sharing, and the strike

This morning at our briefing we learned we would be split up into teams and assigned to different facodajes (colleges) on campus for the rest of project on mondays and thursdays. My team consists of two freshmen and another senior, Andy.

Today was the first we were on our own to get to the USP campus using the public buses. My team got to campus after a ½ hour ride, and almost missing our stop. But we found our facodaje with no trouble- FEA, which is the business college.

Andy and I ended up as evangelism partners for the day. Both of us have colds so we were still tired and groggy at 11am, and I wasn’t very excited at all. In the first 15 minutes we talked with three people, one of which was not interested in hearing our views on Christianity, and two of which were interested but had class. We told them we’d be around for the next few weeks in FEA so they could talk with us if they wanted, or saw us wandering around. One of the students, Carolina, was very interested in talking with us, so we told her we'd be around at 130 when she got done with class.

We decided to eat lunch in Sweden, an expensive buffet on campus where they calculate how much to charge you by the weight of your plate (very cool), and ended up sitting with two Brasillian doctorate students, one of which was Catholic, one Agnostic. I shared my testimony, but we didn’t really get anywhere else spiritually. We talked with them for about an hour and learned a lot about Brasil, at least.

After that we just hung out and paced the building until 130. Carolina was still sitting there, and smiled when we walked up. For the next hour we sat with her and shared the Gospel with her using the Knowing God booklet that Crusade prints (everyone I’ve shared with so far has wanted an English copy, not Portuguese, which is pretty surprising). She believes in Spiritistism, which is kind of like reincarnation + Catholicism, in a way. She believes in God and Jesus and the Bible, but thinks we just keep living our life over and over and learn more and more until we hit perfection, or something like that. (this is a common belief on campus and in Brasil). As we shared with her, she understood everything we said and continued to ask questions and express interest in a relationship with Christ. At the end of the booklet we explained praying to receive Christ, and she indicated she would like to pray, but not in the public place we were at (Brasillians don't pray in public very much). I explained she could take the booklet and pray it later if she wanted to, but it was her decision.

An hour later, we had basically the exact same conversation with another student, Fernanda, in the same part of the FEA building. Pretty cool that in 2 hours we shared the Gospel with two students and both were interetsed in the idea of a relationship with God.

Some of the project students were supposed to go to the dorms but weren’t allowed inside, so we had 10 students sharing their faith in FEA for 5 hours – we couldn’t even walk through the building without seeing the little blue booklet in a Brasillian student’s hand. It was an awesome site to see.

As a sidenote, some of the facodajes do not have class right now because their students are on strike. USP is funded by the government, and is free for students who pass a very hard exam. Yep, college for free. It's cool because most students aren't really interested in hurrying through college, and they don't need to because they don't pay anything. Anyway, the strike is occuring because students and professors believe that they should receive more funding from the government. A lot of students believe something should be done, but not necessarily a strike. For our team, the strike limits the number of facodajes we can visit and evangelise in. Both good and bad - then we can focus on students in concentrated areas, but we would love to be able to spread out over the whole campus.

I think that's all for now ... hope any and all reading this are well.
Tchau!

Amy