Desert cows

This morning, we met the previous stake president, Pres. Cabral, to go to his house near a beach in the town of Pecen. The house was very big and inside a stone fence, as most houses are here. It has an orange tile roof and a porch that extended around all four sides. On the grounds were: coconut trees, a banana tree, sugar cane, beans, and several native fruit trees that we don’t have. They gave us coconut milk from coconuts that had fallen from their trees.

For lunch, we drove to a restaurant on the beach. The beach there was about 60 yards long from the restaurant to the surf. The beach was very wide and flat, extending at least a mile in both directions. The kids played in the water while Logan, Marla, Leah, Shane and I stayed in the shallows. Logan found a live sand dollar. I’ve never seen one alive before. He put it back in the water after I took a picture of him with it.

Lunch took almost two hours. In Brazil, there is a two-hour break for lunch during the day. Many people take naps before going back to work. Afterwards, we went back to the house, and most of us took naps on the porch while Ethan, Makayla, and Corey played in their small in-ground pool.
The town of Pecen was very pretty. We stopped before going into the town to take pictures of the port (the largest in northern Brazil) and the ocean. There is a desert area leading to the port and cows that roam it wild. Ethan asked if you could milk the cows, and I replied that you can, but they only give dehydrated milk.

In the town, I took a photo of Ethan standing by “phone booths.” They are big and round, and two are side by side. Consequently, they are called “big ears.”