The trip here to Brazil was an interesting one to say the least. 24 hours of traveling which included flying and layovers was not the most exciting thing to me, but we made it. I left for Memphis with my family at 5 in the morning after a night of no sleep. We all said our goodbyes and flew to Miami in probably the tiniest plane known to man. If I were 2 inches taller I wouldn't have been able to stand up straight in it! We then got to Miami and hung out in the airport for 4 hours until our flight to Sau Paulo, Brazil. We took advantage of eating our last American meal and got dinner at Chili's. I was dreading this flight because it was 8 hours long, but my emotions for the flight quickly changed once I stepped foot on the plane. It was huge and had TVs on the back of every seat with a touch screen. On them you could view a map that tracked where the plane was, listen to music, play games, but most importantly there were tons of new movies you could choose from... including Harry Potter 7. Haha, flight wasn't so bad after all. They served both dinner and breakfast, making it my first experience with Brazilian food, and I really enjoyed it. Things got a little bumpy once we were in the Sau Paulo airport. The language barrier and lack of communication got us a little tripped up, but we figured it all out. Then while going through customs, a lot of us on the team got our customs paper taken from us and thrown away without us realizing we needed them. We had to run back and have the employees search through the trash cans to find them for us. We finally got them back and were on our way to the final destination: Belo Horizante!
Once we landed, the Campus Outreach staff that works here in Belo picked us up and took us to our house here... or should I say mansion. It is absolutely incredible! 3 stories tall and tons of bedrooms and space. I seriously got lost the first time I was trying to find my room! It really is a blessing that our team gets to live in it. There are 8 guys on 4 sets of bunk beds in my room... definitely will be a challenge, but it will only mature us in our character and will give us opportunity to die to ourselves and serve others. There are 2 Brazilian college students in our room as well and 5 Brazilians living in our house all together. They have been a big help for sure. We all immediately showered and crashed once we got here, and then later unpacked and got acquainted with the house and the CO staff here.
Today we had our first day of training. We learned more about the Brazilian culture and how to relate to them in building relationships and evangelizing. We then learned a lot of do's and dont's and all about taking safety pre-cautions. My favorite part of the training today was the Portuguese lesson. Thankfully I am picking it up pretty quickly because of my background in Spanish. Hopefully I'll be fluent by the end of the summer!
We'll head to campus for the first time on Monday, so please be praying that we have a lot of favor with the Brazilian students we meet! I have only been here for a little over a day and have already had an incredible experience. Can't wait to see what else God reveals and does here in Brazil.
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