One Mission: Brazil

The diary entries

Josh Dye
Public relations intern
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

It could be a One Mission motto: “Mission trips and service projects give young adults a greater vision of world needs—they discover they can make a difference.” This is Dr Wayne French. He is chaplain on Avondale College of Higher Education’s Lake Macquarie campus and staff advisor for the student mission club. “[Young adults] return home with a heightened sense of their personal abilities and are inspired to make a difference in their local communities. It often changes the direction of their lives forever.”

Here is an example. Four Avondale students travel up the Amazon River in northern Brazil over the yearend. Their mission? To work with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency to build toilets in several remote villages. Excerpts from their diaries follow.

First impressions

It’s early in the morning; the humidity is stifling; the rain pours down. The clay banks of the Amazon are incredibly slippery. We’re in a land of beautiful and unknown wildlife—alligators, anacondas, jaguars, macaws and piranhas. We’re given life jackets as we huddle together under a small tin roof on the boat we’ll call home for the next 14 hours.

The buzz in the air is a mixture of nervous energy, excitement and fear. The journey is rough. Patchy sleep is periodically interrupted as we abruptly brake to avoid a log—or is it an alligator? We forget our concerns as the rain stops and the sun rises. The warm yellow yoke of light reflecting off the boat’s wake comforts us. Surrounded by dense, lush rainforest, we continue into the unknown.—Anastasia Benton

Christmas favelas

We spend Christmas Day in the infamous shanty towns—or favelas—of Rio de Janeiro. It’s an eerie experience. The favelas expand outwards and upwards from the city centre, as if crawling up the surrounding mountains. It’s a beautiful sight, yet harsh and threatening—the favelas are home to criminals, drug lords, gang members.

Our guide is the minister of a new Seventh-day Adventist church, a humble building—not much more than a shed and a couple of rooms—that now, in the midst of the violence and theft, hosts Bible studies, free educational classes for children and worship services. The Lord is working on the people in this place of unrest.—Blair Lemke

God’s hand at work

I can clearly see God’s leading on our trip. We get lost within the first hour of our journey up the Amazon; we all avoid sickness; we overcome the language barrier; and our food supplies, despite running low, never run out.

God uses us to minister to the villagers. It feels like we are literally His hands and feet—playing with the children, building toilets for the villagers and sharing our faith through the translators. We feel part of the same family despite being so far from home.—Olivia Jones

God’s love

At night when we have worship, the chief asks if his family can come and listen. The theme of one of these worships is love. We read from 1 Corinthians 13, including my favourite verse—13: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (NIV). We take something as simple as love for granted, but it seems some of the villagers find it harder to comprehend. The worship leader, Dada, asks the husbands and wives to hug and to tell each other, “I love you.” Dada tells us later this will be the first time some of them have said this to their spouse—many don’t marry for love. Compared with other statements in the Bible, this one—to love—seems so simple, but to love sincerely is difficult.—Megan Townend