I am 20, going on 21

´sup kids?

First off, I´ve gotta say that being 20 doesn´t feel too much different from 19. In fact, I´d say that I´d rank it as the 2nd to last in terms of how different the age feels, 2nd only to age 17. Because at 16 you can drive, 18 you´re like an adult but with training wheels, 19 you´re mission aged, and at 21 the training wheels come off and your a full adult. But 17 and 20? Tsk tsk, the only thing that I can say is that I´m not a teenager anymore. Whoo!

So my new comp is Elder Cassio. He´s from Bela Horizante, and is a pretty cool guy. He´s pretty small (I think maybe two or three of him equals one of me), and pretty laid back, and actually we have a lot more in common than I thought. I think he knows how to play more tunes on the guitar than I do, and while we where at a members house eating, he played some Red Hot Chili Peppers tunes for us, which was very cool. He doesn´t speak a whole lot of English, and most of his vocabulary in English comes from the songs that he knows how to sing. So while he can´t really carry on a conversation very well in English, he could probably try and serenade a bunch of people if he went to the US. He was actually the comp. of my comp from the MTC, so we have some stuff to talk about there as well.

As for some bad parts, Elder RJ managed to leave everything that he shouldn´t have (his batteries, photos, letters, notebook) at our house, and took everything he shouldn´t have (list of members, less-actives, references) with him to Londrina. So, unfortunately, we´re having to start over as far as finding people.

This first week has been nothing but knocking doors, visiting the less actives that I remember, and me trying to remember all that I know about this area. It´s been hard, and actually pretty discouraging, but we´re working thru it. Elder C. arrived a little discouraged, first of all because of our house (small and dinky like it is, everyone gets sad when the come to our house, so I don´t blame him there), and second because Bauru is well known in the mission as the city that is quite difficult to work in, and is known to many missionaries as the city that you don´t wanna get transferred too. But I´ve learned to try and push thru it, even when we've been knocking doors for 4 hours at a time.

But, on the up side we got a very good internet reference about someone named Joice who wanted a Book of Mormon. When we delivered it, she was very excited to begin reading it and said that as soon as she figured out her work schedule, she´d try to make it to church. We´ve only had one visit with her so far, as she just moved here and is still quite busy, but I´d rank her as the best 1st visit we´ve ever had. My only concern is that her husband might object in some way. He was sleeping when we gave the lesson, so we didn´t get to meet him, and it´s happened a couple of times that we teach one member of the family, (only the wife or vice-versa) and then show up the next time and get a nice talking too about how they don´t need our religion, etc. etc. So, I´m hopeful that Joice´s husband will be accepting when we do meet him.

In other news, I bought my first box of cereal out in the mission, (Called “Little Stars”, kinda like coco-puffs) and it was heavenly. No one really eats cereal because it´s a little expensive, plus they only have about three kinds of cereal at the grocery store. (Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, and about 30 different brands of chocolate cereal. How I miss Trix...) So anyway, I ended up buying it and eating the whole box, it was THAT good! The only thing that I´m concerned with is the milk. Milk tastes quite different down here, and I think it´s because although they have a cool system where none of the milk has to be refrigerated until after it´s opened, all cartons have a thing that says they´ve been hit by gamma rays to make it that way. So while it´s cool that the milk will keep for a while, I´m a little worried that consuming it in great quantities will eventually turn me into the Hulk. We´ll see...

Mom and Dad, that´s nice to here that you guys have AC now. I´d like to say that I feel that blessed by it too, but that´ll be about a year and a half in the future.

I think that wraps it up for this week.

Thanks to the people who´s letter´s I finally got yesterday, (Grandma, Grandpa, Talisa, and Kamalei. Some had been floating around since March...) and I hope the USA is good.

Excelsior!

-Elder Heperi