This is a screencap of a video shot in Colonia Iguassu, a Japanese farming colony in Paraguay, on the border of Argentina and Brazil. The year was 1993 and Portuguese is still a struggle for me. My mentor, nikkei Brazilian Pastor Kiyohiko Amakawa (to my right), is such a gracious person. As I speak in Portuguese, he is doing the Japanese interpretation and correcting all the grammatical flaws.
The reason that my early attempts to speak Portuguese here weren't so critical is because the people in this Paraguayan colony speak Japanese as their first language and Spanish as their second. Since Pastor Amakawa didn't speak English and I didn't speak Japanese or Spanish, this was the only way we could configure the languages so that I could present this Bible study. This configuration would be repeated throughout our work in Argentina and Paraguay that summer.
Pastor Amakawa is currently serving the nikkei Brazilian community in Chiba-ken, Ishihara-shi, Japan.
