Wednesday, May 13

We arrived in Cascavel and hit the ground running.

We met the pastor of the local Evangelical Free Church, which is the GF site here in Cascavel.

First he gave us a 2 cent tour of the area of town where they minister and then we went for lunch at a Churriscaria, which is where they serve churrusco, which is the Brazilian steakhouse type dining where they bring various meats to your table and carve it tableside.

The meat was pretty tasty and our favorite was the bacon-wrapped chicken.

Most interesting were these two things found on the dessert table…tomatoes in syrup and pumpkin in syrup. Marcia and I tries them both. They were very sweet and the tomatoes were almost caramelized. Not a repeat in my book.

After lunch, Pastor Guillerme (William) took us to a lakeside park and we saw a few interesting birds, including this guy with large feet that are not webbed,

a couple of monkeys…

the world’s largest rodent, the capybara..

and a St John’s bird, who makes a mud nest

oh, and we saw this interesting duck,

All of that was the least interesting part of the day. Our evening was spent visiting 5 families that have children in the GF program. What a blessing it was for those women to allow us to visit for a few minutes with them and to pray for them. There was such a variety of circumstances represented by those families. God is doing great work through this church and we now know how to pray specifically for those families. Some are immigrants from Venezuela, one little boy needs a special surgery, another two children are in a family where both parents struggle with drugs and in another family, the father struggles with drugs.

We were also able to participate with the case workers and volunteers in some GF training, which covered the vision of the program and challenged the workers to think about how what they are doing in the local program aligns with that vision. It was such a blessing to us to see the enthusiasm and the love for the children in the faces and voices of the congregation. There are only 155 members/attendees and they are serving 50 children in the GF program.

The evening ended with a hamburger meal on the patio of the church. We were able to learn more about the individuals serving in the program…Google Translate is becoming our friend. Our hearts are full…