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

Please pray for us.

Today was a difficult day for us. We received several telephone calls from a stranger who was trying to pulll of a scam on our family. The caller says that I, John, have been hurt bad in a car wreck and that they need someone to come down and go to the hospital. This is a prelude to kidnapping here. There are hundreds of stories down here of people rushing out the door to meet these people only to find that it was a trap. I was not in the house at the time of the calls so you can see where the confusion can lead.

What made this day difficult was not that anything bad happened, but it was the fact that the caller seemed to know very specific things about us, even the clothes I was wearing today. Which meant that he saw me today. Most of the time, this type of scam is annonymous. Meaning, the caller really doesn't know anything about the person they are trying to rob.

My instinct says that this event is over. No more will come of it. But we would still like your covering as we do work in a community with many dangerous people and the thought has crossed our mind that someone there could be behind this.

Please pray for our security as we pass through the next few days. We are a little spooked to say the least. God is bigger though and always in front of and behind us! Thank you all! We love you! John

Easter at the House of Hope

Enjoy the photos! The kids had a ball! God bless!!! John

Time

As many of you know, children here in Brazil have to start school at age two. If this seems young to you you are not alone. I think it is too. But nevertheless, this is the age. One of the joys of our day is going to pick up the girls after their classes. We enter into the school and as we enter, the teacher at the door calls out our children's names. First, comes Becca.

Here she comes running with her back pack the size of a Fiat on her back. She is so excited to see us. Everything is exciting to her. She tells us about how she froze to death in her computer class because the air-conditioning is turned up real high. Her hair, which was immaculate when she left the house this morning, now looks as if she just did a 50 minute Pilates workout in a sauna. (The girls classrooms are all open air and it is hot here in Brazil. The temperature rarely goes below 80 and is always in the 90's during the day.)

Now comes Gabi. Never in a hurry, always deliberate. She comes sauntering down the sidewalk as if their is a prize for going the slowest. She sometimes stops to admire the tropical birds they have in a cage and in the process, creates a log jam of kids on the sidewalk. Most of the kids are not looking where they are going in the first place so there are some collisions.

Both girls are happy to be going home. Filling our ears and anybody else's within ear shot how their day went. Who sat on their foot. Who called them a name. Who gave them a piece of their candy. It is a regular newsbreak right there in the entryway to the school.

I am sitting here trying to think what more could I want as a father. I am hard pressed to think of something. Our daughters are happy to see us. What else is there? They love us and want to be with us. The goal is to keep it that way. When Becca is 16, I do not expect her to run across the school like goofy, jumping into my arms and telling me all about her day. It is the emotion and the love that I want to have.

We are doing our best to see that it stays that way. Praying with them everyday. Reading tons of stories to them at bedtime. (We have read the story Medaline 136 times in the last month.) Taking them for ice-cream. Going to the beach. Time. For the most part, I remember the things my parents DID with me, not the things they said to me. When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, once a month, my dad would take me to lunch at Ponderosa. I remember it like yesterday. I do remember a thing we talked about, just that we did it and I loved it. I know we probably didn't have the money to do it at the time and that just makes it even mopre special to me.

Spend time with your kids. A good friend of mine just recently got a membership to an aquarium for his family. That is what I am talking about. I know this couple will have a daughter that runs to them when she is older.

Pray for us as we try to make time for everything that is calling on us. It is so easy to get busy. It doesn't matter if you are in missions or are working a normal 9 to 5. We so long to be there for them when they need us!

Shoot out!

I wanted to ask for all of you to pray for the HoH and our safety today. Just about an hour ago, the police and a gang were involved in a shoot out in front of the House of Hope. Ana, our director, was in the process of letting the morning class of the before/after school program go out the door when bullets began flying by the driveway. 30 seconds later and all ten of our children would have been in the middle of the street with no where to go.

This type of violence is getting worse. The gangs have no respect for human life and the police will pretty much do anything to reign in the violence. I do not want to think about how bad this could have been. But all we know is that we have to go to work there every day. This is not something we want to look forward to.

Please pray for our safety, the children's safety, and for the staff. We are all on edge now because of this. Please keep us covered. We love you all! John and Fabi

Welcome to the new Schmidt family blog. If you are having a wobbly over the name, then you need to read our newsletters and you will understand. I have enjoyed writing our monthly newsletters for you all to catch up on us but through the help of a very good friend of ours, we realised that there are things that happen weekly with us and that over time we may not remember to include them in the newsletter. This is kind of a newsletter add-on. (Thanks BKH).

The updates on this blog will be for both our family and the House of Hope. Pretty much anything that happens in our lives that we feel is necessary to share will be shared here. Cute kid stories, storiues from the daycare, God-stuff that happens on a pretty regular basis. We want you all to be a part and to know what the Lord is doing here with us.

Please enjoy the future updates and know that we miss you and love you many times over!!! In His Name, John