John Sapieha was teaching at the Hampstead Bible School in London, when he first met Gary in 1988, who was attending his classes there while on furlough from his mission work in Brazil. Gary’s visit to HBS in 1988 served to answer a prayer John had been holding up to the Lord regarding how to combine prison ministry, which he had felt being called to, with a return to Brazil, which he had left in 1984 and where he had family. Upon learning about the FPF work in Brazil from Gary, John realized this was a door the Lord was opening up for him, in line with his calling.

Following the calling came provision to finance his return to Brazil in 1991, where he began prison ministry and work with juvenile delinquents at the “FEBEM” youth prison with FPF in São Paulo, and as of in 1992 also in Rio de Janeiro.

Richard also met Gary while he was on a furlough in England in the late 1980s and equally felt called by the God to join as a missionary. He first went out to Brazil in 1992 and was ordained as a pastor there. Even now, 30 years later, he still faithfully serves the Lord in his second home Brazil.

John served the Lord faithfully until he passed away after a short illness in August of 2021, he was 87 years old.

In March of 1987, Ron and Gary felt it was time to leave Peru, at long last. They had both been there for 5 years. But there was one problem: the Peruvian legislation had not foreseen foreign prisoners and thus, there was no regulation of what foreign ex-prisoners were supposed to do, other than stay in the country until the very end of their sentences, which would be many years into the future still. All this on their own expense, since there was no social system at all, no health care, no housing, no legal right to work or start a business or even sign a contract. Besides that, even after the time was up, there was another Kafkaesque dilemma: due to lack of legislation, after the expiration of their sentences, foreign ex-prisoners were considered illegal immigrants, for having overstayed their original 30 or 90-day tourist visas by far of course, which in turn demanded heavy fines to be paid, before any decision about granting to leave the country could be considered….

Hence, upon recommendation of friends from the “Summer Institute of Linguistics – Wycliffe Bible Translators”, in March of 1987, Gary and Ron said farewell to everybody and flew from Lima to the jungle town of Pucallpa. They stayed at the Wycliffe “Lake Yarinacocha” translators base for a few days and then took a 45-minute flight with a small single engine propeller plane from Pucallpa 200 km across the Amazon jungle border to Cruzeiro do Sul, in the state of Acre, Brazil.

Ron remembers:

“It was a miracle, as this flight only operated for a very short time and the Peruvian immigration officer at the airport in Pucallpa looked at our newly issued passports with no entry stamps in them. First he said, we cannot leave the country like this, we’d have to go back to Lima and get a copy of our entry registry. That was impossible of course! We left the counter dejected and prayed to God what to do next, when the officer came after us and called us back. He then simply granted us to leave the country and stamped our passports. He even helped carrying our bags to the 6-seater, single-engine “Cessna 206” propeller airplane and waved us good-bye.

When we arrived in Brazil at the small, hardly used, but brand-new airport, also in the middle of the jungle, and had passed immigration and customs, I went to the bathroom and read “Jesus é o Salvador do Mundo” (“Jesus is the Saviour of the world”) scribbled right in front of my face, and was amazed about this ‘writing on the wall’ message and how true it was! “

From there they flew another 3.500 km to the other extreme end of the country, to Rio de Janeiro. They found a cheap apartment in the neighbourhood of ‘Botafogo’, with a view to the famous ‘Pão de Açucar’ and Gary immediately checked out international churches, embassies and prisons to continue the ministry to foreign prisoners. After a month, Ron went on to return to Germany, but Gary would remain in Brazil for most of the rest of his life, alternating between Rio and São Paulo, even regularly going to the border town of Foz do Iguaçu in the south west of the country and on to Asunción, Paraguay, to get his visa renewed and to also visit foreign prisoners over there.