Building work at community center 'The Sower House'

It´s been more than three years since we started building a missionary house in the back yard of ‘The Sower House’. This house will serve as living space for long-term and short-term missionaries who come to work with us at the community center. We can finally tell you that we´re in the final stage of this building project!

Starting the construction work in 2010

At the end of 2010

The missionary house in 2011

2012

June of 2013

In the beginning of June, a small group of young people from a church in Pennsylvania, USA, came on a mission trip to Brazil to help us out with the finishing touches of this big building project. They worked really hard during a whole week and were able to finish all the external painting work of the missionary house. With great results! 

Great results!

Thanks to a very generous donation from my (Dot) church in Holland, we´ve already started furnishing the part of the house that will serve short-term volunteers. We´ve been busy buying lots of supplies for the house: from a bunk bed and refrigerator to curtains, cups, plates and pans! It´s been wonderful to see God provide everything we need to improve the structure of the project and we´re very grateful to Him for giving us the opportunity to create a nice living space, so we´re able to receive well the people who are willing to come work with us and serve the kids and families we attend at ‘The Sower House’. In October we hope to welcome the first short-term volunteers in the new house!

                                                  The bath room ready to be used!
 

                             Working hard to get the kitchen and living room ready too

Brand new bunk bed ready to be used!

But the building work around ‘The Sower House’ doesn´t stop at this point… There are still many other things to do! Our next project is focused on turning the concrete back yard of ‘The Sower House’ into a nice playground area for the kids to enjoy. In the neighborhood where these kids live, there´s not even one park, square or playground area where they can run around, play and meet each other in a space properly developed for them. So it´ll be really great to be able to offer them at least a small playground area to safely play in at the community center.

Our concrete back yard

Enough space for a nice play ground!

We´ve also started to do some building work in ‘The Sower House´s’ main kitchen area. We would like to improve and enlarge the kitchen structure and create a big, well equipped kitchen that will not only serve for preparing food and snacks for the kids´ program, but will also serve as a good place for giving cooking and baking classes and workshops for moms and women from the community.  

                     Seu Luiz working hard to put two new windows in the kitchen wall

                                       The two new windows in the kitchen wall

So there are many challenges still ahead of us and we know that we depend on God´s provision in order to one day see all these desires become reality, desires that are focused on better serving the kids and families God has put on our path.

God bless you!

Love,

Caio & Dot

Some special holidays!

We had a few very busy months at the end of last year, so by the time it was Christmas we were more than ready for some holidays, rest and no set responsibilities. The Christmas celebration of community center Casa Semear was the last event of our work year and it turned out to be a wonderful celebration!

Some 150 people came to the small Baptist church we were allowed to use for the Christmas celebration; it was a great opportunity for us to share the Gospel with these people! The kids also played an active role by performing a musical that explains God´s plan of salvation.

And of course the handing out of Christmas gifts was a very special moment too, it´s always amazing to see so many happy faces and the great joy a simple present causes in these kids!

The following weeks were very relaxing and quiet. We used our time well, resting lots and reloading our energies after the extremely busy time we´d had. We spent Christmas and New Year´s Eve with Caio´s family here in São Paulo and also used our free time to work on some of our craft projects. 

Christmas 2012

Caio´s craft project!

In the second half of January it was finally time for my parents to leave behind  a cold, snowy Holland and spend three weeks with us here in Brazil! The last time they were here, was more than three years ago! We had a wonderful time together. We tried to show them a bit of the normal, Brazilian life by, among other things, taking them to the local market on Saturdays and having pastel for lunch.

We also spent a week travelling along the shore to visit several different beaches and small villages that are very beautiful and famous amongst tourists. If you live in São Paulo and want to show a bit of the Brazilian nature, you quickly turn to the northern beaches of the state of São Paulo, they´re worth it! Together we really enjoyed our holiday at the beach! 

Joseline (who was also in Brazil during this same time) and her boyfriend, Bruno, joined us at the beach for two days, so we were able to celebrate together mum and dad´s 35^th wedding anniversary! Very special!

Celebrating mum & dad´s 35th wedding anniversary

In February it was time to go back to work at community center Casa Semear. Mum and dad were able to see a bit of our work with the kids and also joined us in the program for a few days, and then the time came for them to return to Holland. 

Joseline also returned to Holland in February, so now I´m again the only member of our family living at this side of the ocean ;0) But we´re very thankful for the wonderful time God gave us together here in Brazil!

And now we are back to our normal, daily responsibilities: the SuperWoman program started again two weeks ago and besides that, running the community center in general, continues to be a huge challenge with a very small team of 4 attending a big group of around 80 kids!

Doing home visits in the slum

Caio has also returned to his normal, daily routine of working for the Christian publishing house. He received his first whole book translation job and is very busy with it right now. It´s a book by D.A. Carson that needs to be translated from English into Portuguese. Caio is enjoying his new job and we´ve been able to see God opening new doors and confirming him in his ministry. Caio also finished his theology studies (Master in Divinity) and we´ll be celebrating his graduation on Saturday, 2^nd of March.

And, last but not least, something that has been on our minds more and more is of course the arrival of our baby boy or girl and we´re trying to prepare ourselves for parenthood as best we can. We´ve been on the adoption waiting list for about 8 months now, time flies!! We don´t know how much longer we´ll have to wait, but we hope that we´ll be able to welcome our little boy or girl still this year. And so we´re gladly expecting...

God bless you! Love,

Caio & Dorothee

Casa Semear: Overview of 2012

Here´s a short video with some pictures of everything that happened at community center Casa Semear during 2012! 

We´re very grateful for everything God did in and through us at Casa Semear and in the hearts of the children, teenagers and families we were able to work with during this year!

All honour to Him!

Picture overview of October & November

Before we celebrate the start of a brand new year, we want to share with you a picture update about our life and work here in São Paulo and everything that has happened during the past few months.

October 2012

The Super Little Ones´ camp-in party

In October it was time for a very special program for our Super Little Ones (a name they themselves came up with for their group of 5-7 year olds). At community center Casa Semear, besides the normal weekly program, every now and then we try to invest some extra time and attention in each of the different age groups, and this time the youngest kids were the lucky ones!

We organized a huge camp-in party at the community center, just for them; two days filled with joy and laughter, a very full program including lots of games, arts and crafts activities, barbecue, watching IceAge4, a photo-shoot and sleeping in real tents!

 

The kids had a wonderful time, although we, aunts and uncles, were totally exhausted by the end of the weekend ;0) But that´s fine, it was absolutely worth it! It was great to see all those happy faces and be able to offer these kids a different environment for a bit; a time to just have fun and to forget for a while about the problems they, although still very young, already face in their lives…

 

Social Awareness Day

The 27th of October was a very special day this year: we organized a new and very well succeeded event at community center Casa Semear. In collaboration with Mackenzie University (one of São Paulo´s public universities), we organized a Social Awareness Day for the community surrounding Casa Semear. 

It was wonderful to see how God provided everything that we needed to run this event; in a quite short period of time we managed to get a number of different volunteers and professionals to come and serve the community in different ways.

 

Together with more than 40 volunteers who came out that day to help us, we were able to offer the community a day filled with fun, advice and health orientation. It was a very busy day, with lawyers, dentists, story tellers, candy floss, social workers, nurses weighing people and measuring their blood pressure, diabetes tests, hairdressers and a lot of fun and games for the children! We had a total of 300 people come to Casa Semear that Saturday, and were very pleased with the results. We would like to turn this into a yearly event and already have a number of ideas for next year.

 

November 2012

Road trip to the beach

In November, we took the SemearKids, group of 8-10 year olds, on a road trip to the beach for a day! Most of them had never seen the sea before, so you can imagine how special this outing was for them! They enjoyed all of it very much: the water, the waves, the sand and the sun.

 

As poor kids who grow up in the slums of a metropole like São Paulo and hardly ever get a chance to leave the concrete jungle, there´s a lot they don´t know or understand about nature and the sea, which resulted in some very funny comments and questions from their part. At a certain moment, Marcus (10 years old) standing at the seashore while running some sand through his hands, asked me: Auntie, did they make this stuff out of sand or cement? When I explained to him that it was sand, but that it hadn´t been made by humans, he looked very puzzled and said: How come it wasn´t made by humans?? But someone made it right? Well, that must have been God then… he concluded.

Little Iara asked me several times that day if she was finally allowed to go back into the swimming pool again… ;0)

Adoption Support Group

Since September, Caio and I have been attending monthly meetings of one of the very few adoption support groups here in São Paulo. We started to participate in these meetings mainly because our psychologist from child services who also did our screening interviews recommended it to us as a way of preparing ourselves better for the arrival of our adoptive baby boy or girl. And I have to say that we´ve really enjoyed these meetings. 

It is really nice to get to know other couples that are in the same phase as we are, with (more or less) the same vision and motivation, and it has been very interesting and useful to share experiences and just talk about the whole subject of adoption. It suddenly turns this whole adoption process into something very real and we can see it helps us in preparing for the arrival of our little one. 

Caio´s work, new opportunities and a study Bible

In the past four months, Caio has been busy doing work for two different Christian publishing houses and besides that, he finished his last classes that were still missing for him to complete his Master in Divinity. His graduation will be in March of 2013!

But he also spent a lot of his time on a new job that God brought to him in a very special way: through one of his theology teachers, he got the chance to participate in writing and revising theological notes and comments for a new study Bible that is going to be published here in Brazil. He was able to work on different Bible books and really enjoyed this great opportunity God gave him! Over the past semester, we´ve been able to clearly see God opening new doors for him, leading him and giving him opportunities to use his gifts and talents in His kingdom.

 

God bless you! Love,

Caio & Dot