Not so Wordless Wednesday: Ellie Loves the Lighthouse!

The Lighthouse

She loves the people, the food, and especially the dog. We will miss this lovely community when we leave here. There is truly LIGHT in this house!

Brazil So Far...

We've had a week in Belo Horizonte now at the Lighthouse having a great time seeing the work there, trying to help out in some practical ways and having a good time with our friends, Laura and Felipe who are leaders at the Lighthouse. You can look at their blogs here and here see more of what's been going on here in their last 2 or 3 posts.

Lydia walking with girls from the Casa Refugio (Refuge House). All of these children have HIV. Please pray for them as there is a new law and such homes are no longer allowed to exist, and many adoption possibilities have fallen through.

This is on a soccer/basketball court at the Lighthouse that kids from the slum love to play on!

We are on a hill and can see much of the slum from our windows.

There aren't too many ways I can help, but I can definitely knead bread, though this was a much larger batch than I've ever made.

Hanging out on Laura and Felipe's front porch.

Getting ready to go visit a local park on Saturday...

where we saw lots of monkeys...

and fed them crackers!

Lydia started walking almost as soon as we got here!

We're now in Rio de Janeiro at the end of a short trip along with Laura and Felipe. We've had a nice time so far seeing some of the sights and relaxing at a local bed and breakfast with a fantastic view of the city. We actually saw Obama fly down from the Christ the Redeemer statue earlier yesterday We went to Copacobana beach yesterday and it turns out he was staying in the Marriot there. There were tons of army men and trucks and police. The street was blocked off. People were crowded around waiting for him to arrive. We had to eat and get home and did not wait. So strange that we'd happen to be here at the same time as our president!

Here are some pictures from Rio de Janeiro:

Laura and I with our girls at Christ the Redeemer Statue.

And we're off right now to head back to Belo Horizonte and get back to work. These are really random pics and really random info. as I have had very little time to think about blogging! Just wanted to share a little.

Guest Post by Tom.com: Frugal and Natural Garbage Disposal Cleaning

If your fridge is anything like ours, sometimes you have interesting science experiments going on after a few weeks. Whenever we clean out the fridge, a lot of old food goes through our garbage disposal before hitting the sewer system. A commonly suggested way to keep the disposal clean is to throw ice chips into it every so often. To keep the disposal smelling nice, throw in some peels from a piece of citrus.

We will sometimes buy lemons for other cleaning around the house, but we don't use the whole thing. We used to keep the rest of it around until the next major usage of the garbage disposal, but they would go bad.

To reduce the wast, what we did was slice up the leftover lemon and put it into a container in the freezer. Whenever we start smelling the disposal, we pull out a slice of frozen lemon and throw it in to the disposal. It takes care of both the ice and citrus suggestions while reducing our waste of lemons.

(In case you didn't know, Tom.com is my hubby. :)