24 February Update

Photos from the Prior Medical Boat Mission, in 2011
If you post the web address below into your browser, it will take you to my Dropbox where you can download a huge Power Point file full of photos from the Brazil Boat Mission of 2011.  It can take several minutes to download, because it is full of photos.  Once you have downloaded it, you can open it like any other Power Point file.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/108848843/Medical%20Boat%20Mission.ppt

 A movie about the medical boat can be seen here:

http://www.umcor.org/UMCOR/Resources/News-Stories/2012/June/Health-Care-on-the-Amazon

It is an interesting clip, with Pastor Augusto speaking a couple of times, and the big ‘ol captain shyly driving the boat in a very brief scene.   There is even a quick glimpse inside Augusto’s church with him singing as the words are projected on the wall behind him.  On the web page, the movie is found in a little box on the right side.  If you click on the right spot, it will become full-screen size.  I recommend watching it!

 The Teams are Full!

We now have 14 American team members for each of the two teams!  Because I am on both teams, there are 27 of us all together.
17 of the 27 are from Helena, Montana and all the rest are either from far out of town or from a faraway state. 
If you send Don or Jenn a web link to your home church, we can connect it to this blog.  It's just one more way to build friendships before we meet for the first time in an airport or in the Amazon jungle.

Winter in Montana
I will put a few photos here from a nice Montana lake (Canyon Ferry is its name) in February.  This will make the heat of Manaus seem much more tolerable.  My wonderful dog is named Griz.  He is a Labradoodle and a world class knucklehead.

See me waving?

Fund raising has been productive! 

At the Wednesday Night Dinner tonight we earned $359.69. 
We already had one fund-raising dinner, but at the moment I can't recall how much we made.  We have at least one more Wednsday Night Dinner to host, too. 
St Paul's UMC has given the mission team $1,000 as an endowment gift.

These funds will all be added together and applied towards the cost of the mission trip to Brazil.  They will reduce the amount that each individual has to pay, not by much because there are 27 of us, but every little bit helps.  We may use the money to purchase Team T-shirts, to reduce the cost of vaccines, to purchase materials for children's crafts, and/or to pay part of the boat fuel bill.  There are many places where the money can be applied so that all of us can enjoy the benefit of it.

That includes the team members who are coming with us from outside of Montana.  There are six of these brave strangers who have elected to join a group of 21 mysterious Montanans on our trip to the jungle.

Here are some pictures of the boat we'll be on.