José Vertematti, who served in the 1970’s as a circuit overseer in Maranhão, wrote: “To get to the congregations in Sítio Ceará and Guimarães, my wife, Mazolina, and I had to travel two hours by boat and then wait for whatever means of transport came along, since there was no bus service. Several times we went by truck, Mazolina in the cabin and I on top of the cargo, which included pigs, chickens, and goats or sacks of flour, rice, and beans. When the truck would get stuck in the mud, we had to get out and push. If all went well, this part of the trip took about five hours. Then we walked another four hours to reach the Kingdom Hall.” The local Witnesses appreciated these visits very much.

There are circuits that cover huge, sparsely populated areas. During the 1980’s, for example, one circuit included the states of Acre, Rondônia, and parts of Mato Grosso and Amazonas, an area equivalent to that of Spain. While in that circuit, Adenir Almeida visited the congregation in Lábrea, Amazonas, a town where many people suffered from Hansen’s disease, or leprosy. To get there, he traveled four hours by bus, stayed overnight in a boardinghouse, and in the morning set out, along with eight other passengers, on the back of a truck loaded with bottled alcoholic drinks. After several hours of traveling in the heat, all of them were very thirsty. The only liquid available was in those bottles. Brother Almeida confesses that under the circumstances it was hard to resist the offer of the others to share the bottles they pilfered from the cargo. After traveling for ten hours under a burning sun, with plenty of dust and then rain, at last they arrived in Lábrea. There, the whole congregation was on hand to meet him—two special pioneers and two unbaptized publishers! On Sunday, he had the pleasure of baptizing the two publishers.