Rio Centro

​Today the Internet is down – and it was yesterday, too! Yesterday’s highlight was looking at a large church in downtown Rio, and finding a man who had a broken shoulder. We asked if he would like prayer and he gladly received it. It was our first experience of praying for someone on the street in a foreign country. His wife spoke English (yay!) We did not see an instant miraculous healing, but we gained confidence in handling such a situation. 

Rio has many eager, accomplished graffiti artists. They do not hesitate to display their talents, even on the outside of third story buildings. I wish I had photographed two which depicted large portraits of a woman with excitedly parted lips.

Oh, and whilst waiting for half an hour for an Uber taxi (supposedly three minutes) we were thrilled to see three or four monkeys racing around the hospital grounds next door. Then two tiny monkeys (with different faces, so not their babies) skipped and darted up the power pole and onto the wall and away. 

As we walked from Santa Teresa suburb into town we passed down the Selarion Steps, a ten year long project by a local artist tiling this flight of stairs and some of the surrounding walls. 

Food seems quite expensive. I imagine the favela-dwellers mainly live on beans and pasta, but avocados seem very cheap and enormous.