Good news! Pastor Lucas of Union Church knows a luthier in Copacabana who will be able to tell me if my guitar is fixable. If so, then he’ll give me an estimate on fixing it. Labor is cheap here in Brazil, so I might even be able to afford the repair.

Thankfully, the US dollar gets a little stronger against the Real every day, so there is hope! One of our friends just bought a “cheap” guitar here for R$ 600, so a repair has to be less than that. Right?

I love my cherry red acoustic/electric guitar. It is the perfect size and shape for me. My parents, husband, and in-laws all contributed to its purchase the Christmas before last. My guitar and I have had some good times. We especially like to lead worship together. See how pretty it is?

When we flew here about a month ago, the case got all chewed up by the baggage machinery. I opened it up as soon as it came off the baggage carousel, though, and it looked all right.

Then, I got it out to play this afternoon for the first time.

Somehow, my sleep-deprived, just-off-the-plane self didn’t see this crack. This huge, jagged, potentially arm-stabbing crack. That I can’t fix. Or afford to pay someone to fix. To be honest, I don’t think this kind of thing can be fixed anyway. At least, not on less-than-$200 guitars. And I would have had to tell Delta about it within 7 days (not that they would have done anything about it, since guitars aren’t covered by their policy).

So I’m bummed. I can still practice with it, but I can’t lead worship with it. Sad.

Speaking of worship, to end on a high note, here’s our worship band from last Sunday:

That’s John, Amy, me, Jesse, and Alistair. Alex plays the piano, and Geison the drummer and Pastor Lucas on guitar are out of the shot.

Things have been rather unhealthy around here recently. About two weeks ago, I came down with nasty sore throat. That hung around for about a week, at which point Lorraine promptly got food poisoning and missed school on Monday and Tuesday. Things seemed just about recovered for her by Friday, though. But apparently I picked up some kind of virus, because by the end of 3rd period that day, I was just about dead. I came home and slept for the rest of the school day. When Lorraine got home, our conversation went something like this:

LORRAINE: Here, drink this cup of water.
TIM: I don’t want to.
LORRAINE: But you need to, drink it.
TIM: Fine.
[Tim drinks entire cup of water.]
TIM: That was too much water.
[Tim vomits.]
[Tim vomits again.]
[Tim vomits again.]
[Tim vomits again.]

So, yes, that’s been lots of fun. The real irony is that I’m in the middle of teaching a unit on the immune system in Life Science.

A word about the fruits and vegetables here in Brazil: they are different. Some of them are very different. Like these:

These are maxixi (mah-shee-shee), a cucumber-like vegetable. Tasty, but a pain to peel.

Also, the best oranges are, in fact, greens:

And the tastiest bananas are the size of my thumb. I call them “thumbnanas.”

Pronounced “fayleesh pashkwah,” like a good Carioca. He is risen!

We celebrated Easter this morning at Union Church with a surprisingly large congregation, including many first-time attenders. There was a breakfast beforehand with pancakes, sausage, and fruit (papayas, mango, melon, pineapple), and a great service with all the good old Easter hymns. We were afraid that the singing wasn’t going to work out all that well, because most of the band was gone and we were scrambling to get it together in the end, but it was great. As I said to one of our friends at church, God can always take whatever it is we throw out there and make it into something beautiful in the end.

In his sermon, Pastor Lucas urged us to remember all the other Christians around the world who are celebrating Easter today, some of them in hiding. It’s great to know that we, our families and friends back home, and all the other members of our faith can celebrate Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection together.

He is risen!

UPDATE FROM TIM: Here are some pictures of Lorraine leading worship this morning, including a shot of the “flowering cross,” a Union Church tradition.

Well, it has been a wet and wild week. Since Saturday night, it has rained more or less constantly, and the temperature has stayed in the sixties and seventies. It’s hard to believe that we spent our Saturday in the nineties, sailing a blue ocean on a crystal clear day.

As a Christmas gift, ICS-Rio took all its employees on a cruise to Ilha Grande, off the coast of Rio to the South. About 90 people went, and we had a great time. The boat was about 40 feet long, with benches in the back for sitting and a padded center section for lying in the shade or sun. The day was beautiful, and the Atlantic was calm. At one point, we stopped and just jumped off the boat to swim in the ocean. Here I am, among a crowd of my fellow employees and their families.

We stopped about halfway through the cruise near Angra, at a little cove with an old pirate church.

These boats were like ours:

The beach wasn’t the only thing that was good about the cruise–the food was also great. The school provided coxinhas, Guarana, sandwiches, and two huge chocolate and maracuja cakes. And Romeo e Julieta.

By the end of the day, we were pretty happy (and sunburned) campers.

Here’s a little map I made of our apartment, for those of you who want to see how we’re living. As you can see, there are many showers:

This morning, the maid next door leaned across her balcony railing and hailed me with a long string of Portuguese. The following conversation, I’m ashamed to say, was the best I could manage:

Me: Eu nao falo Portuguese. (I don’t speak Portuguese.)
Maid: (Another long string of Portuguese)
Me: Eu so uma Americana. (I am an American.)
Maid: (Looks shocked. Throws her arms out and utters another long string of words.)
Me: Eu nao intende. (I don’t understands. At this point my verb conjugation has suffered from my nerves, and I have used the third person form of the word “understand.”)
Maid: (More Portuguese, accompanied by sweeping motions. I now understand that she is asking if we want her to be our maid, too.)
Me: Nao aqui. (I am now blending Portuguese and Spanish, also using the word for “here” instead of the word for “now,” because I don’t know the word for “now.” Tim later tells me it is “agora.”)
Maid: (More Portuguese)
Me: Desculpe, desculpe, tchau. (Sorry, sorry, goodbye.)

There you go. My first conversation with a Brazilian.

After months of waiting, we have received approval from Rio to seek other assignments within the NICS system. There is still a chance we could go to Rio, if our visas come through before December 13, but after that we will stop waiting and go with another school. Right now, it looks like that school could be Lima, Peru.

Lima has several things going for it. Peruvians speak Spanish, which Tim took 5 years of. Peru is in South America, still, which was our target continent. They really need us–they’ve been trying to fill our positions all year. There are two jobs, which are not necessarily our areas of expertise, but which we can fill adequately. Tim would be the librarian and I would be the GED tutor for the high school.

One thing which may prevent us from going to Lima is that the school requires teachers to raise a certain amount of monthly support, which Tim and I don’t have. As you’ve read from us in the past, we are committed to helping missionaries, and that includes not putting more strain on our churches’ mission budgets. Please pray with us that we can surmount this small financial obstacle, so that we may serve God in Lima.

Thanks to Tim’s parents, we’re in Whistler, BC this week at the Tyndall Stone Lodge. We joined them for the weekend, and are staying out the rest of the time-share week by ourselves. It’s quite nice–we’re having a lot of fun. No snow, but no crowds, either.

The latest word on the visas is semi-encouraging. A necessary form from Brazil has been added to our file, which may mean that the visas will be granted. Unfortunately, in the meantime, all our paperwork was sent back from Brasilia to San Francisco, into the care of our consular agent, who is on vacation until Thanksgiving. So we wait.

Please continue to pray for new developments in our placement. The end of the semester in Rio is about three weeks away, meaning we will have missed half the school year. As a teacher, I know that the situation at the school in Rio will only deteriorate further if they cannot procure teachers, whether that means getting us down there or finding another solution. We pray that God will provide firm answers soon, both for our sake and the good of ICS-Rio.