, so England did lose.....by quite a long way. We had some times of being very discouraged, especially the day when the children came last in every game. Thankfully we managed to stir up a bit of enthusiasm on the last day, and tried to motivate them to "lose with style" and really enjoy themselves. Being competitive is very normal, but in Brazil it seems even bigger. Football is SO important to these kids, they really struggled to do so badly. But, anyway...here´s a photo of our first day (with lots of the children missing), when we thought we had a chance of winning.

We are currently having our "Olympic games" here at the lighthouse. It´s a kind of holiday club for the children of this slum, with a big focus on sports and competition. This year we have 5 teams, and I (Beckie) and Gideon are in the England team. Sadly, guys, it seems like we´re going to lose..... my team has really been struggling against some of the others, today though, no-one wanted to give up. They also managed to encourage one another a little, so today was much better. I´ve promised them all some English chocolate for tomorrow, so I´m hoping to see greater motivation. I was really impressed with some of the little ones (from my normal group) who showed great determination, even Vitória (8yrs) who had to join the older team for football against some 14yr old boys. She really showed courage, I was proud!!

It is July 26th and we are in Brazil. Today we ate Christmas pudding.....not for any special reason but just because we had one left over from Christmas, which was brought to us all the way from England by Beckie´s mum. It was YUMMY!!!!