Eunice believes that every community already has rays of hope, general revelation from God and some form of Christian witness embedded in the culture. However, there is also a mix of a whole lot of other beliefs seeking to lead people away from God’s grace and the peace that He desires for us. To establish a relationship based on trust, it is necessary to exhibit a genuine faith, one that makes it a priority for us to live out the Great Commandment: love God, love your neighbor. She also believes it is paramount to engage the Christian leadership from different denominations and promote unity so they can fulfill the Great Commission. The Gospel needs to be GOOD NEWS in all aspects of life!

Eunice was born in an indiginous village, the Pankararu, in the interior of Northeast Brazil where her parents worked as missionaries. Before her first birthday, she came down with the polio fever. Her parents were saving money to take her to a larger city to get vaccinated against the virus. Unfortunately, the poliovirus invaded her little body two months before the planned trip. Her childhood was filled with special therapies and surgery to correct the damage polio had caused to her left leg. Along the way, she was the beneficiary of a lot of care and attention from her parents, physical therapists and doctors who were able to help her to maintain movement to her affected leg. As a result, Eunice is passionate about provision and believes God desires to have every child well provided for. In fact, that is why He created a world so abundant in resources.

If you sit to chat with her, she is full of stories about the resourcefulness of the people she has been called to help. She will tell you about how the community leaders in the Araras lake were able to bring back the fish by carefully monitoring fishing boats, or how their cassava flour in the Mamuru River is the best in the region. She will also tell you about the teenagers she trained to be the “Clean Water Brigade”, encouraging their community to change the way they treated their own waste so that their drinking water would be protected.

How has James and Elsie’s ministry helped Eunice fulfill God’s call to her life?

Child Safety Prevention: Eunice received training from our network and promoted the same to teachers and Christian leaders in her region.

She goes to our network platform and downloads methodological materials to use with her team and community leaders. One of these is our yearly prayer campaign.

Northbrook Church sent a group of young adults to run a special workshop for all the teachers in the Araras Community in 2019.

Northbrook Church sent financial help to the river communities during the 2020/21 COVID pandemic.

She says that living in the North tends to make one feel isolated. Our network keeps her connected to the rest of Brazil through inspirational content she receives from our website, yearly events, both in person as well as online.

Biggest challenge and greatest win:

Supplying food to the people who were isolated during the COVID 19 pandemic was a huge challenge. The entire region lives on a hand to mouth economy. Eunice’s team organized the distribution of food and other essential items to 44,431 people in 208 communities from 6 distinct ethnic groups during 2020.

Now for a fun win. Recently, Eunice’s team negotiated with city authorities to help 25 couples from a community to obtain their official marriage certificate. Some of these couples were already grandparents! For each couple to obtain proper documentation on their own, they would have to travel six hours by boat to the nearest city hall, pay a fee and provide their identification documents. The cost of doing so was prohibitive, so Eunice and her colleagues negotiated with a justice of peace to come to the village for a “marriage fest”.

Birth, marriage and death records are a problem in this part of the world. People are born, live and die without proper documentation and this means they are deprived of many of the benefits they would otherwise need to participate in society as good standing citizens. The twenty-five couples held a community wedding celebration for 500 people in attendance. Joyous occasion indeed!

• Written by: Elsie Gilbert