Enlarge your Territory

As you may or may not know, the Casa da Esperança house and land is not ours. We, nor the church here in Recife, owns it. Well, that is about to change.

Through a very generous donation from some friends of our church in Europe and England, ALL the money that we have needed to purchase the Casa da Esperança was given in one day!!!

Not sure where to begin other than to thank the Lord for His provision and grace. To purchase the land has been a longtime vision for us personally and for Miguel as well. More specific details of this transaction will follow in the August House of Hope newsletter due out in about 2 and a half weeks. But know that we have been blessed beyond all bounds!

No longer do we have to worry about the owner asking for his land back. Thank you Jesus!!!

Welcome back!

Sorry for the delay in getting a fresh post on the site. We wanted to give everyone an opportunity to get back to us so we could give permission to enter the blog.

We are doing well. The girls are on their "winter break" from school right now. (Remember, the seasons are reversed here.) They are already starting to go nuts from having a routine change. Oh wait, that's me who's going nuts. Every 3 and a half minutes another request for another snack. Can we watch a movie? Can we take a shower? Can we eat some cookies? Can we do ballet? Can we throw small pieces of food off the balcony? It doesn't ever seem to stop.

This week and next we have a friend of ours named Julie staying with us and visiting at the House of Hope. We are enjoying having here with us and she is enjoying seeing the kids. Some of which see saw when she was here 2 and a half years ago.

Fabi and I are doing well. This typically a very busy time of the year for us so we keep busy during the day. Our nights are spent reading or watching movies. i don't read much but I have recently stumbled upon a series of books by Joel Rosenberg. The names of the books are The Last Jihad, The last Days, The Ezeikiel Option, and the Copper Scroll. They are awesome books. Just a friendly FYI.

We will be writing more in the coming days, weeks and months. Thanks for the patience with this and enjoy the blog...again.

New Email Address!

I wanted to tell you that we have changed our email address! We have had some privacy issues recently and believe it or not, one of the issues has been the very company we have been with for our email!

Anyway, the first part of our new address is the same as the old one but you will need to change the "terra.com.br" to "gmail.com". Please start communicating with the gmail account as I will be closing the terra account soon.

We love you and miss you and hope to hear from you soon. Remember to let me know if you want to be included on the blog permission list!

Permission

In light of the fact that we have had several encounters with potential kidnappers, thieves and other very dangerous people, we have to decided to make this blog a permission to read blog. What this means is that you will need to be approved to be able to read the blog. It has just become a major liability to have so much personal information on the Internet without having some form of control over who sees it.

We are sorry that it has to be with way, but things have become dangerous enough here that we really do not want personal information readily available on the net. Especially about our daughters.

Soooo, if you would, please email me at johnandfabi@terra.com.br and let me know if you would like to continue reading the blog and I will enter you into the program. We love you and miss you and hope you understand. In Him, John

The US dollar vs the Brazilian Real

Something significant happened this week. The value of the dollar compared to the real is going down. It has actually been going down for quite some time but it went below 2.0 for the first time in several years.

This is significant for us. When we first moved here, the exchange rate was 3.17 reais (plural real) for every one dollar. Now, as of this morning, the rate is 1.95. So, US$100.00 back in 2003 was a little over R$300.00 reais, now it is a little under R$200.00 reais.

The graphic to the upper right shows the downward trend the dollar has been on for about three years now.

Please pray for us as we look at other options to keeping ourselves here. there are a couple of work options but they would take time away from the daycare and the orphanage. So please pray for us to have wisdom as we make some tough decisions soon. Thanks.

Say what?

Over the course of the last several blog entries and newsletters, I have spent considerable print space on what goes INTO my daughters mouths. (Or noses) Today, let's focus on what comes out of them. (Their mouths people! Their mouths!) It is so funny to listen to little kids talk about the world around them. They process things differently than we do. Combine that with the fact that most kids do not have the "is this appropriate to say right now?" filter, and you have solid laughs and memories.

From Becca wondering (out loud of course) how unfair it is that Daddy can go to the bathroom standing up and she can't. (I reminded her of the neat little trick mommy showed her and she seemed to relax a bit.) To Gabi saying that Daddy's breath smelled like "a**". (Great, I wonder where she heard that.) The girls give us plenty of laughs and occasional desires to get the duct tape.

The other day we were at a meeting at church and Becca leaned over and asked me, "Daddy, how many more days is this meeting going to last?" Sheesh. We are so related it is not even funny. What is sad is that I was thinking the same thing. Not minutes, but days!

I am sure that there are things that are just spectacularly hysterical to one family that another would roll their eyes at. But kids say it like they think it. And I happen to think my daughters are freakin' hilarious!

The other day at cell group, the house was full of teenagers. Someone moved a chair across the tile floor and it made a very suspicous sounding noise. Becca looked at me and said in Portuguese, "Daddy, how could you!?" The room exploded in laughter. I wanted to crawl away and hide but instead, I turned red, chuckled and knew once again, that this was my daughter and she gets it honest!

Health

Asthma is a funny thing. It is one of those ailments where you know certain things will precipitate an attack, so you avoid them. But then there are always the days like last weekend when Becca woke up at 2 in the morning barely breathing from a combination of asthma and laryngitis.

As a parent, you do your best to avoid the glue's, cigarette smoke, car exhaust, bon-fires, you name it. All of these things can be deadly to Becca. It is really frustrating when an attack occurs with no visible reason. It is times like these when we truly realize how dependant we are on God. We would have nothing if not for His generosity and provision. That includes are girls. This is the second time in Becca's life where the Lord has woken us up to check on her and we find her in a state of asthma.

We refuse to look at this negatively. My first reaction was, "Lord, please! Why does she even have asthma?!?" But once I chilled, it changed to, "Thank you Lord for protecting her and for waking us up!" God has allowed this asthma to be an issue for us here and so be it. We need to be careful but we know that God is with us.

Thank you for all the prayers you offered up for us in response to my Mom's phone-calling. We were so blessed to know that we were being covered and were floating around on the St. Luke's prayer chain. We love you! Thanks