Luke and his companion

Luke and Elder Rebelo











Luke and Mate drink

Luke at a members home.

Good sized explosions on the road...

So Levi tells me that the Utes won. What a terrible start to the year… And, Lauren´s driving? Ha, that´s funny. How things have changed...

New Year´s eve was interesting. We had dinner at a member´s house and then headed back to the house. It gets kinda crazy around here because all the kids around here make these kind of homemade bombs out of soda bottles and who knows what else and throw them at each other and at passers by. Every two minutes or so, during Dec. 31st, we would hear and see many good sized explosions on the road. All the kids think it´s hilarious when the adults yell at them and women chase the kids away from their houses trying to smack them with a broom.

It rained a lot on the 31st here, so there weren´t too many opportunities to see any cool fireworks. New Year´s day was a bit difficult to find people as everyone who wasn´t drunk asleep in their houses were asleep and drunk on the road, which are two hard teaching situations.

We did manage to find a nice family to teach. Their Catholic, and the dad said that he´d like to visit our church but always has a meeting Sunday morning. Oh, which reminds me, I had a good experience with developing patience. The Catholic family that we´re teaching has a family friend, a 15-year old guy by the name of M. who is visiting from another city and is staying just 4 houses down from them. He seemed really interested in the message and said that he´d come to church with us on Sunday. When I called him Saturday night to remind him about church, he said that unfortunately he had to go back to his city and had left Campo Grande, but that he would be back on Wednesday. We were a bit disappointed, but said we´d see him on Wednesday then. About a half-hour later we went to visit the family´s house to remind everybody else, and when we got there the guy was sitting there hanging out with them! (He must think that this American is pretty dumb, eh?) The look on his face when we showed up there was great, but me and Elder R. exercised patience and resisted the urge to burn the guy and instead we didn´t address it and just invited everybody to church. And, you know what? He ended up going to church and had a good experience. Controlling emotions works! (As a funny side note, the lesson in the new members class was about the Final Judgement, and how liars get a place in the Telestial Kingdom. We´ll work with him to be more honest next time)

Welp, I think that´s all from this side of the equator. Luckily this week has cooled down and I actually had to use my blanket for the first time since I got in this city. There´s hope yet…heh.

-Me

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

Hot Christmas

Poor Cougs. I hope the Utes lose...We´re approaching 98 degrees today here. No white Christmas for me this year.

I finished up with my visa problem, so thus ended the biggest pain in the butt that I´ve had yet in the mission. I´ll definately be smarter in the future and not lose my identification slip. But all´s well after that.

We had Christmas Conference yesterday. Normally it would be mission wide, but President decided to save money and travel time for everybody and hold one yesterday for everybody that´s in the cities of Campo Grande, Dourados, and Ponta Porã, and another one today for the rest of the mission. It was really good and fun, but unfortunately I didn´t get to see anyone from my MTC group as they´re all in the other parts of the mission, but it was cool just the same.

Thanks to Talisa for the letter with Halloween pictures, and congrats to Amy on the mission call. Welcome to South America!

Welp, that´s it from me.

Today´s not actually officially P-day, so we´ve got shorter time than usual just to write a quick e-mail. I´ll talk to you guys tomorrow, and I´ll try to come prepared with something interesting to say.

Merry Christmas, Feliz Natal, Feliz Navidade, Happy Chanukah and Kwanzaa, and a Happy Festivus to all!

-Heperi the brown nosed Elder (not brown-noser, just brown nosed.)

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