Londrina calling

So today I´m coming to you guys from Londrina. Visa renewal time rolled around so I’ve spent a lovely Sunday night riding on the Bumpy Brazilian Bus (The journey was supposed to be about 12 hours I think, but the driver drives like a man possessed and managed to get us there in 10 hours. Not bad, eh?) And, I got to take a look at the mission office for the first time. (I picked up my Christmas package from the family. Thanks for the harmonica!)

P-day will be a little slow today as we have almost no idea where anything is in this city.

Yesterday was good as we had some investigators that had never been to church before show up. Including that guy... that I said came to church last week but gave a wrong address to us so we ended up not being able to visit him. He’s a great guy... He sometimes doesn’t remember how old he his and stuff like that... we’ll keep working with him.

It’s been raining for a good 4 days straight in Campo Grande, which has its good parts and bad. The good side is that we don’t roast alive in the sun, we just get soaked. The bad part is that my laundry once again is not drying, and we recently discovered that the tube-thingy responsible for carrying the water away from our back porch area doesn’t drain very well and creates a bit of a flooding problem when it rains too hard.

As a result of the heavy rain yesterday, it seemed that about half the ward didn’t show up. It was a bit sad to see so many not there as a result of the weather, and the bishop expressed disappointment that so many were missing. I also had the opportunity to try to put into practice some council of President Kimball when he said that if some parts of Sacrament Meeting are boring, that’s your fault and not the speakers. (Or something like that.) The last guy spoke for a good 45 minutes, and obviously didn’t prepare his talk. He would just read a couple of paragraphs from his manual and then make some commentaries. I tried to stay interested, but only managed to pay attention to the last 10 minutes, which weren’t too bad.

In other news, it’s mango season here in Campo Grande, and the place is loaded with them. There’s usually trees growing all over the place and sometimes in the road, so me and my comp usually grab a couple from people that offer them or grab ém from a tree in the road. It’s pretty cool.

Welp, that’s it from me.

I hope everything’s good over there, and good luck with the Christmas preparations.

Give Berkeley a congrats from me for the wedding. I’d love to see Andy’s, so tell him to wait till I can make it.

´till next week!

-Me

Feliz Natal (Merry Christmas)

Levi tells me that it´ll be Arizona and BYU. G´luck to them, and currently I´m an Alabama fan. (Down with the Utes!)

So, my prediction was right. Elder O. left, and I´m here with Elder Rebelo from somewhere in the north of Brazil. He´s a nice guy, and speaks English pretty well. I thinks that he speaks better than any other Brazilian Elder that I´ve run into. He said he just read and studied a lot, so the promise of learning English is true. But as a result, he knows a lot of funny things to say, like “Don´t go after those wicked women” and stuff like that.

Welp, it´s been a week of much tracting. The whole mission is currently in an immense effort to find and focus especially on families, so we´ve been in search of some. We found many who were interested in the message, but nobody yet who´s made the effort to come with us to church yet.

The search continues...

On Wednesday, this guy... stopped us on the road and said he´d like to receive our visits. Apparently he had been visiting with the missionaries and even had a baptismal date marked when he moved here, so he lost contact with the missionaries. We set up an appointment with him and invited him to church. Turns out he showed up yesterday and everything. His name is A..., about 29, and likes to study Hebrew. He asks everyone that he meets if they speak Hebrew and will say a few words to them. He´s a little odd, but a good guy. We tried to pass by his house later that day to see how he was doing and feeling after church, but unfortunately we couldn´t find his house. We walked up and down the whole dang street many times, but unfortunately the number system of houses is quite weird in the city. On many streets, you get to just choose which number you´d like, instead of being in order, which means that sometimes house number 34 will be next to house number 567, so it takes a while to find a house at times. It´s a bit stupid with the numbers, but we´ll keep up a diligent search for him.

In other news, the championship game between São Paulo and some other team was on yesterday, which made it quite difficult to find people to listen to the message instead of watching the game. Those that did listen either turned out to be drunk (I´m getting better at telling the difference between a drunk guy and other types of crazy), Pastors who just wanted to teach us some stuff, or both. One lesson we taught was to two people in their driveway, and my comp had just about finished explaining about the Book of Mormon, but for some reason the other guy who lived there got angry and came out and yelled at us, told us to go to heck, and many other words that I didn´t understand. Heh, it was one of the times where we weren´t well received. At least, in my experience here in Brazil, usually the missionaries get pretty well treated, but I guess not always.

Welp, that´s all from my front.

Thanks again guys, and a Feliz Natal to everybody!

-Me

Short letter, sorry!

So, we´ve reached the end of one more transfer. We actually won´t know about anything until tomorrow, but I´m pretty sure that my comps. outta here. He´s in the same boat that I was in (6 months in 1st area) so my prediction is that he´s gone. We´re still struggling in the investigator going to church department. We teach enough, but when it comes to those that actually go there, we have a bit of a problem there. We have a new goal in the mission to focus more on families, so it´s going better in terms of finding the people.

Sorry about the short letter this week, but we´re a little pressed for time again.

–till next week!

-Me