Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

I hope all of you are having an amazing Christmas! After recieving several e-mails expressing the amount of snow that I´m ´missing out on´ in Oregon I have to admit that I am missing the family. I love the holidays with the family, but It really has been good here.

Thank you everyone who has commented on my Christmas video to my family! Seriously didn´t expect it to be quite the hit that it was with really anyone else besides my family. I have really enjoyed just hearing from long time friends, co-workers, and of coarse family from the movie! You can check it out if you want at: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/video/video.php?v=517295848602

A little of what we´ve done-- Last night was the main party... oh, back up... I didn´t say much on this but we (our Brazil team) went to a new city in Brazil this past Sunday, called Juiz de Fora, MG... Its in the state next to Rio and its very pretty with awesome people. We have been staying in a Church that´s been treating us like royalty, taking us out to eat every lunch and buying us a great breakfast and dinner to have at the church. We have been playing futbol all the time and had a super fun time 2 days ago with some guys around 18-19 years old who were very good! It was super fun! We also have been doing the first open air evangilism stuff and been to several churches where we have done skits, sung songs, and preach or give our testimonies. I am speaking on Friday for open air stuff so that´ll be new for me. But we have been at this church since Sunday and we leave to go back to Rio on Sunday. They have a website and some pictures of the the past sunday where we did a few songs. http://www.presbiteriana.com/?pg=galeria&id=42

So yesterday was the party and there were all our group and then about 10 other people that joined us and they prepared this really beautifully set up dinner. In Brazil, the party starts on Christmas Eve and you come together at 10 pm and have little ordurves until 12 am (midnight)! Then at midnight you start to eat! and we ate, talked, and danced till 2 am! It was very fun! I was teaching them East Coast Swing dancing and they were teaching us some different samba styles and a Brazilian Square dance thing. It was awesome! I have eaten so well!

So we just were taken out to eat lunch today where the store owner opened up his store JSUT FOR US and so we had a great lunch and then tonight at I think 7 we have a church service here at the church where we are doing a few songs.

So that´s how our Brazilian christmas is going. Thank you so much for any prayers or thoughts.. I miss you all so much but know that I´m doing great and really enjoying the Holiday time here with these people. amazing people!

Merry Christmas!

The Party Continues - Week 2

Hey!

So here´s another quick recap of what has happened since my last post. I wanted to have pictures on here but i couldn´t yet... they are coming, so just hang on!

- Went to this huge rave that I wrote about a little in the previous blog, and it was outta control! techno/rave on one stage, funk on another, and hip-hop at the third stage. It was at an closed down amuesment park that was very similar to a mini-disneyland. thousands of kids, a bunch of dancing (fron 11pm to 5 am, straight techno/funk/hip-hop dancing!!!), and a strong christian influence. The whole point behind the party was to reach kids where they are at and the whole thing was a christian organization that put it on. I got to talk to a few people about ywam and what im doing. A few people were very promising to hear where their heart was at as well as their beliefs. it was just crazying thinking, ´were doing outreach right now at a huge rave with 10000 people!´ crazy cool stuff!

- We had our first official free day on Monday, so we took a van to downtown rio and explored the bazarrs and market places, then headed over to barra(pronounced baha) beach which happens to be the most expensive part of all Rio, and we went to ´Barra Shopping´-- the biggest mall in Latin America!... we went inside for an hour or so but everything was super expensive and i didn´t want to be in a mall in Brazil so 5 of us walked to Barra Beach 30 minutes away and went body surfing and swimming in the South American Atlantic for the FIRST TIME!!! it was awesome! really warm, not like the Gulf though, but board shorts no problem. Later that night we met Roger, one of the guys that picked us up at the airport and has become an awesome friend, and he took all 9 of our team+ one other girl out to eat at what he just told us was a, ´Brazilian BBQ.´ We were all super excited but had NO IDEA what was in store!..... All 10 of us that he took confidentlycan say that it was the best meal we have ever had in our entire lives! i will post some pictures but it was all you could eat with about 6+ servers waiting on us 11 people hand-and-foot! over 12 different types of legit meat-- I ate lamb, steak, pork, ribs, chicken, chicken heart, octopus, heart of a palm tree, sushi, salmon, caviar, several types of other fish, plus other stuff i can´t name and then i washed it all down with fresh coconut milk! ALL YOU COULD EAT! oh man!!! And Roger paid for all of us! oh and then we got desert... some parts of our outreach are really tough ;) I love RIO!

- We´ve been to a few orphanages and that has been awesome to play futbol, music, uno, and dance with the kids (only boys at the ones we´ve been too).

- On this past sunday we went to a Heavy Metal/ Death Metal church. Their whole goal is to evangelize to people in Rio that were Satan worshipers or just into that style of living and music. it was very unconvetional and they liked it like that! It was the first chance our team has had a chance to speak in front on a crowd and I got to speak so I was super pumped about that! It went well and we had a lot of fun with the people!


Future Plans:
-For christmas we are going to a church that is inside Brazil a few hours and we will be with them from this coming Sunday for one week (Dec 21- 28). Really excited about it because it sounds like we´ll have plenty of times to speak, do music and run church services and events.

-We also might be going to the city of God which is a favella (or slum) here in Rio that is actually a movie, ´City of God´and its all about this favella. Very good and powerful movie! We plan on going to the biggest favella in Rio which has over 300,000 people. It´s its own city. the drug lords control everything in the favellas (in the movie, ´City of God´it explains very well how these favellas are run).

-When we return to the Ywam base in Rio, we will be doing the New Years outreach that happens on Copacabona beach so after christmas we will be preparing for that. In January we plan on going to the Christ statue and some really amazingly beautiful/ must see places here in Rio where I´ll deffinitly post some pictures!


Thanks again for checking this out! To all my friends that are in other parts of the world on their outreach, I miss you all and love hearing from you and about what´s going on in your part of the world!

Apartir de Rio de Janeiro

Hey from Rio de Janeiro!

Its been a week and one of the most amazing weeks ever. we left at 8 am on saturday last week after saying goodbye to some of the best amigos i have ever met. Some of the most amazing people in my DTS, and though i am completely one sided on this matter, i believe we had one of the best dts´s ever... we left at 8 on saturday, traveling to Denver, then Washington DC, then to Rio. We arrived in Rio at 11 am on Sunday with ALL of our luggage and all of our people... Amazing... we were expecting to loose at least one of either... We were met by two men who have come to be very good friends, Roger and Lazero. speeding off from the airport we went to the YWAM base in Santa Cruz Acada which is a little outside the main part of Rio but the base (´Jocum´ is YWAM) is located in a favella which is a term for the slums here. The one we are staying in is actually a nicer one but we still can´t leave by ourselves ever, unlike the favella we were just at for 3 days, Borel. Borel is a very dangerous favella with 1 out of 10 men riding around on motorcyles with huge machine guns. the traffic, drug dealing, is HUGE in all of Rio and especially the favellas. There are constant raids from the corrupt police and huge shoot outs but nothing happened like that while we were there except one man was shot in the foot.

Jocum here is amazing with great food, rice and black beans everyday for lunch and dinner combined with either chicken or beef. They made us cheese burgers and first day which was hilarious and very tasty. Theres an amazing futbol field here that is just one ministry lazero runs and me, Benji, Bruce, and Mat have had hours upon hours of futbol with kids and some adults along with basket ball in the marketplace here in Santa Cruz.

The weather has been awesome with a consistant 87-94 degrees and high high humidity but yesterday and today have been raining so its a great break from the pools of sweat that we sleep in as misquitos multch my our entire bodies.

Dancing is huge here as well as all the arts. we have done a lot of music things like playing at a school for kids about 8-16 years old and dancing. me and benji have learned the basics to ´capuara´ and most of the team has learned authenic, brazilian samba. I´m very excited for tonight because there has been a DTS that was from this base here that arrived from outreach the day after we came, so we have been playing volleyball and dancing with them. Been playing uno and just getting to know them. I have come to seriously LOVE these people. so relaxed and layed back, that´s how all the brazilian culture is. very chill and fun loving. everyone loves to party and laugh. But this dts team has been so fun and tonight is their dts graduation ceremony so we´re doing it brazilian style. we are having the graduation at 7 oclock and then we are heading about an hour away to a legit brazilian party of about 10,000 people and gonna party till about 5-6am just dancing, singing, and laughing... i love these people!

oh, did i mention that there´s a pool on the base here...?

our ministry stuff has really just been building relationships and playing/loving on kids which has been amazing. most of every people here, even more so in the favellas, know the gospel competely. they have heard it so much and even at these big parties we´re gonna go to, most of the people are sick about religion. So our approach is to genuinely care about them as people, their social issues, who they are, and not even think about religion unless they open it up for that.

I am praying that God will use our team in awesome ways and if we get to see the result of our actions and our love, that would be such a huge bonus!

and the only thing that could follow that up is... seriously, the women here are beautiful... haha... i plan on finding my wife in the next 3 months.... ;)

Hope you are doing well! I tried to just hit a few things that have happened in just a week. thanks for taking the time to read this!


-Sean O´Connor (aka. ´Sean Connery´)

DTS '08

So this is it. The bitter-sweet ending of something amazing. DTS lecture phase is over and in 4 hours all of the Asia teams (team Cambo[dia] and Thailand) will be leaving for 2 months and in 9 hours i will be leaving for Brazil for 3 months!

I threw a video together really quick with just a few pictures to recap this past 3 months, BUT it was having a horrible time loading so I'll have to throw it up on here another time. I have seriously had one of the best times of my life here in Lakeside, Montana, meeting the most fun people and learn oh-so-much about my relationship with God.

I want to keep it short because I have a lot of friends going to Asia in 4 hours that I won't see for a long time, but I did want to say that I'll keep this blog posted with updates for the next 3 months, giving you details of my journeys, experiences, and what God's doing in my life and in Brazil around me. thank you so much for taking the time to check my blog and see what's going on in my life!




-Sean O'Connor