Our Favorite Portuguese Missionary!

 A trip up north to Porto and a chance to visit with our favorite Portuguese missionary.... Sister Paulo.  We have come to love this faithful, fun and dedicated young woman.  She could have been upset about her call to Porto Mission (3 hours from home) but she is a wonderful, happy, hardworking missionary just as we knew she would be.

Flames in the Church?

I remember when we wanted to have little votive candles on the tables for one of our daughter's weddings.... No Way you could have any kind of burning wick in the church.  I assume they have a different rule here??

These cute little clay creations are personalized sausage cookers!! Genius!  Normally you would use some cotton in the bottom, douse it with bourbon and then light to cook sausage of your choice.  We used some kind of alcohol.  They were yummy and the hit of the ward activity cultural night.  (notice the size of that flame!?!)

Other cultural delights ranged from PB&J sandwiches rice krispy squares, Portuguese soup, Brazilian pasta salad & home made corn dogs.  Elder Anderton made his famous homemade whole wheat bread and we brought butter and raspberry jam...it was gobbled up!

After traveling south to Algarve for a big SR devotional,  it was very warm the next day as we were returning back to Lisbon - We HAD to stop by the beach to get our feet wet!!

 

Algarve is known for it's oranges!

Another great example of the graffiti everywhere we go.  Someone took advantage of the shape of this old building.   Once these abandoned buildings are painted... they don't take them down because the graffiti becomes part of the culture of the area.

Out in the center of a very small village near a beach there is this telephone booth... no phone, just the phone booth.  ??? Maybe the secret vacation spot of Superman- and it stands ready for him??

Our Main Purpose Here....Our Mission!!

The Distinguished looking man in the middle is President Amorim of the Porto Mission...He is really a dynamic man who we have gotten to know and love.  It is a bit odd, but we actually know him much better than we know our Mission President here in Lisbon Mission.  The other distinguished man to the left is our 'Boss' Antonio Paulo.

We are beginning to see some of the missionaries we have gotten to know and work with go home.. it adds a personal touch but they are all great!

 Just in case anyone has forgotten, we spend most of our days (sometimes 7 out of 7) doing what we are here to do.....being SR missionaries.  Over the past four months, our P days have been non existant because the weekends were jammed up with meetings & training sessions.  That may slow down quite a bit now summer is here.  It sounds like the whole country of Portugal takes at least a month long holiday sometime in the summer so it will be hard to pin people down.  It may look like we do nothing but sight see, and eat - (well truth be told...we probably eat more than needed) but most of the pictures posted here are in route to or from an assignment.  It just happens to be a beautiful, interesting place!

We only get to know the missionaries in Porto mission when we travel there to teach the ones leaving then we meet their companions and all the new office Elders.

 The first part of June, we held a National Seminar for SR Specialists and Stake Presidents for training on the new PEF program now available in Portugal.  We had an assignment to cover a 30 minute section in the 5 hour conference.  Elder Anderton did great and I struggled through a short prewritten part in Portuguese.  (everyone smiled politely)  This pic shows the European PEF manager, Miguel, explaining policy and procedure.  We work in the PEF office with him two days a week.

As with any activity, there was food involved and Sister Neiswender and I were able to put our skills of feeding large groups of people to good use!

Elder Anderton talking Self Reliance to a group of Bishops

After training a new facilitator, we stayed to visit a SR Education group meeting.  We are trying to get around to visit all the groups that are functioning to support and help them along.

Down on the Farm!

We work with this adorable little lady and her husband, she is one of our Stake Self Reliance specialists.  She may be small but she absolutely gets things done, a real fire-cracker!  Her stake had nothing happening with self reliance and in a little over 2 months time she had scheduled a work shop/devotional in every ward in the stake!  We have been very busy due to her diligence.  They are both very hardworking people and ultra self reliant.  Although they live in Lisbon, they run a family farm 45 minutes away.  They invited us to visit their farm...It is hard to believe these two keep up with all the work that has to be done there.

On the piece of land by the house they have 5 different kinds of chickens, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, and bees.  The garden is full of vegetables to be harvested & canned along with 6 different kinds of fruit trees.  They have no hired help.. all the work is done by the two of them.  I find that pretty amazing!

This is her outdoor oven where she bakes bread every 5 days!  Those are her 'oven tools' standing in the corner behind her.  It is a wood burning oven.  She served us some of her bread for lunch...delicious!!

The Family home has been here for generations...they did some improvements with running water, electricity and an indoor bathroom!

Notice the main source of heat with the fireplace in the back...those chairs in the little alcove are for a really cold night!  All the walls of the house are a good 12" thick.

This is their one luxury...Brother Teles dug this swimming pool by hand and is so proud of it.  The summers get very hot in this part of Portugal.

BEES!  It is hard to tell...but this is a lump of living bees surrounding their queen.  He is waiting awhile for them to get established before moving them into one of his bee boxes.  They produce their own honey...YUM!

They keep just enough sheep that they can have a lamb for Easter dinner and another for Christmas dinner every year.

Besides caring for the land around the house...this plot of land about 50 acres is covered with olive trees they use to make their own olive oil and also cork trees they strip and sell for profit. 

Cork Tree

AND the fields were also full of beautiful wild flowers!

She is one fun loving, hard working, Christ like woman.  Just one of the amazing people we get to know and love.

A Trip North

This is the beautiul little villiage of Constancia in northern Portugal where we stayed the night while on assignment for a Self Reliance devotional in the city of Abrantes.  It was so quaint, quiet and lovely...it felt very 'European"!!

The village is next to where two major rivers converge.  The area was beautiful and the people so nice!

This is the little bed and breakfast where we stayed... The young man who managed it was so great!  He served as a personal guide for the area and was so willing to help with whatever we needed.


Just down the road (actually down the river) is the Castelo Amaral.  It is so impressive on it's own little island.  I imagine it was a great place for a stronghold defense at the convergence of the two rivers.

The only way to get there is by boat

 The next day we were invited to a picnic in the branch of Abrantes.  BBQ is the same in any language!