Three weeks ago I boarded a plane headed for Brazil. Yesterday was the last day of the service I pledged to ACD. It seems like so long ago that I landed in Florianopolis and saw a Mennonite couple, but in Brazil. She “being a Holdeman Mennonite in full regalia,” we had no trouble picking them out.

The airport in Florianopolis is one of the nicest I’ve been in for a while. It was a pretty new airport with a nice outdoor shopping area outside of security. The drive through Florianopolis also spoke of a well-to-do town. Then the restaurant that we found to eat, and the explanations of all the different Brazilian things on the menu. A walk along the beach before it clouded over allowed me to see the Southern Cross for the first time in my life. I remember thinking in science class in school that I would never see that constellation.

Settling into the routine of the ACD camp happened fairly quickly. We had a lot of good times inside the walls of that house. I got to know a few people from all over the Americas. As I like to say, I got to know them, but in Brazil. I’d like to think that we would have had as good of times anywhere else too, but you know, something about the sun being in the northern sky instead of the southern sky really helped us bond, I think. Or maybe it was the beans.

I enjoyed the experience, even though at times it was mildly damp. The best part of the day, of course, is the after-lunch return to work. Your clothes have been thoroughly wet-cleaned and said water has had a chance to wick inside your clothing. You stick a bare arm through the sleeve and the water says “hello nice to meet you” and you say “it’s a good day” back. Eventually you manage to warm up the damp inside your sleeve and away you go until the evening.

At the end of the workday, we would often sing a song to those we had helped. This was received very well by many, if not all of those we had helped. At the beginning of my stay, the camp was majority Brazilian, so this worked very well. At the end of my stay we had about three Portuguese speakers and 7 Portuguese non-speakers. In the last week, we sang for a man in our half-Portuguese half-I don’t know what language that is, and his first words to us were “Was that English?” [he asked this in Portuguese of course].

There are three people that stick out in my mind at the end of it all. There was the lady with seven daughters, if I remember correctly. She was very thankful for our help. Then there was the man who had raised fighting roosters in a shed attached to his house. We cleaned up the left-over mess for him, and washed up his “rooster rink.” He and his wife served us some churrasco with the familiar manjoca, rice, and beans.

I haven’t forgotten the third person, but I have to do some bad writing and forget about him for a second. Friday the 5th of July dawned cold and rainy. It was the epitome of a Novo Hamburgo winter: cold, muddy, and thoroughly miserable. This was the day that it finally hit me. Here I am, the last day of my service in Brazil, and I’m fixing to fly north to more pleasant climes. The tickets are purchased; all I have to do is pack up and leave. And then these people are living in the mud, the rain, and the cold. They can’t leave like I can.

This brings me to the crippled man. His house had been thoroughly flooded, and due to the prior condition of the house, about a third of the roof was washed away. He had an orchard full of different kinds of fruit trees. It didn’t stand a chance against thirty days of submersion under the flood waters. What I gathered from a description of this man was that he felt sorry for himself and would have liked us to take him in and take care of him. This is when I really started thinking about his situation. If I lost almost everything in a flood, and my house had been practically destroyed, wouldn’t I feel sorry for myself? Wouldn’t I want to be taken in and clothed and housed? Would I expect it? How would it make me feel if that actually happened? It makes me wonder, are we doing enough for these people? For some reason, I saw myself in his shoes and concluded that, no, I don’t think I would react any differently in his circumstances.

I think about how that would feel to be almost without hope, and without means to well support yourself. It seems that to be taken in and cared for would have felt like heaven to him. We did feed him dinner yesterday, but we didn’t take him in. It makes me think about Lazarus under the rich man’s table, and about the verse that says “…, I was naked and ye clothed me…” How can we fulfill that verse? I’ll be contemplating it, I think, in the next few weeks.

I may be writing more in the next week or two, perhaps, about Goias, perhaps not. There is another bloggerista who is spending another week in Rio Grande do Sul. You can check his writing out here: https://rylankoehn.substack.com