Rowes’ Brazil Mission Trip 7/18/09

Today we visited two different projects Brazil Mission Society supports. One was a Lutheran School (which has 900 students in it) that has partnered with Social Workers in the community to provide special services for children that otherwise probably would not make it scholastically (mainly underprivileged).

The other project was really interesting. It started out as a Lutheran School then expanded to work with the public schools to do need-assessments on how this particular ministry could help in the community. They now work with high-risk children---who were going to be booted out of the public schools and an arrangement is made to keep them in the public school for their ever day classes but assess what kinds of programs would motivate or stimulate their desire to learn. As a result--the Church has partnered with different resources in the community to provide for dance, music training, workshops, English, physics, and math, work classes sponsored by Wal-Mart (such as cooking classes where the young people are finally certified by the state to work in stores as bakers), sports programs that the public schools have cut because of money (and the church has people who coach the sports…soccer is a big one here), etc. Evidently Wal-Mart likes partnering in educational pursuits with under-privileged kids and they support four of this church’s programs. The ministry presently has 1500 young people, many of whom, with their families, join the church. In other words, much like Trinity, they go out into the community, find the need, and seek to provide for the need--then finding the people wanting to be a part of their ministry because they are so alive and concerned.

Tomorrow, after church, we are going up into the mountains to the orphanage.

The weather has been nice and comfortable--about 60-70 degrees each day.

Let you know more later.

God’s Blessings,
Pastor Rowe

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