A Brazilian Weekend, Our First Sunday School Lesson and a Visit to the Zoo

My Brazilian friends, Fabiano and Ducy invited me to spend the weekend with them at their place. They picked me up on Friday afternoon and I stayed until Early Sunday morning. I shouldn't have been surprised by the first thing we did together which was "passear no shopping," wander through a mall. It is such a Brazilian thing to do. It was so great to spend nearly two full days speaking only in Portuguese. They really spoiled me. They made me Brazilian food, including beef, which is something that is not exactly common in this Hindu area. I think the best part of getting to know Fabiano and Ducy (besides speaking Portuguese and eating Brazilian food ;) ) was getting to hear about the ministry that they are involved with here in Guwahati and meeting people from their congregation. It was an extremely encouraging weekend and I was sad to say goodbye to them. They are on their way to Brazil to try and resolve some visa issues and, Lord willing, will be back in Guwahati by the middle of May. I'm looking forward to seeing them again!

I came home early Sunday morning so that I could go to Kalapani with everyone and help teach our first Sunday school lesson out there. I was expecting a handful of children to be there but to my surprise there was about fifteen. First Ray gave a short lesson which was translated into Assamese, then we took the kids outside and had our Sunday school lesson. We started with the creation story and we will continue with that over the next week or two. In Sunday school we will focus on Old Testament stories and during the week when we are out teaching all of the kids we will be focusing on the Gospel stories.

Here is Ray and his translator.

Making little creation story books with the kids.

After lunch our friend Samuel took us to the zoo. It was a pretty good time. This wasn't the first time that I have been charged more to do something because I was a foreigner. I was just as displeased this time about it as I have been in the past. Discrimination is such an ugly thing. It's not so often in my North American bubble that I'm on the receiving end of it though. Another reminder of how blessed I am.

I love going to zoos because I love looking at the animals. I always find zoos extremely depressing though. It makes me so sad to see the animals cooped up in cages. The zoo here in Guwahati was probably the most depressing zoo I've been to yet. It was awful to see elephants changed to trees and large cats in such little concrete cages. I joked with Raysha that there was a one day only exhibit going on while we were there. It was "Canadians outside of there natural habitat." I think I got observed just as much, if not more than any of those animals in the zoo did.

Andrew, Samuel, Autumn and Raysha.

This was not extremely reassuring. There was a rhino living on the other side of this "fence."

I made a new friend.