I've been putting off this last post, the wrap up to the Brazil missions trip, for quite a while now. It's now Saturday after I returned back, and I haven't had but a moment to really sit back and think about what happened. Sure, I had the whole plane flight back, but once I got on California soil the world turned upside down. So here's a slight recap of what happened the days before:

Friday afternoon was a recap of Tuesday afternoon - we cooked for the homeless and I sat in front helping them take down names of people who showed up. Now. First of all, let's suppose the church is a little loud. Then suppose the people talking to you are speaking in Portuguese, many of them with accents (sotaques) that were fairly strange. Then add in that the people who are talking are missing a couple of teeth. Now you're starting to get the idea of how difficult it was. Friday night, the whole crew piled on back to the two houses (CASA I and CASA II). The ride back home was fairly amusing, as I had Jenny in stitches at the train station (I was ranting again about boys, and we all know how amusing the rants about boys could be). We ended up being wedged into a train Japanese style - no one could figure why there were so many people returning on the trains at 9pm.

Saturday morning, bright and early, I got a ride back to the OM missions house. I had a chance to talk and pray with Jenny before I left, say good bye to a lot of people, and just in general enjoy my time there. Paulina had been staying at Cleyde's house, so she came back and between the two of us and Valtiner (Walter), we hit the town and shopped until we dropped. Actually, it was more that we shopped until the stores closed, which was a little early. We raced to get back to OM by the time the car was needed (Júlio had to pick some people up for the youth meeting that night), hooked up with Rogerio, and was watching a movie. But we got a couple of phone calls asking for Júlio... finally figured out that he was supposed to do some translation work for a videographer for OM. We finally got him to send it to Valtiner, and the two of us, plus Rogerio, translated the 45 second clip from English to Portuguese. The process went something like this: Speaker talks. Elaine transcribes. Once English transcription is done, Elaine does Portuguese translation. Valtiner goes through and smooths out grammatical errors. Rogerio goes through and reads through, smoothing out grammatical errors with Valtiner one more time.

After the movie and the mad dash to the video store to return some movies, the four of us went to some hole in the wall place to get supper. It ended up being a hot dog/burger stand in the middle of nowhere, outdoors. Paulina and I split a nice chicken/cheese sandwich and headed back to pass out before church.

Sunday morning, we headed to pick up Cleyde and go to church with Rogerio and, it turns out, Valtiner. Paulina couldn't go in the morning because the children of a close friend of hers was sick, so she and Julio headed out in the morning to run some errands and drop her off. The other four of us got lost on the way to church and made it in time for Sunday school in a big drafty concrete building. I was NOT dressed for that, trust me. The people we were going to meet weren't even there, though, so we stopped off at Carlos Santos' house to chat with Frances, Sarah, Julia, and Lucas. A bunch of us (five - Rogerio, Júlio, Valtiner, Paulina and I) went to lunch at a place called the "Vaca Preta" (Black Cow). Brazilian buffet. Mm.

Anyhow, so I was taking the bus back, so I got dropped off at the bus (after dropping off the future Pastor Júlio at his preaching gig - his last words, in English, were, "Stay out of trouble"), barely made it on, got dropped off at Garulhos airport, barely made it on the plane (silly 2 hour lines to check in baggage), and then I was off for a fairly peaceful flight back to the States.

Things were NOT peaceful when I got back to the States, though. After landing in SFO at 9:15am, I started to make phone calls as requested to my boss in San Mateo. I finally got in touch with him, only to find out, an hour later as I stepped into the office, that I was let go as a part of a massive layoff. Our group was hit hard - from 12 to 3, and I found myself suddenly jobless. Hence my mad panic to get the rest of my life in order. There were so many things to do - letters to write, cubes to clean up, that and my belt test this weekend. All things considered, it was a crazy, crazy week, and I'm just starting to get back into the swing of things. I'm starting to look at jobs next week, so we'll see how things go.

More about what I learned in the next missive.