Christmas BBQ

I think the phonecall business is all a little surreal. Everybody sounded the same except Liam and Lauren. You guys both sound a lot older. The most similar were Grandma, Grandpa and Tota. Christmas was a good ól time.

Here in Brazil, everybody holds a “Christmas Supper” that starts at midnight on Christmas Eve and goes on ´till who knows when. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be out till midnight, but President did let us stay out till 10 at one of the parties. One of the families that we’re teaching invited us to their house for their barbecue, for which we were very grateful. It was basically like food from Tucanos, and even included a full roasted pig, head and all. There´s also this thing called Mandioca that is a bit like a potato that I like a lot, and there was plenty of it that evening. A good night.

So one of our investigators, named R., agreed to a baptismal date on January 11th. We found her and her family knocking doors one day. As the chapel is in the other Elder’s area, we decided to find the house that was the very closest to the chapel and knock there, and we ended up finding a whole family. She’s been very receptive and reads the Book of Mormon very consistently. The only problem is that her husband never shows much interest when we come to visit. He listens but never usually responds to questions or stuff like that. Also, we’re in the process of helping them get married, which isn’t too complicated, but we’ll depend a lot on him. R. is really excited to get married, but says that unfortunately he’s a bit fearful of marriage. Which, after 3 kids and 10 years of being together, I think isn’t justified at all. We’re trying to find a tactful way of telling him to just suck it up, be a man, and get married so that he can have an eternal family. We taught them about marriage and the temple already, and R. seemed quite moved by the doctrine. Please pray for them and for us to help him.

Last week after the Zone Christmas Conference, we went Christmas caroling as a zone. We all headed to one of the plazas downtown and set up our choir (about 22 missionaries) while others stopped the people passing by and got references and handed out pass-along cards. I was in the choir for a bit, but then I found it more interesting to talk to the people. There’s always quite a few hippies there (funny enough hippy is Portuguese as well) and they’re always fun to talk too. We found a decent amount of people that we’re interested in the message, though not too many who live in my area as it’s about an hour from the center. It was a nice experience.

It’s nice to hear that you’ve got a lot of snow there in Provo. As I mentioned on the phone, if the temperature drops below 70 degrees here, people close down their houses and half the city gets sick with a cold.

Welp, sáll from me.

Thanks for the support from home.

-Me