This episode resumes the story I left off in Episode 11, interrupted by the account in Ep. 12 of the events of April 25, 1974, and how they affected our lives. These nine months were a test that would make us or break us as missionaries. If we got through them, we would be able to get through any other test of our call to the mission field.
We arrived in Brazil on March 24, 1972, and the first order of business was to make ourselves at home in a new country. We spent most of the first month in the metropolis of São Paulo with the Ross family, but God was calling us to the interior, to smaller towns and out-of-the-way places that had not yet been reached with the gospel. It was late April before we could move into the house next door to the Montgomery family in Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, lying 250 miles to the west of the state capital, São Paulo. I hesitate to estimate its population in 1972, but I would hazard a guess of 5,000 or so. Driving on the unpaved country roads through plantations of sugar cane or coffee that covered the rolling hills of red clay raised a cloud of fine dust that filtered through closed car windows and dyed sweat-soaked shirts red. In the rainy season driving was a battle with slick mud and hub-deep ruts. The smell of roasting coffee beans emanated from a processing plant on the hill across the Rio Pardo, the river that passed through the town. The very name of the river translates into Muddy River, a reference to the reddish-clay color of its waters. It was the natural choice for holding baptismal services.
The House and its "furnishings"
The house had just been fixed up with a fresh coat of paint but not much else. Its only furnishings were a kitchen sink, a bathroom with a stool and shower, and a laundry room behind the house with a concrete tank and built-in scrub board. It would be 7 long months of sore knuckles before Abbie would get a washing machine at the end of November.
Our bed and dinette set were loaned to us by the Montgomerys…loaned, not given, because they didn’t want us to be stuck with the furniture and not buy our own furniture later. The first piece of furniture we bought was a used chest of drawers for $10, complete with 7 cockroaches. In my journal, I mused about whether those cockroaches were new or used. Cockroaches were a constant feature of life. Later in the year, when spring arrived in October, next door in the Montgomery house, all the cabinets had to be emptied and cleaned because of the invasive species. Indoor wildlife also included lizards, which were harmless, but that was only a small consolation to Abbie when one time she walked out of the kitchen through a doorway, and one fell off the wall onto her neck. Inside the church building, lizards fighting each other on the wall behind the preacher were more interesting to the congregation than the sermon was, as the lizards reenacted miniature Jurassic Park scenes of fighting dinosaurs.
Mostly we made do with whatever we could use to furnish the house. Shelves were added to the plywood crate the stove was shipped in. That was where the kids’ clothes were stored. For us, the flimsy plywood refrigerator crate was converted into a makeshift closet. The household goods we had shipped before we left the States arrived in the port of Santos before we got to Brazil, but it was only after numerous long trips to the customs offices and phone calls and bureaucratic mix-ups, that we got our things in June, over two months after we arrived. We painted the old steamer trunk we shipped things in and used it as the only piece of furniture in the living room. In November, we splurged and got two patio lawn chairs for $7 apiece to complete our living room furnishings. In the bedroom, a 3-lb. coffee can covered in blue-and-white paper served as the bedside table for our alarm clock. The blue paper matched the dark blue of the bedroom walls.
Seven months after we moved into the house, Abbie was still making curtains to hang over the bare windows of the dining room, living room and bedroom. Of course, there were no curtain rods, so I went out and cut bamboo to use as curtain rods.
Not everything was in the plywood-crate and bamboo-curtain-rod class.
The first thing we did was go to Sears in São Paulo and have a refrigerator-freezer and gas stove shipped to our new address. The new appliances were already at the house when we arrived in Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo in late April. But the refrigerator stopped working two weeks later. After phone calls and another trip we made to São Paulo, Sears agreed to replace the refrigerator without charging for the shipping. There was some bit of inconvenience during the 10 days we didn’t have a refrigerator, since we had to go next door whenever we had to get something out of the Montgomerys’ refrigerator.
Money: 250 miles to the bank
São Paulo---That “trip to town” was 250 miles each way, and it became a normal part of life. By car, it was between 4 and 5 hours, but we didn’t have a car, and unless Steve was going to São Paulo and I caught a ride with him, it took most of the day because the bus wasn’t direct and we had to change buses at other towns to get to the capital city. There, we had to ride local buses for another 45 minutes to reach the suburb village where we stayed with the Ross family.
How often did I go? Whenever our money ran out. Our support consisted of personal checks from churches and individuals. No bank in the interior would exchange them on the spot, so we had to resort to money changers in the capital, usually at travel agencies. I would sometimes go by myself, but it was also an opportunity for Abbie and the kids, Rachel and Rick, to get out of the house and be with the Ross family. It also meant I didn’t have to rush back home. Neither the Rosses nor the Montgomerys had a phone, so whenever I travelled without the family, we had no way of communicating with each other. All of those factors came together in a perfect storm in September and resulted in one of the most unforgettable experiences of the 3 years and 3 months we lived in Brazil.
The time came to cash in our USD and replenish our supply of Cr$. By July, I had figured we could “get by” on $140 a month, because some things (vegetables, fruit) were very cheap … one time we got a sack of ponkan (a huge variety of tangerines), 98 of them for $2. (In my journal I noted that Abbie stayed home from church the next day because the kids had some intestinal issues, most likely a cause-and-effect relationship between those two events.) One time, on a trip further into the interior, I spent a night in a hotel for $1.50. Our house rent was $60 w/o utilities (but that was one-fourth of our $250 monthly average in offerings). The income each month varied widely, due in part to our dependence on the postal services. In nine months, twice we got a little over $300, but in May, the second month we were in Brazil, the offerings total ed $66.50. The Montgomerys set up a room in their garage and I taught English to supplement our funds, since we had to replace the clothes and housewares we hadn’t shipped from the States. And we had to make sure there was enough money for the bus to São Paulo to exchange whatever checks had come in.
Money: We had less than $1 and we still hadn't arrived
We decided that Abbie and the kids would go with me on that trip in September. It was 7:00 Saturday morning when we left home, but we just missed connection from Bauru to SP, so we didn´t get to the capital until 4:00, where we caught the city bus to where the Rosses lived. At 5:00, we walked up to their house and discovered no one was home. A neighbor saw us and said, “Oh, they’ve gone to Rio de Janeiro to a church meeting and won’t be back until Monday.” Because neither the Rosses nor the Montgomerys had a phone, we couldn’t let them know we were coming and they couldn’t let us know they were going to Rio de Janeiro that day.
There we stood in the street with two little kids and no place to stay. Our cash assets were down to Cr$4.50 (around $0.72), and that was long before the days of credit cards. A hotel was out of the question. I remembered that one time I was with Don and he had stopped by a missionary’s house. I happened to remember their name, so we walked back to a store in the neighborhood and I looked up their name in the phone book. The fact they were Americans made it easier to pick them out of the huge book. The missionary’s wife answered the phone and said her husband had gone to a meeting and would only be back late that night. I explained our predicament and she said we were welcome to come to their house. She told me which buses we would have to take to get to their neighborhood and which stop was closest to their house. The big city was unfamiliar to us, and it was getting dark and the garoa (a drizzling rain typical of São Paulo) had started to fall. I had a vague idea of where I had been with Don but I had to stand in the aisle of the bus leaning over our suitcase and peering out the front to watch for the right bus stop. In the normally chaotic traffic of São Paulo, the driver had to stop suddenly. The passengers watched as a tall American clutching a suitcase slid headfirst down the length of the diesel-coated aisle and came to a stop at the side of the driver.
We got off the bus in the right neighborhood, but in the dark I didn’t recognize the streets. The address we gave the people we met didn’t help a lot because the street was winding and there were a lot of side streets with similar names. Finally we came across someone who knew of an American family that lived around there and we found our destination.
When we had gotten on the last bus, we told Rachel and Rick to go under the turnstile because we didn’t have much money and we didn’t want to pay for another bus ticket. But Rick liked the thought of spinning the turnstile and got through it before we could stop him. There went another Cr$0.50. But the Lord had promised that we would always have enough for our needs. That night we went to bed in a stranger’s house after travelling for 12 hours, and we still had money: Cr$2 ($0.25).
We went to church with the missionaries the next day, and on Monday they took us to the Rosses’ house where we got more details of the story. The churches in SP rented a bus for the trip to Rio for a church dedication, and they reserved a seat for us. When I didn’t show up, they thought I had come to SP and gone back home already. For four days straight, Don had tried to call one of our church members in SCRP to let us know their plans, but he never got through. As a result, we missed a church dedication in Rio de Janeiro, but, boy, did we gain an experience in São Paulo we will never forget!
The Paraguay experience: chickens, pigs, and a horse
Our visit to our colleagues, the Eldwyn Rogers family in Asuncion, Paraguay, is another experience we remember for different reasons. I remember the trips into the countryside and listening to preaching in Guaraní sprinkled with Spanish here and there, while we sat outside under the shade of trees, and pigs and chickens wandered in and out of the grass-covered huts at will. Abbie’s most vivid (and probably only) memory is being coaxed by the Rogers kids to ride a horse, which promptly threw her to the ground and gave her a sore back for days. That was also her first and last contact with a horse. Her attitude toward riding horses since then has always been, “Never again!”
My driver's licence: not learning how to drive, but learning how to get one -- in Brazil and in Arkansas
My transportation challenge wasn’t horse-related; it was getting my driver’s license. I took the written and road test and got my license on November 30, on the first try. That was so rare that the examiner remarked, “You did it in one day!” Actually, it took 2 ½ months. I started in the middle of September getting all the documents, and then had to take a course from the local driving school and get a learner’s permit before taking the test in Portuguese, followed by the road test. No matter I had driven 24,000 miles the year before. That foreshadowed what happened when we moved to Arkansas from Portugal in 2016, when I was 70. Because the system showed that my last US license was from Colorado in the 1980s, I had to take the written test and get a 30-day permit that required me to have a licensed adult in the car with me. When I took the road test, I remarked that I had driven on three continents, including São Paulo in Brazil, Lisbon in Portugal and Naples in Italy. I started driving at 16, long before the 40-year-old examining officer was even born. He thought that was funny. I tried to find that funny.
A visit to the dentist: That's not the way we did it in the States
What Abbie didn’t find funny at all was her visit to a dentist in Brazil. Of course, that’s no fun anywhere, but when a tooth broke and she had to go to the dentist, she wrote in a letter to my mother,
“I sat in the chair fanning my face so the gnats wouldn't get in my nose and mouth while he was working on me. (No screens on the windows.) The appointment desk is just a small table in the corner of the room where he works. His daughter helps him some and she came in with no uniform and didn't wash her hands (in the room anyway). She stood there and chewed on her fingernails while handing him the tools.
That was quite a difference from the dental offices she went to in the States.
Sink or Swim: The SOS method of language learning
Then, there’s the obvious obstacle that probably comes to mind first. The language. That, of course, is not so much an obstacle for young children. In a few months, Rick, 3, was repeating anything he heard in either language. In December I entered this in my journal,
The other day Abbie had Rick sweeping the food crumbs out from under the table (because he's mainly responsible for them being there in the first place). As he swept, he was saying over and over, "Vem aqui, garbage." (Come here, garbage.) In order for him to say it all in Portuguese, we told him that in Portuguese the word for garbage is "lixo". He registered that bit of information and went back to sweeping, saying, "Come here, lixo." We all feel that way at times. We can't talk either language right anymore. It's all mixed up together.
We didn’t take any language lessons. What we learned was just by living and working among the people. For Abbie, that was mostly in domestic settings and shopping for the needs of the household, which included two young children. In the beginning, Sis. Jeannie sometimes went with her for some of the shopping, and she helped with the basic homemaker’s vocabulary. I was often away, travelling with Bro. Steve or going to São Paulo for documents or money. Abbie had Sis. Jeannie right next door in case of any emergency and we were thankful for that. I recently went through some of my mother’s papers, which included letters she received and kept, and I found a letter Sis. Jeannie Montgomery wrote our parents the first year we were in Brazil. We learned the story from the other side of the dividing wall between our houses. Jeannie went on and on about how glad she was that we were living next door. Jeannie said Abbie was a real blessing to her because, for the first time in over 20 years on the mission field, she finally had a neighbor that spoke English. We never know all the ways the Lord can use us, do we?
As for me, I’m addicted to languages. Even before we left the States, I listened over and over to a small vinyl record with Brazilian Portuguese phrases, so that when we got to Brazil I could greet people appropriately at any time of the day, “Good morning”, “Good afternoon”, etc. I could say “thank you”, and when we arrived at the airport in Rio de Janeiro and went through immigration I tried out what I had learned and told the officer I didn’t speak Portuguese. “Não falo Português,” I said. He shot back in English, “But you just did.” I realized I should have been practicing the phrase, “Esta é a única coisa que sei dizer em Português.” (This is the only thing I can say in Portuguese.) But, that wasn’t on the record.
Within two days, even before I could buy my own grammar book and dictionary, I borrowed books from Bro. Don Ross and studied Portuguese. There were church services practically every night somewhere, and I concentrated on every vowel and every syllable the speakers said. These strange sounds were puzzle pieces I had to fit into a complete picture of proper Brazilian Portuguese grammar and syntax. The new sounds represented masculine or feminine; singular or plural; past, present, or future; the names of objects and abstract expressions I would need to know to be able to preach Bible truths.
Whenever I spoke at a service, (Don and Steve made sure I did that often), I preached in English and one of them interpreted. That lasted one month, then I “preached” in Portuguese for the first time. Well, I read from a text I had crafted using a grammar book, dictionary and the Bible. I was so engrossed in this process that it was almost a month later that I wrote in my journal, “This is the first time I’ve even thought about the US.” That was because we had just gotten back the first slides I had turned in for developing and they were taken before we left the States.
It had never been my practice to read a sermon and writing a message was time-consuming. But preaching through an interpreter was not much better. **At the end of May, two months after we got to Brazil, I spoke for the last time through an interpreter. By the end of June I was using an outline instead of a full text and I began speaking extemporaneously from notes. Mercifully, those notes and written messages have long since disappeared. I’m sure I would be appalled at the Portuguese with which I persecuted the saints in those early days. But I must say, they were always very gracious and forgiving and endured with kindness the way I massacred their native tongue.
Christmas comes every year: our 1972 version
That’s a pretty fair summary of our first nine months in Brazil. By the end of 1972, we were fully at home in a foreign culture. Even though Christmas was nothing like what we were used to, we took that in stride. There was no snow, it was summertime and hot; there was no turkey or ham on the table. We dined on rice and beans and tomatoes. There were no presents to exchange. The only semblance of giving we experienced was brought to us by the members of the Ribeirão dos Cubas mission point Steve and I preached at every Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t a village, just a community of neighboring small farms, and the brethren remembered the Montgomerys and us in this season. They gifted us with three chickens and a pig. We had made it. We were home.
Christmas 1973? We couldn't have guessed...
The New Year was just around the corner. That whole year would be a training period, culminating on December 28, 1973, when a near-fatal accident suddenly changed the entire course of our lives. As we enjoyed our rice and beans in peace and quiet on Christmas Day in 1972, no one in either family could have foreseen how abruptly our lives would be changed forever a year later.
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