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I went to do some odd jobs at the church last Thursday and as I worked I noticed four raggedy little heads peering at me from the crumbling fence that separates the church property from the "house next door" (the words are in quotes, because if you saw "the house" you would probably place the words between ? Marks). "Pasthdoor, comeer!" Thadeu, is three years old but he is still sucking a pacifier which makes his "three-year-old Portuguese even harder to understand. "Can we wide your bike?" I had ridden Jackson's bike to work and Thadeu and his siblings: Marcia, Eduardo, and Edson were enthralled! "Our dad had two bikes, but one of them boke and he gave the udder one away." For the next half an hour seven kids (Edson, Marcia, Eduardo, Samuel, Mateus, Jacklyn, and Maria Julia) took turns taking the Schwinn for a spin around the parking lot. I winced a few times as they whizzed by on a rapid rush down the ramp that runs beside th...

While the Bob Jones soccer team was with us last week I noticed how often the girls were attracted to different members of the squad. Not that any one of them, the team members that is, sought that attention, it just happened. In the video below you will notice the pandemonium at one of the schools in the after game autograph session. One of the girls asked me, "Are they soccer players or are they models?!" Another one said, "I think that the number one qualification for being a part of this team is that you have to be cute!" In the excitement of having a whole team of young men from the United States I even heard the the lady director of the one of the schools say, "They are lovely!" My take on this seeming undue attention of course could be attributed to many and differing factors but a large part of it, in my opinion, is the lack of a father figure in the lives of most of these kids. They're starving for attention. When the teams come and the studen...