One example is Decuãpü, one of the closest communities, which is an hour away by speedboat, but only about 8 minutes by air. Our work in the communities is to establish churches and to train leadership in existing churches. This is somewhat impeded by the language barrier. With five distinct tones, the Ticuna language is one of the most difficult in the world to learn. The church in São Paulo de Olivença is pastored almost entirely in Portuguese, although we often have many Ticuna in the services. Some Ticuna are now coming to town for their education. Several of our Ticuna youth are preparing for ministry by studying in our church's Institute which is taught completely in Portuguese.

Katrina grew up in Curitiba, in south Brazil. Michael comes from northwest Indiana. All three of our kids are adopted. Ían was born 01-01-2001, our millennium baby. We've had him ever since he was released from the hospital. Vivi (11 July 2001) and Brie (29 December 2002) came to our home in May 2004. They had been living in a children's shelter since April 2003. Maybe people are just flattering us, but many say that Ían looks like Michael and Vivi looks like Katrina, and most people think Vivi and Brie are actually twins. We plan to homeschool the kids, and we've already begun some informal work with Ían. It's working out to be a twofer though because we usually find later that Ían has taught Vivi what he learned.