City trip to London & short visit in Holland!

It has been very quiet on this weblog for the past couple of weeks... and there´s a good reason for it: we were travelling! We spent some time in Holland and London. It wasn´t really furlough, but an extra, shorter holiday trip to Holland. Quite a while ago, we received a generous gift from one of our family members here in São Paulo especially for our 5^th wedding anniversary. First, our plan was to make a nice honeymoon trip to the Northeast coast of Brazil, but as we thought a bit more about it, we realized that we could also just use this money for an extra trip to Holland! Now what is greater fun than being able to spend some time in my home country with family and dear friends?! So that´s why in June we spend almost two weeks in the Netherlands… That is very short, you could say, but for us it was a wonderful, well spent holiday time. We enjoyed every bit of it and were able to rest from the first semester which had been quite busy and challenging.

To celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary, we also made a short city trip to London! Great fun! It was so good to be away, just the two of us, spending time sightseeing as real tourists ;0) and discovering new things & spots, walking a lot, eating fish & chips as much as we could and reading a good book in the quietness of Hyde Park.

So we really enjoyed our holidays and are ready for a busy and challenging second semester!

 

Love!

God bless,

Caio & Dot

Meeting for moms: touching stories & one great hope

Since last year when we did the camp for teenagers about the exodus, the idea that God wants to create a new society where there´s love, justice and peace, as a result of his dwelling among the people, is something very strong in our mind. For that people, who lived more than 3 thousand years ago, this hope was clear because they could compare it with the kind of life they had; a life full of slavery, oppression and injustice. As for us, the idea is a little more difficult to imagine because our lives don´t look much like that.

But there are many people to whom such hope may seem impossible, something too good to be true. In one of the parents meetings at Casa Semear, the mothers (they are the only ones who show up) had the opportunity to share their life story and their reality right now. Among the great tragedies they have to face, the heaviest of them all has to do with their partners. Husbands or boyfriends who mistreat, threaten, take advantage of, abuse, neglect them and do everything else, but to love them, is a common experience in their lives. To see your children hiding under the bed while your partner beats you up is an image that gets very close to that life of slavery, oppression and injustice. Many of them really feel like slaves because they don´t see how they can escape from this situation.

While Dot and me were talking about this, we couldn´t help but wonder how great God´s grace and love are. How such a holy and marvelous God could think it was worth it to safe a world in such a terrible condition? But it´s so good to know that He is doing it. We also talked about how much we want to see these women, one day, living in a world fully redeemed by God, being able to live a life of love, justice and peace. Tears and wounds of a life of suffering will turn into a big smile, finally life as it should be! This is the one great hope that we want to share with these moms.

Caio

Missionary house almost finished!

Two years ago, when we started the construction of a missionary house in the backyard of community center Casa Semear, we had no idea how long the building process would take and how much time, effort and faith it would cost us to complete this project! Little by little donations arrived, little by little we were able to buy the construction materials and slowly (every now and then we had to stop the building process for a while) the missionary house was built.  

 

Starting to build in 2010

Ready for the first ceiling

Group of volunteers from Scotland

First floor ready!

`Seu Luis´ working hard!

Building the second floor...

But thanks to the hard work of our builder `Seu Luis´, and the effort and dedication of many volunteers who either supported the project financially or came to Casa Semear to help build the house, we can now finally say that there´s light at the end of the tunnel! The end of the building process is near! The house is almost finished! Over the past few months we saw the construction site quickly changing into a beautiful missionary house, which is now almost ready to receive its first residents. The missionary house has three floors: the first floor will be a small apartment for one of our Brazilian missionary workers; the second floor is meant exclusively for short-term volunteers who come to serve at community center Casa Semear and the third floor, the terrace, will be our relaxing spot as we always joke around: “There´s space for a barbecue and a small swimming pool, a perfect place to hang out on warm, sunny days!”

Ready for the second ceiling

Uncle Robert helps too

Building the roof

Volunteers working hard!

Bucket after bucket full of cement

is poured out on the roof.

Building the roof terrace

Roof terrace almost ready...

As you´ve probably noticed, we´re very excited about the whole project: now we´ll soon be able to offer our short-term volunteers a great place to live at during their stay with us. And besides, for Dora, one of our Brazilian workers, this means that her very first `own´ house is almost ready and she´s so excited about creating her own home. 

Roof terrace ready!

Seu Luis´ crazy dangerous constructions!

Does this mean that the renovation process of the community center is almost done now?? No, unfortunately not! When Dora moves to her new living space, the first floor of the community center itself will be emptied, which means that we´ll be able to finally start renovating that part of the community center: it´s our goal to transform that floor into a nice, creative teen lounge space and there also is a big kitchen area on this floor which we want to renovate and start using as the central kitchen and dining-hall for the work with the children and teenagers. At the moment we´re using a tiny, little kitchen with one small oven; not very practical if you need to cook and prepare snacks for up to 40 kids!

So there´s still a lot to do, but when we look at everything that God has already given us in the past two years, how He provides every time again and how He enables us to little by little turn the community center into a well organized, well working project, we´re just so thankful to Him!! He really is able to do so much more than we often ask for or can imagine (Ephesians 3:20)!

First window ready!

We want to thank you for supporting this project!

God bless you! Love,

 

Caio & Dorothee

A few hours that make a huge difference

We´ve been busy working at Casa Semear for over a month already now. When I say ´we´, I mean myself and the other team members (Robert, Silvana, Dora and social worker Eliane).

As some of you might have read in our last newsletters, Caio practically stopped working at ABBA and is now working almost full-time for a Christian publishing house in town. So the Casa Semear team is a bit smaller than last year and that means that we also had to lower the number of kids & teenagers that participate in the program. We´re working with a group of 80 kids this year, which still is quite a big group!

 

Just to explain Caio´s job a bit better: he´s working for Vida Nova, one of the biggest, Christian publishing houses here in Brazil, for six hours a day. At the moment he does a lot of correction work of books that have just been translated into Portuguese. In the future he would like to also work on the translation of books from English into Portuguese. He works in his own time, at home as a volunteer. 

As many of you might know by now, Caio loves books and theology, so up ´till now he is really enjoying his new job. Besides the work for Vida Nova, he is still involved with ABBA too. He helps out at Casa Semear on Thursdays and every now and then he´s busy doing PR work, speaking in local churches on behalf of ABBA and developing new video material to promote ABBA.

We´re back with all the different activities at the community center and for me that means that I´m busy doing the SuperWoman program for the teen girls, giving English classes on Fridays and developing & teaching different, fun kinds of arts & crafts. Besides the animal key rings, which we´ve been producing at Casa Semear for a while already, we´re now also making beautiful, patchwork Christmas balls to hang in the Christmas tree. (One way for you to support project Casa Semear is by buying these handmade arts & crafts products. All resources will be used for the work with the kids). 

Every week we try to come up with a new, fun way of doing arts & crafts for the youngest kids, so they can also spend some time being creative while they get the opportunity to learn new skills, like using a scissors, drawing, gluing, recognizing colors and shapes etc.

Making turtles!

At the beginning of this year, I started the SuperWoman program with the teen girls looking back on 2011: What were good things that happened to you in 2011? The answers given by the girls surprised me and made me well aware of how important our role, the role of Casa Semear, is in their lives! 95% of all the answers had to do with activities of and around community center Casa Semear! When I tried to challenge the girls to think further than just the community center, their reaction was short and clear: besides the things we do at the community center, there is really nothing else going on in our lives that is so great that it would be worth mentioning! The highlights of their year are the SuperWoman meetings, the teen camp in July, the pyjamas party and the Christmas celebration! 

Sometimes we wonder if our presence in this neighborhood, in the lives of these families and kids makes any difference... it seems so little, what we do… those few hours a week that they get to spend at the community center, those few hours that we get to know them, teach them, be there for them... The rest of the week they live in such a negative, destructive environment, a world so full of violence, indifference, dangers, so cold and hard. And many times it seems as if this world they live in has a much stronger impact on their lives than the things they learn and experience in those few hours a week with us at Casa Semear…

But how wonderful is it to see how God uses these few hours a week to influence, to change their lives! These small sparks of love, attention, friendship, harmony and joy do have an impact on these kids´ lives! The huge importance of a smile, a cup of hot coffee with milk, a simple question: How are you doing?, a hug at the end of the day, before they go back home. It´s the small things that make a difference, a huge difference! Even if it doesn´t always look like it, even if we aren´t always aware of it. God wants to use us, how wonderful is that! I pray that He will use me, us, this year to touch and impact the lives of many kids & teenagers. For His honor, not ours… and for His kingdom. 

God bless you!

Love,

Caio & Dot

Christmas celebration Casa Semear – 2011

Next Thursday we will be starting a new year of work at community centre Casa Semear. As a team we took the month of January as holidays, so we´ll start the work in February again, filled with new energy, excitement and vision!

But before we start a new year, I first want to finish 2011 well by showing you some pictures of the Christmas celebration we organized in December. 

The team of community centre Casa Semear

Towards the end of the year, we got in contact with the pastor of a Baptist church near the community centre. We were surprised by his interest in our work and willingness to cooperate with us and help us out with some things we needed. He allowed us to use his church building for our Christmas celebration! Which was great, because as Christmas was coming closer and closer, we were getting quite worried about the location of the party; we were expecting around 200-250 people! Invited to the yearly Christmas celebration are the children who participate in our program & their families… As we have around 90 children participating in the program… well, do the math! That´s a huge group of people! Which really doesn´t fit in the community centre itself, so we needed a different location. A location that couldn´t cost too much, because we really didn´t have any money for this Christmas party. This explains our great excitement when we found out we could use the Baptist church building for free! 

Lots of presents!!

 So it was a wonderful Christmas celebration! The church building was absolutely full of people and the program was a success: the children performed a musical for their parents and relatives; a musical about the Gospel & Christmas, that really explained God´s plan of salvation very clearly. The children were really nervous; because for most of them this was going to be the very first time they were performing something like this on a real stage in front of so many people… But it went really well, everybody was so proud of them!

The musical...

 

The pastor sharing the Gospel

After that, the pastor shared a short message about Christmas and the Gospel; he also invited the parents to come and be a part of this church and participate in their small, home bible study groups. I had made a retrospective video with lots of pictures of the past year; which was received with a lot of attention and excitement. And then finally, we got to the best part of the celebration (according to the children at least ;0): handing out all the Christmas presents! We had managed, again, to find a sponsor for every single child in our program, who had bought several presents for the children, like clothes, shoes and toys. It was a huge party! Some of the sponsors had come to the Christmas celebration and were able to hand the presents to `their´ child themselves, really special! It was wonderful to see all those happy faces and to be able to surprise the children this way! Afterwards, there were snacks & drinks and every family came by the community centre later to pick up a huge food package.

Food packages

It was a wonderful and special Christmas celebration and at the same time it was kind of a goodbye party... because we wouldn´t see the children for about 7 weeks… Holidays! Great… and then again, we really miss the children and are already looking forward to next Thursday!

God bless you!

Caio & Dorothee