Don and Betty Best

Communications and Guest House

Missionaries Don and Betty Best serve in Santarém, Brazil, and have been working with Project AmaZon (PAZ) since September, 2002. Don is a native of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and Betty of Westwood, Massachusetts. Prior to joining the mission, Don and Betty’s long-time home was in Surry, New Hampshire, where Don worked as a writer/editor and Betty home-schooled sons Paul and Jonathan.

Paul and his wife Melissa now live in Los Angeles, where Paul works for the National Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Melissa works as a market analyst for the Fresh & Plenty supermarket chain. Jonathan is the kitchen manager at the Riverside Bible Camp in Cusick, Washington and a worship leader at the Fourth Memorial Church in Spokane.

Don and Betty Best

Don and Betty host the PAZ guesthouse in Santarém and provide interpretation, transportation and other logistical support for visiting health and construction teams. They frequently accompany visiting teams on their river trips, helping to coordinate church construction and evangelical outreach. In this capacity, they typically host 10 to 15 teams a year.

Don and Betty also devote large amounts of time to mission communications and photography. One of their most exciting and challenging projects in this area was writing and designing the preface for the mission’s new Portuguese Bible.

“We are very happy to be working here in the Amazon and grateful to our Lord and to the body of Christ for enabling us,” the couple relates. “There is nothing in the world so beautiful as seeing the life of an individual — and often entire families — transformed by the love of Christ. By the grace of God, a tremendous revival is underway here in the Amazon and the harvest is plentiful.”

The Bests attend the PAZ Central Church in Santarém. Their home and sending church in the United States is Agape Christian Fellowship in Brattleboro, Vermont.

A Sweet Aroma....

27 June 2010, 12:13 am | from Don & Betty Best

Dear Friends,Well, the firecrackers are going off all around the neighborhood, signifying the beginning of the first World Cup soccer game this year for Brazil, this one against North Korea. I may be the only person in Brazil that is not watching television at this moment! But praise the Lord, what a wonderfully undisturbed time to write to you!!We have much to catch up on! Several teams have come and gone, and by God’s grace, scores of lives have been eternally touched. We have a team coming...

5 April 2010, 12:21 am | from Don & Betty Best

He is Risen!!!Dear Friends,Many blessings to you from the Amazon, where Jesus has many disciples (and the Easter Bunny scarcely any.) Today — Resurrection Sunday — the light of His glory will rise in many people's hearts, including ours. God is pouring out his grace on this beautiful land called Brazil, and bringing many to salvation. We have just come back from a wonderful (but rough) trip out on the Amazon River, to a community called Correio do Tapará, where six ad...

11 September 2009, 11:18 pm | from Don & Betty Best

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot comprehend it. – John 1:5Whew!! What a trip! I just got back from the border of Bolivia, where we visited a PAZ youth ministry.Can you imagine a place darker than this? Mothers regularly pimping their 12-year-old daughters to truck drivers in order to put food on the table. Young men selling themselves as male prostitutes to finance their addiction to “óleo”, a deathly combination of cocaine, acetone, and tobacco. Witch...

Softening our hearts

6 March 2009, 2:02 pm | from Don & Betty Best

Dear Friends,We hope you are well and enjoying each day to the fullest.We were really blessed over the past few weeks by a wonderful team of medical students who came down from South Carolina to run free health clinics and share the love of Jesus.I (Don), along with some other PAZ missionaries and health staff, accompanied the team during their first week here, running clinics in the small river town of “Prainha,” (“prahEENya”--means “little beach”). The town sits on the north side o...