Fortaleza

Sunday 30th September and we arrive in the coastal town of Fortaleza, way up north in Brazil, in what would later be our last road trip in our cars for the year. Yip, Fortaleza would be where we would leave the cars. Arriving in the afternoon first thing we did was head to the beach. Great idea!! After all the driving we'd been doing for the last few days since Rio it was nice to sit back and relax, enjoying some fresh coconut juice at the beach. We met our contact at the local shopping mall before heading to the church where we would be staying for the next two nights, not before we joined in the church service. Even though I didn't really understand what was going on (we arrived at the service late, we were exhausted and it was in Portuguese), it was fun being at a service outside under the moonlight with palm trees around us. 

Being close to the equator it's now hot all the time. It hardly gets cool at night even, the main weather changes these days are humidity. More or less humidity from place to place. Our time at the church was while we waited for our new accommodation, "The Mansion", to become available. While staying at the church us girls took the opportunity to have a pedicure and manicure time one evening, while the rest of us did a gym workout by moonlight!! Great fun and definitely needed (both the beautifying and body workout!!). 

 Katherine chilling while Natalie

gives Tanya a manicure

We went to Fortaleza to support Herbert and Lorelei, a young missionary couple who have started an Iris base in Fortaleza, partnering with missionaries from YWAM. They'd just been given the lease to a huge multi-roomed (12 I think!) house in the city where the vision was for them to live in a community of missionaries, in time bringing prostitutes leaving the streets to come and live with them. 

Cleaning madness!

When they got the keys to the house it had been abandoned for a year so was ridiculously dirty and rundown. We had some serious cleaning to do before going to sleep that day. Pity the water ran out right when we'd finished cleaning so none of us could take showers for the first 2 days!!! Going to sleep that dirty is not great!! But lucky we got the electricity and lights working so at least we had lights :)

A taste of what we had to clean!

One of the rooms where we stayed, while

cleaning the house to make it habitable!

Iris Fortaleza work in the local favela and with prostitutes, amongst other ministries. This is where my heart is as well so I really enjoyed my time there. The team are an amazing team of young men and women sold out for Christ, I really enjoyed being with them as well. Going into the favela was fun, getting to know some local families. Iris have a prayer house in the centre of the favela where we went to a few times to pray and worship. I love that the first thing they did before starting to minister is start a prayer house to intercede for the city and nation. Turns out their prayer house used to be owned by the main drug leader, as evidenced by the bullet holes in the walls when they moved in, the fact that the house is higher than neighbouring houses (so the gang members can keep an eye on the community and when the cops were coming), helped by a ledge almost all around the house which the watchman could run around to have a 360 degree of the community). 

Friday night and we went to the streets at 10pm to minister to prostitutes and transvestites. What an amazing night of ministry, one of my highlights from the whole year. We started by praying and worshipping together on the beach. We then split into small groups of 4/5 and went in different directions to minister. I had a great time meeting people, praying for them, giving them words of knowledge from God. Seeing people visibly encouraged and touched by the Spirit before my very eyes makes what we do worthwhile. 

Worshipping on the beach before going to streets

Much of our time in Fortaleza was involved in family logistics of planning the next steps of our journey. We have decided to break for Thanksgiving and Christmas so we really are onto the last few weeks of this journey. Some practical considerations at this time were what to do with our cars (it's not possible to drive them between the last countries of Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana) so do we leave the cars or ship them. The problem with leaving them is that it's not legal to import foreign cars into Brazil. Hmm. We also have Tanya at 8 months pregnant so we needed to think about where she would give birth to Zion. 

In the end we decided to try gift our cars to the growing Iris base in Fortaleza as this is where they'd be best made use of, this of course would be dependent on the Brazilian government letting us transfer ownership to them. Tanya and a few people would stay in Fortaleza until she gave birth. On Monday I got on a bus with 5 other people and headed to Manaus, the jungle town in the middle of the Amazon, ready for my third and last jungle adventure.

A map of South America showing where we've been