Hidden Beauty...............

Living in the edge of the favelas in Rio De Janiro is an incredible experience, the structure and the community is so amazing I absolutely love it and really enjoy being here!!

You may think that is far from Beautiful as it is very different for us from home but I think it is so nice, however when you get past the concrete boxes and telegraph poles that are decorated heavily with wires and streamers which represent a drug pick up, there is such a beauty and hidden talent that is so exciting and busting of freshness.

These are the people that should be known for their talents of singing, dancing and loving well. They are so beautiful on the outside and amazingly beautiful on the inside too.

There is a real humbleness to the peoples characters and a real genuine friendliness, wait more than a friendliness, you feel like you are accepted and belong within minutes of arriving and we have never even met these people before but straight away you are taken into the families!!

People open their mouths to sing and a tear come to my eye and my heart is full of happiness as such a precious voice fills the streets that are full of kids playing, teens chillin and people just mingling.

This is what life should be like, we have so much to learn about relationship and loving well, we are being blessed daily by being here. We have been working with the children in this area and playing with them, loving them and showing them a hope in their future.

Even though there is such beauty that is here, there is also the other side of the community, which is ridden with drugs, mainly crack and witchcraft and heavy spirits. We are coming against this and bring the light, its so ironic how there is such darkness and such light in the same place but this light needs to be here as it will soon drown out the darkness!! 

Human Trafficking and the Sex Trade..................................

In School and our research for Outreach, it has become obvious to us that we will come into contact with those who are selling sex and of many of those adults and children will have been involved in being trafficked at some point or will be in danger of being trafficked.

As you know that we work in our red light district in Zona Norte Tijuana, this is a place where there is much trafficking in and out of the states and the rest of south America. This is trafficking people for selling Sex, Slave labour, and organ trafficking. In one club in Tijuana that we walk past we have been told that a couple sold their baby for $5,000 for organs! This is something that we cannot get our heads round and seem so far away from anything like this but actually its happening around us all.

I have been looking into the history of the Favelas in Rio De Janiro in Brazil, last year 3,000 people were trafficked for Sex. This is a huge number and this is only that recorded number there would have been many more that have gone under the raider!! Looking at where Brazilians are trafficked to is many countries in Europe including the United Kingdom!!

The Favelas came about in the early 1920's and it is where Military would live when they were home from the war, then later when the cities got larger, the government wanted the economy to grow therefore they pushed the poor people in each city out to the suburbs and there for the Favelas arose. This is like a cardboard city built up on the hills. There is a strong spirit of oppression and worthlessness, as they have been cast out of the city.

Many children from the age of 6 years old will come down from the Favelas and enter the tourist areas each night to work a 10 hour shift, looking for clients, many clients are tourists. They will be doing this to get whatever money they can and they will sell their bodies for £3.00 a time, this is what we would pay for a Starbucks coffee!!

God has been speaking to myself, Pepe and our Students about "Brazil looks a beautiful country on the outside and it is, but also God made the inside beautiful too, but there has been so much corruption that it has been so damaged and twisted,  it is in these times that He wants to restore and build up His beauty in this country from the inside out again!"

This is what we feel that we will be a part of, whilst we are there in Rio De Janiro, that we will go and speak truth, value and beauty into the people that we meet, that we will show them the love God has for them is pure and not the "love" that is shown to them by Man. God has been showing us this so much and we are all excited that we get to be a part of this too!!