Week #16, Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 6-12, 2017

I start my blog post this week with this:

We are all a piece of the puzzle, or maybe I should say we are all pieces of many puzzles.  We all have to work together to finish the puzzle whether it's in our family, our job, our church, our neighborhood, our school or wherever we have a presence with other people.  We all matter and we are all important!  That puzzle of the world just wouldn't be complete without that final piece and yet sometimes we really don't see how we fit in.  Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I say over and over to myself, "You is Smart, You is Kind, You is Important,"  (from The Help).  It really helps somehow and I go back to sleep.

I love my life and the wonderful opportunities that I have to grow and experience new things.  It is a great big wonderful world out there and it is awesome being a little bitty part of it, but my part matters.  Your part matters.  We all matter!  Never lose sight of that!

 This is the scripture that we put on our missionary plaque that hangs in our ward at home.  We may be small and simple but when we all do small and simple good things, they can really amount to great things and can really move the Lord's work along.  We are serving God in Brazil because we believe that we can make a difference somehow in someone's life.

I work in the nursery for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings.  This morning as we were talking to the little kids (I was listening and trying to understand what was being said, haha) one of the little girls was staring at a picture of Jesus reaching down to lift up a child and I wondered what she could be thinking.  I hope she was thinking that Jesus loves her and will always be there to reach down and pull her up because that is the truth.  He is always there for us and will always be there for us no matter what!  We are never alone, we always have Him to pull us up and cheer for us and want us to make it home to be with Him again.

We had a talent show for our Portuguese class this week.  The Barrett's played a beautiful piano duet, MarJean Harris made delicious pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, Marilyn Anderson showed some pictures of her amazing paintings and Lori Whiting and I showed our crochet projects.  We tried to explain our talents in Portuguese!  It's fun learning a new language but it is really hard.  

This week's adventure was going to Ibirapuera Park.  It's kind of like Central Park in NYC but here in Sao Paulo.  We took the bus with several other couples.  We first visited the Afrobrasil Museum.  It was fascinating.

 The park was really pretty, lots of ponds and tons of trees and bike/walking paths and a few craft vendors.

 These kids were amazing!  Wish they could teach our Geezer band a thing or two!

 They have some pretty great street art here!

 The pau brasil is the national tree of Brazil, the country to which it gave its name. It has beautiful yellow flowers and with it's green leaves we now know why the national flag has the green and yellow colors on it.

 Leaving the park and crossing 18 lanes of traffic on this foot ramp.

 This monument is a symbol of the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, and the biggest monument of the city of São Paulo.

We had a great time exploring a part of the city that we hadn't seen before.  We are blessed to be with fun people who like to get out and have adventures!