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.

 

Hannah and Raquel were invited to dance at a children's day celebration at ABB, a club for Banco do Brasil. They came up with this dance on their own, and did a really good job. We are very proud of them.
posted by Eduardo Buck at Thursday, October 27, 2005

 
Igreja da Vinha Macapa just had its first women’s conference, and Luciene translated for the guest speaker. There were a total of 15 women there for the one-day event. The women loved it, and are already asking when the next one will be.

Igreja da Vinha Macapa

posted by Eduardo Buck at Wednesday, October 26, 2005

 
We recently had our annual children’s day celebration. We gave out sandwiches, cookies, juice and pop. Luciene did a presentation of singing, and a puppet show for the kids. There was a group of kids from our church that also did a presentation. We had a good time, and God gave an abundance of food that we could share with the needy of the neighborhood.

Luciene and Hannah doing a presentation for "Dia das Criancas", or Day of the Child.

Every one of these kids is precious to God. Investing in kids is something that always seems to have returns.




Some of the kids doing a presentation that they themselves made up.

Some ladies from our church making sandwiches for the Children's Day Celebration

posted by Eduardo Buck at Tuesday, October 25, 2005

 

Moringa has become a family project. Here we are stripping the leaves off of the stems. I am experimenting on how to dry the leaves for future use. There are tons of seeds right now, we are trying to harvest them so that we will have seed available for a larger project. We have been experimenting with growing them in our back yard just to get familiar with it. We are very excited about the possibilities that moringa can provide in water purification, in health treatment, and in providing much needed nutrition to the poor and undernourished.



Luciene's mom came to visit us, and to help out since Luciene was having the health problems. It has been great having her here with us. Here she is with Nicolas.

Josiah is so cool!

posted by Eduardo Buck at Sunday, October 23, 2005

 
Roseane and Rosana


A girl scout troup in Georgia decided that they wanted to adopt two girls here in Brazil, who are in extreme poverty, and who need help with school supplies, etc. There are numerous people in our church that would qualify, but Roseane and Rosana were the ones that we felt God wanted, and that fit all the criteria, and we are so happy that God will be blessing them in this way. They are always so happy, and willing to help. They came to me and asked me to give them bibles so that they could complete the bible study questions that their family group leader gives out every week. Please pray for these girls, and for the other adolescents in our church, that God would raise up a good youth group leader to take care of them and pastor them.

Roseane and Rosana with their family

Their dad, Sr. Raimundo, has been very sick. He got Hepatitis, the bad one, and hasn't really been able to work. He plants a garden, and makes charcoal in the yard to help get money for food.

posted by Eduardo Buck at Tuesday, October 18, 2005

 
I don’t know what happened to my last post, it just isn’t there. I was almost asleep at the keyboard, so maybe it got posted on someone else’s blog, I don’t know. Anyway, I wanted to share the good news. The doctor had told us that Luciene had hepatitis, and we needed to do the test to determine if it was Hepatitis A, B, or C.

We asked a lot of people to pray, and Luciene’s pain subsided, something that all the heavy-duty medicine at the hospital didn’t do. We continued to pray for complete healing. On Wed. we did the exams to determine what kind of Hepatitis it was, and they all came back negative! We will return in a month and redo some of the tests, to confirm that she was healed, and to make sure that the liver is no longer irritated.

Luciene is now practicing to put on a presentation for “Day of the Child” which we are going to celebrate in our church this Saturday.

Thanks so much to all of you that prayed for us, we have felt your prayers, and we have been much encouraged.
posted by Eduardo Buck at Saturday, October 08, 2005

 
Yesterday we got the verdict. It appears that Luciene has Hepatitis. We will get the results back this afternoon, and find out which kind it is, if it is Hepatitis A, B, or C. Thanks for your prayers. She is doing ok, but feeling very weak.
posted by Eduardo Buck at Wednesday, October 05, 2005

 
“It’s an ancient Amazon Indian cure,” he told me, as if that would make the medicine easier to swallow. It was quite possibly the nastiest medicine I have ever had. From the deep red color, it was obvious that Urucum was one of the main ingredients, but there is also some oil, maybe some eucalyptus or some copaiba oil or both. Urucum is the plant that the Amazon Indians get the red paint from, the paint that National Geographic type photographers like to show, the red matted hair, and the red face. Makes a great picture, really. But does it also make a great medicine?

“I can’t tell you what is in it, because that would take away its effect, and it wouldn’t heal you,” he said, and I just looked at him. What kind of baloney is that? If I tell you the ingredients it won’t cure you? It is pure poppycock of course. If he had been a little more honest, perhaps he would have said that he couldn’t tell me the ingredients, because then I could make it myself, and wouldn’t pay him his very high fee as the resident “holy man healer” with the secret Indian cures.

It would be easy to dismiss these types of things, and give no credence to them at all. But I have learned that not all that sounds like nonsense really is. Let me give you one example. Amapa is known for its shrimp, and for it’s Açai, which they will often eat together. Here in Amapa, there are huge shrimp known as Pitu, that are really like small lobsters, and it is customary to eat them with Açai, which is a native fruit that the Brazilians make a drink of that is a staple of life here, and most foreigners hate. (Just for the record, I love Açai.) Here, in the land of the shrimp and the home of the Açai , it is common knowledge that if you have a sore throat, you don’t eat shrimp. You just wouldn’t think of it, because it would inflame your throat.

I, in my North American arrogance, dismissed it as a wives tale. But you know what? I have found that the Brazilians are right, when I have a sore throat, and I eat shrimp, it gets worse, it really does inflame it, and I really should avoid it. I have seen, through my own experience, that this is true, and now I at least make the decision with the information I need. Is it worth it to me to eat this marvelous shrimp, knowing that my throat will get worse? Usually the answer is yes, since I really like shrimp. J

So, I have learned not to outright dismiss something just because my North American ears haven’t heard it before. On the other hand, I have heard some things that I still think are just wives tales. For example, there is a belief that if you eat mango and drink milk at the same time, you would die. As soon as I heard it, I put it to the test, and ate mangos and drank milk, and I am still here to talk about it. “Well, it has to be pure cow’s milk” was the explanation that I got. Then I saw on TV a couple of years ago that this was something that the slave owners told the slaves so that they wouldn’t eat all the crops, which sounds like a much more plausible explanation to me.

I am looking at this neighborhood natural healer with a certain amount of healthy skepticism, and I think he sees it. He disappears into his yellow and blue wooden house, and returns with an old yellowed badge, which he proudly hands me with yellow and blue specked hands. The aged and yellowing badge declares him an employee of IEPA, a Brazilian organization which does research on plants and natural cures. The badge doesn’t say what his job was of course, I mean, he could have been the janitor for all I know, but it does give some air of official “scientific” legitimacy to the affair. He tells me that he had been an employee for 15 years, that he had been doing research, that he helped raise that organization up from nothing and then got kicked out because of political affiliation, and starts rattling off some scientific names of plants to impress me with his knowledge. It’s all plausible enough to be true, but then if you are going to tell a story to convince a new sucker, I mean patient, to give you their hard earned money, you’d better have a convincing story, right? So it doesn’t prove anything that his story seems plausible, or that it could be true.

And why am I there in the first place, staring at this little heavy guy with the paint drips all over his hands and shirt, and a faint odor of thinner, someone who doesn’t look anything like a doctor and is obviously midway in some household painting project? We had waited, as a child ran to call him, and he must have tried to clean some of the paint off before coming out and entering into the separate little building on the front corner of his property that serves as his center of healing. Bottles filled with various potions and medicines lined the shelves, plants hung drying, and bags of different plants and roots filled every available space. On the walls hung pictures of various saints, and crucifixes, and smiling haloed Jesus’. “What in the world am I doing here,” I thought?

I have tried the inhalers, I have tried the treatments of conventional doctors, and it hasn’t helped my asthma. My neighbor was worried about me, hearing me cough all the time now that the dry season is here and everyone is burning their weeds and clouds of smoke float slowly over the city like a weird fog because people are burning huge tracts of rainforest in surrounding areas, and the dust from our dirt road rolls by the house in huge billowing waves when the wind blows. The time of coughing has arrived.

So my neighbor, perhaps needing some peace and quiet, went and talked to this medicine man, and he said that he guaranteed that I would be healed. What have I got to loose besides the R$40 a bottle he is charging? I took the plunge, bought a bottle of the nasty red mystery Indian healing potion, and I am now taking it two times a day, and giving it to Raquel also.

You know what? Neither of us has had an asthma attack since we started taking it. Raquel even got a flu/cold kind of thing, and didn’t have any problems with asthma, which is unusual. We aren’t even half way done with our first bottle, and we are seeing results. He told us that we would need three bottles to be completely healed. If it heals me, and it heals my daughter, well, the R$40 for a bottle barely covers the price of an inhaler, and if we have no more asthma, it seems like a small investment, really.
posted by Eduardo Buck at Wednesday, October 05, 2005

 
We did the ultrasound yesterday, everything is fine, all the organs are normal, but there was one kidney stone. We will get the last of the test results back today and we will see the doctor later today. Will keep you posted on what we find out. Thanks so much for your prayers, we really appreciate them, and have felt them sustaining us.

Meanwhile, here is a post that I had been working on before all of this happened, and just never posted with all of the excitement.

For a couple of weeks, we have been feasting on macaroni and cheese, and having pancakes with real maple syrup. It just amazes me how God is so good to us. A vineyard church in Marysville sent us some boxes, man what a blessing. It is amazing how you miss the little things from home. One of the things that I miss the most is maple syrup. You just can’t buy that stuff at your corner store here on the Amazon J

Every year my dad would get us a Sam’s Club membership, and that is when we really started doing the real maple syrup instead of the corn syrup with fake maple syrup flavoring. We could get a whole jug of 100% Real Maple Syrup (I think it was like half a gallon) for US$6, which made it cheaper than the fake stuff at the local Kroger’s. And once you start eating the real thing, it is almost impossible to go back to the fake stuff. It was just a regular part of our diet, and our routine, making pancakes or French, oh, excuse me, Freedom toast on the weekends.

We can get M&M’s, I’ve seen Doritos, though they are hit and miss, mostly miss, but there are some things that you just can’t get in Macapa. One of them is 100% Real Maple Syrup, another is Jones Potato Chips that I used to eat in Mansfield, Ohio. I can do without the chips, since I have been struggling with high blood pressure I can’t have the salt anyway, but the maple syrup, that is one thing that is hard to go without. It makes me want to start an import/export company just to be able to import syrup.

Anyways, I said all of that to get to the point of how good God is to us, that here, in the midst of the Amazon Rainforest, God provides us with what is good, and what our heart desires. He is concerned, even about the little things, things that probably seem pretty insignificant. I mean, when you are omniscient and omnipresent, and you have to hold the whole universe together and keep everything running smoothly, it seems like such a small thing to worry about providing a balding transplanted corn-fed Ohio boy something so trivial as maple syrup. But that is the kind of God we serve, that is the kind of Daddy we have, that provides not only everything we need, but also provides many little things that we want, just because we want it and it pleases His heart to see us happy. It is easy to sing praises to God. He is so Good!
posted by Eduardo Buck at Tuesday, October 04, 2005

 
Luciene was able to sleep well last night. We went in this morning and did some of the bloodwork, but we won't get the results until Monday. Thank you so much for your prayers. Other than feeling really weak from not eating, and some slight pain, Luciene is doing so much better, we have really felt your prayers lifting us up. God bless you!
posted by Eduardo Buck at Saturday, October 01, 2005