Christmas...

...feels and felt a million miles away.

Miles away now because we are in Chile, having spent seventeen days on Easter Island, and we had Christmas in Brazil which is about a million miles away from home.

It was great though. A Scottish-Brazilian Christmas on the farm. Ted cooked a very suculent turkey on Christmas eve, as is the local custom and i got a chance to wear my tie. Along with the volunteers, Morven and Fabio, who run the farm had over the two kids they are trying to adopt and two other kids from a local orphanage who didn't have anywhere else to go.

These guys were so cool. One is 14, Nilo, who has had try outs for some great under 18 football team and Matias, who is 9 but built like Mike Tyson. Matias had a serious case of ADHD, but he was helpful in his own way. He drank a lot of coffee. One day full of pride he came up to the farm house riding bareback on a semi-wild horse he'd managed to lassoo with some rope. It was premeditated. He was wearing a cycling helmet. I truly believe he thought this would make it okay in the eyes of Fabio to go horse whispering like this.

He was a good laugh, but the laugh turned sour in your mouth; his story is a bit too tradgic for much humour. Apprently he'd been a lot worse, when the people at the ophanage met him he was frequently professing Satan was his father and he wouldn't let anyone touch him. His legs and arms are marred with scarring that looked to me like burns.

He knows Jesus now and was delighted to read to me from his Bible for a long time. It is hard to fairly judge the passage of time when listening to Bible stories in Portuguese. But for a kid like him it definately was a long time. It didn't seem to phase him, knowing i couldn't understand anything. He even contented himself to ask me how to say some of the words. It suprised me how encouraging you can be even when you don't speak the language.

Besides the various dramas we managed to squeeze in the mandatory couple of terrible films about Christmas ('Christmas with the Cranks' and 'Skipping Christmas') and the not so mandatory, but delightful game of Scrabble.