On the 28th of February 2001, Buck and Luciene moved to the Amazon Basin of Brazil. We lived in Macapá, right on the equator. Why would a web designer give up his career and take his family from their comfortable life in Columbus, Ohio, USA, to live on the Amazon River? We came with a vision to save the Amazon, to tell people about Jesus, and plant a Vineyard church. We have planted a church, and we are turning it over to the national leaders, heading back to the States in Sept. 2009.

 
Marcos Gean Dias passed away this morning at 11 am. He was diagnosed with rheumatic fever, which results from strept throat that is not treated. He died of heart failure and kidney failure. According to http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4709, “Rheumatic fever begins with a strep throat from streptococcal infection.”

I met his dad, Adamar, at the hospital. We took care of the paper work, and then I took him to his house so he could tell the rest of the kids. The funeral truck dropped Marcos Gean's body off at his house, still in his adult diaper, draped inside the cheap plywood coffin only by a white cloth. We cleaned him up, cleaned the blood off of his teeth, cleaned the blood off of his ear and face and hair, dressed him, folded his hands.

Death is closer to the family than we are accustomed to in the States. It is not sanitized and commercialized, but close and intimate. As close as the front room, barely big enough for the coffin and nuclear family. The family, because they are poor, must clean him, must dress him, must sleep at night knowing that he is there in the front room. The funeral and burial will be tomorrow, Sunday morning.

This is the first death to hit our small congregation. This is the first death I have seen up close and personal here. I didn’t know that you have to put cotton in the nostrils and ears, so that things don’t leak out. I didn’t know so many things about death. These are things that they don’t teach you in church planting classes. This is stuff that you learn the hard way, with tears in your eyes and bloody cotton in your hands.

posted by Eduardo Buck at Saturday, August 28, 2004