Dear Dad and Mom,
Merry Christmas!! I love you so very much! I pray that you had a wonderful Christmas Eve and a blessed Christmas day. I am sending this message through Raquel so I hope you will find it in your junk mail. Since we will be staying on base all day tomorrow there will be no other opportunity to communicate on Christmas day unfortunately.
This evening (Christmas Eve) we will be having a Christmas dinner with the orphanage/shelter that YWAM Manaus owns and runs. We will have a little service with the children and all the staff, both of us offering up songs of worship and then myself and two others will give short little testimonies that relate to thankfulness of things God has done in our lives in the last while. It starts at 8pm so I will have to make sure that I keep an eye on the time for 9pm to arrive. I think I will take along my alarm clock, lol. I can’t remember if we were doing it again in the morning of Christmas day but I will wish you a Merry Christmas again at 9am J
Since we arrived here in Manaus things have gone fairly well. It has definitely been different than our time in Venezuela. I have loved the ministry once again at the orphanage/shelter. We have gone there two days now. It hosts children who are either orphans, street children or children that come from an unstable family that may or may not involve abuse. The children are so beautiful. One little girl reminds me of Lotus when she smiles and laughs (from what I remember of her anyhow). Yesterday we mostly just cleaned the building, which in my opinion is kept immaculate already. The children do not go without here, they care very well here. You can definitely see and feel Gods love in this place. Today along with a few others we got to play games, draw and just have fun with the children. I really enjoyed today and have taken many photos over the last two days. The others did construction work, well more like shoveling dirt around and leveling. I was luck to play with the children instead but that was because I, along with many in the group, have been sick all week L A few had fevers and flu’s. I mainly had severe cold and congestion (to the point of barely being able to breathe while I slept :P) and was fighting the flu. Also many have been experiencing dizziness and lightheadedness. We wonder if some of this, including muscle aches (which I also had) are the side effects now kicking in from the malaria pills.
I am thankful to be feeling much better this evening but was still too weak this morning for manual labour. Actually Faith and I just walked around finding various fruits on the trees and having a yummy fruit feast – which was badly needed! There are orange trees and mango trees and papaya trees and some other thing that I don’t know the name of but is so yummy. Oh and guess what! I now know the reason why Cashews cost so much. You would never guess how they grow!! I took pictures. Only one cashew grows per fruit piece. It is on the top and outside of the fruit. The fruit has a weird taste to it and I am still not sure I like it but eat it anyhow as I know I could use the nutrients. Anyhow google cashew fruit. It’s pretty crazy J
For Christmas day, everything is shut down here so Sarah and Alef and Kadeen left a little while ago by car to buy us groceries so we can cook ourselves Christmas dinner. We will also play some games and watch some movies. Not quite the typical Christmas but should be good! It is MUCH hotter here but it is also way more rainy. Our first day it poured and poured, we were soaked. It also takes forever for laundry to dry.
Oh one last thing. On the Tuesday, they were so kind and Raquel took us into downtown Manaus (as we are quite far out in the boonies here)for a tour around. It is amazingly awesome and beautiful!! Many buildings are influenced by the Neo-classical era. The buildings are so colourful and have so much character. There were many people around but by afternoon there were even more people! It was so crazy, I loved every minute of it. It is just such a beautiful area with so many things to see and so much more that we could have seen but obviously are not able to as we are not tourists. We also had to take city transportation so that took up much time too. OH what an experience there too! Hahaha, on our way home we had to pack all 17 of us plus one of the guys from here onto an already packed bus. IT was really quite awful at first, though we did laugh a lot at first but as we were not feeling well and it was the end of the day a few of us were beginning to be close to fainting, BUT God sent us a small mercy! The bus broke down! HAHA! We had not gotten far because of traffic, which in itself had made things worse as we barely moved so there was no air flow, when all of a sudden we heard a loud scrapping noise and the bus pull over to the side and come to a stop. Everyone groaned. We all piled off the bus and proceeded to wait for awhile for another bus to come along and pick us up. Part way through we somehow managed to find enough energy to perform two of our skits for the waiting locals. It was rather humerous and I think they were slightly amused, it passed the time that’s for sure and it was fun.
Anyhow I better get going now. I was able to write more than I thought as I had first written part of this out so that Raquel could take it with her and type up tomorrow at the office but she just allowed me to use her laptop right now and apparently if the sky clears up we may even get connection that I am able to send this through my own hotmail account. Guess you will see what happened when you get this.
Anyhow I love you both so very much!! We fly out on Monday to Porto Velho where apparently the connection is very good and will only cost just slightly more than $1USD / hr! I can’t wait to connect with you again!!
Merry Christmas Mom and Dad!
Sending all my love, your loving daughter,
Stephanie
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