Excessive amounts of meat

On Thursday morning, Walter and Bill had gotten up early and investigated our ladder problem. Sure enough, the rungs had not quite been identical (mere millimetres difference, but enough to cause problems) so they had cut the wood to the required length and we could set about constructing the ladder. A couple of design changes were recommended regarding the supports for the steps and a base board, which took a while to implement, but soon we were ready with our steps. We proudly carried them out to the playground only to discover that the lack of a top step meant that there was a considerable risk of some kid doing serious damage to themselves by falling down the hole between the first step down and the edge of the floor of the playground. An additional step was therefore required which was duly constructed, with the required supports, and added to the unit. This solved the problem and so the steps were bolted in place. While we had been doing all this, the guys had been busily constructing the A frames for the roof and putting them in place. Swimming pool painting was more or less completed on Thursday morning, as I recall, although this was carried out by the ladies, assisted manfully by Stephen Boyle and Alistair McCauley, so I didn’t really have a lot of involvement and hadn’t really had enough time to go swimming in between writing postcards and catching up on Bible readings and sleep!

On Thursday afternoon, we headed into Londrina to do some sightseeing and shopping. Our first port of call was the OMS seminary, evangelical junior school and English language school. We had a tour of the teaching facilities, the chapel and the library of the seminary before wandering through the playground of the junior school into the Webb English language school. We saw some of their facilities and one of the OMS missionaries told us some of the work that was done at Webb.

From there, it was back onto the bus and into the heart of Londrina. Due to the risk that we could permanently lose members of the group if we all split up, we had to all stick together while shopping. Shopping in a group of 16 people takes a bit of getting used to if you are from an independent minded way of working. Initially, it took about 20 minutes to traverse around 50 metres to allow people the opportunity to look at things being sold by street vendors. The pace then picked up slightly down the main street, but came to a halt for quite some time once we reached a sports shop. Some of the men in the group then bought the shop’s entire stock of Brazilian T-shirts - yes, literally! Meanwhile, I embarked on small circuits around the neighbourhood (having explained to Walter where I was off to and ensuring that he wouldn’t let the group depart the store without me). I managed to find a few more postcards, but was sadly disappointed in my search for a food based store. Once the tops had been purchased, we then set off down through Londrina to a rock shop (of the inert (or crystal) variety, rather than the musical type) and an art gallery. I wrote a few more cards here before we returned to the bus.

From the rock shop, we trundled around to a little Christian bookstore. We had a mosey around (Christian CDs for about 7 quid, but the English collection didn’t really contain any that I wanted) before returning to the bus.

Our final stop that evening was an all-you-can-eat meat restaurant. The waiters wandered around carrying large hunks of meat on skewers (except the rib man, who had his own mobile BBQ affair) and would, if you desired, cut you a lump of meat from the skewer. Various cuts of beef (including sirloin steak), pork, lamb, chicken in bacon, chicken hearts, etc. were appearing at the table at a frequency that had to be seen to be believed. Thankfully, the waiters also poured your drinks, for in order to keep pace with the arrival of new hunks of meat, one had to just keep shovelling the food in the gub. By the end of the main course, we were already substantially overfed. The arrival of a desert trolley was, therefore, a challenge. I selected a couple of pieces of cake and managed to get through them alright. Stephen Boyle’s aspirations of tidying off a passion fruit mousse, however, proved insurmountable and so I offered to do the duty. Unfortunately, I too suddenly realised just how full I was. By the time we came to leave the restaurant, I still hadn’t finished it - so I took it with me.

Rather than having Tommy drive home alone, I offered to go along with him in his van. It was an amusing drive, accidentally jumping a red light and finding a speed bump that neither of us had noticed due to the fact that we were looking at a market. On arrival back at Shalom, it was decided that we would forego supper that night and so, after devotions, we carried our heavy bellies down to bed to allow them to try to digest several days worth of eating.