I returned yesterday from a trip upriver to Boa Espiransa, a small village about 30 km south of Altamira, on the Xingu River.  It’s a sparsely populated area near where we traveled by motorbikes into the Assurini.  There is a Spanish Red Cross clinic there that only operates one day/week.  It’s a very nice facility and they see over 100 people/day when open.  People travel for up to a day by canoe to be seen.  A doctor from Spain visits twice/year and docs from other countries visit, but infrequently.  We will aggressively try to interact with the people who operate this clinic to see if we can make some headway into solving the medical bureaucracy.  We’ve been here five months and have made no progress into gaining information on medical licensing.  My hope would be that I could offer my services at this clinic on a regular basis (one day/week?) and their desire to staff this clinic with another doctor might motivate them to be my advocate.  It would sure be nice to have somebody WITHIN the system helping to guide me in the process toward becoming legal to practice.  I could use the contacts at this clinic to begin to form relationships that could lead to a church plant in the area.  This clinic, along a tributary of the Xingu and buried in the jungle, offers hope as a first step toward combining medicine and ministry.  We would ask you to join us in praying along these lines.  We need God to open doors and to even show us the open doors.  Our confidence in His leading is greater than our confidence in our ability to find. 

Some pictures of the people (and critters) we visited are in the album.