Out with the old

The sun is going down on today and on this year. We've been invited to watch the fireworks display in Funchal at midnight. The newspapers are full of promise, of course: "Surprise in store this year", and so on... Honestly, after seeing the display 36 times or so, I can't really believe that there would be any really surprising surprises. Fireworks are fireworks are fireworks. We have already noticed the difference in the Christmas lighting in the town; the crisis is real and the surprise would be not to see a difference in the fireworks.

Is it possible to come to this point in time and not look back? In closing out the blog for the year, the highlight for 2012 was the trip to Turkey in May. Somehow I think there's more to come from that experience. This year will also remain firmly fixed in our memory because of Abbie's father's death in August. Then, in October, we learned that our dear sister Jackie passed away in Malawi. She had been ill for a number of years and back in 2004 we really didn't think she would survive the crisis. This was the last posting about her, at the time she and Jaime left the island for good. She would have been 62 in November.

 The church continues to go forward. There was a baptism in October, also. But speaking of going forward, Gil left for France the week after his baptism, leaving his wife and young daughter here in the meantime until he can get place for them to live. We have since heard that he has a job and Debora and Gabriela will be going to join him in a couple of months. With unemployent at close to 16% and among the under-30 working population it is close to 25%, emigration is on the rise. The newspaper reports that an agency is coming from the UK next month to recruit another 50 nurses to work in England. More translation work for me. I've been involved in translating documents for over 50 emigrating nurses already; and that doesn't count engineers and doctors.

Orlando assisting me in baptizing Gil

The cantata is the other big event of the end of the year. We sang it in Portuguese on Christmas Eve and again in English last Saturday night.

This coming Sunday, we will sing it in English in the morning and in Portuguese in the afternoon service. Pedro, our brother from Ukraine, said we should sing it in Russian Sunday, which happens to be the day Christmas is celebrated in countries of the Orthodox tradition. I told him he'd better get busy and translate it into Russian so we can practice it one time, at least, before Sunday. In the meantime, we'll concentrate on English and Portuguese.