Evan's comments:

I was able to finally meet the owner and wife of "Mr. Cheney's Cookies"! He saw our name tags in the temple cafeteria and asked if we knew Jay Cheney.  He is a really nice humble guy and appears on his way to become even richer here in Brazil. I think he has 8 or 9 franchises already, 3 in São Paulo alone.

He will be visiting Jay and then Utah in a couple of weeks.

The humanitarian missionary work keeps piling up--there's so much to do that it's impossible to do it all. So we just have to trust the Lord to lead us to do the most important things first. 

Here's a typical example:

--Soon after arriving in Brazil, the Welfare Director over all of Brazil said that since Hiroko speaks Japanese and since the church hasn't made many inroads into the Japanese community here in São Paulo (there are a million Japanese-Brazilians here) maybe we should look into finding a welfare project for a Japenese organization.

After settling in our apartment and getting over the jet lag, and learning the bus and subway systems we looked-up some Japanese organizations, visited the Japanese cultural area here in São Paulo a few times and made a list of potential organizations. (all this was sandwiched in between learning our way around São Paulo, doing all the other welfare assignments, finding a ward to attend, etc.) 

--After a few more weeks and after going over the Japanese list a number of times we couldn’t figure out how to do anything for any of the organizations, so we stopped looking for awhile.

--Then one day, for some reason I brought up the Japanese potential organization list again and kinda zeroed-in on one of them that takes care of mentally handicapped people. We hadn’t considered it before since it is about an hour and a half away from São Paulo and we have no car, and there are plenty of other welfare opportunities right here in the city (of 22 million!). But I thought that we could at least try to make a phone call, and after several atempts at trying to communicate in Portuguese over the phone (it’s really hard for me to understand Portuguese over the phone) I was finally able to find someone who spoke Japanese and gladly handed the phone to Hiroko. She found out that this organization had a small administrative office close to downtown, so she set-up an appointment to visit the director there. It was just to see if they were a good organization or not and if they would meet the Church’s criteria for help.

--About a week later on a Friday, and on a really hot humid day, and after riding buses and subways and searching for the address along busy streets we finally found the office. We had to figure out how to get them to let us in and who to talk to and it looked like we weren’t going to be able to talk to anyone when finally the man Hiroko had talked to heard us talking and came to meet Hiroko. Up to this point, if you had asked me, I felt that we had probably wasted way too much time in trying to do something for the Japanese community! But the man invited us to sit down in a tiny, crowded room and He and Hiroko began talking in Japanese. Every once in a while I would ask Hiroko to ask him something and she would then continue the conversation. 

--As we left the meeting we both felt really good about the organization.

--On Monday the Welfare Director asked us about our meeting and after our comments he said that maybe we should follow-up and visit the actual facility in the other city. We both had felt that we should, so Hiroko again used her Japanese to set-up an appointment to visit the care center. It  wasn’t easy for her to make all the arrangements, but she finally was able to.

--The director who we had met with previously drove us to and from the treatment center. We went with another one of the Church’s welfare services employees (Marcos, a great member who we consider to be “the salt of the earth”).  We were so impressed with the care, organization and love that the staff had for these patients. The staff treated us like royalty and eagerly showed us what they are trying to do to help their patients. It was kinda hard to hold back the tears (and of course Hiroko couldn’t). We all felt the Spirit so strong at that place.  So of course when we reported back to the Welfare Director, he wanted us to initiate the process for helping them, which of course we did. And not surprisingly, it was approved by the Church.  We will now be spending a lot of time developing this welfare project with them.

--If this were the only reason for us to come to Brazil then our mission would already be worth it!

Of course there are other examples of the Lord guiding welfare missionaries and church leaders to all to the orphanages, poor communities without water or sufficient food, hospitals, run-down day care centers, neo-natal resuscitation, womens shelters, even a community of native brazilians (lamanites of course) way out in the country that need our assistance. 

As I’ve always said, I’m loving every minute of every day here. It is truly an amazing experience to see the hand of the Lord as he guides us to the people he wants us to care for.

We love you all,

Chau