this week...

Yet another week has flown by here in Rio. Here are a few highlights…

- Got my tourist visa renewed at the Federal Police. No trip to Rio is complete without a trip to the Federal Police with visa issues. Fortunately, tourist visa extensions are much easier then all permanent, missionary, or student visa red tape that the WMF staff have hassled with for months here. The officer that processed my extension said, “You are a brave man.” It took me a minute to realize that he was talking about my favela address on the application. We joked that it was “extreme tourism”! Ha!

- Had my final Portuguese language lesson on Friday. I am grateful for my tutor Ludmila…she had a lot of patience for my slow language learning! Now if I could only find some Brasilians in So Cal or Cape Town to speak Portuguese with. We all marked the occasion with some great Chinese food and sushi!

- Went to the quarter finals of Beach World Cup on Copacobana beach. It was one of the few sunny days this week! Saw Brazil beat Canada, Portugal beat the Bahrain, BUT…. the highlight was an all-out brawl between Argentina and Uruguay. Uruguay scored in the final minutes, putting them ahead. Something set Argentina off and the fight escalated fast…fists, chairs, and police clubs were flying. The Brasil fans loved it, since there is not a lot of love between Brasil and Argentina. Thankfully, it all stayed on the field and in the player area just off the field…and didn’t spread into the stands!

- Our WMF community shared a time of worship, lament, and prayer on behalf of our friends on the streets here in Rio (similar to what we did at Grace last May). Using Psalm 10, we light candles representing specific names of friends and children who were on our hearts. We then took time to pour out our petitions to God on their behalf. The final verses of the psalm take on deeper meaning among my friends here….

“You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.” (Psalm 10:17-18)