First Baptism!

Photo Shoot

Hey so I don´t have a ton to say about this last week because I didn´t really do all that much that is noteworthy. I talked to my parents that was awesome!








I had my first baptism, his name is Eduardo, he is so cool. People have been trying to teach him for like 10 years but he would´t get baptized before. The baptismal service was so good! Everything just went well with the plans, it was awesome! The guy who baptized him was a missionary that taught him 10 years ago that married his daughter.

We taught one guy this week I will talk about. He is actually a member but all 4 of his sons aren´t. He said he was praying for a missionary to come and talk to his sons and he felt like he should go somewhere and we would show up. We did we met him under this lamp post that is always on for some reason. We went to teach his sons and it was kinda scary. I think they are all part of the drug lord gang thing here. They told us they new what we were saying is true and we had one in tears but they said they were doing some terrible things they need to clean up before they can be baptized... their dad told us every bad thing they have done after we left and not going to lie i kinda am a little scared to go back. I guess we will see what the spirit tells us to do. 

That´s all i have for this week, sorry it´s short i already shared everything with you on Christmas and didn´t do many cool things this week love ya all bye!

oh i forgot, I gave a talk on Sunday. They are much less scary on missions. I had no clue what I was saying the whole time it absolutely sucked but oh well i just bore my testimony at the end and the spirit made everyone think it was good.

Apartment

awesome christmas tree made out of coke bottles!

we found a turtle!

Skyping with Cameron

Merry Christmas

look how tan that handsome young man is!

This email won´t be very long today so sorry in advance for that. I had huge miracle this last week. We have two people that have been going to church for the last like 8 years. We are meeting with both of them, one we were able to talk him into baptism this saturday. All of his family are members his sons are doing the baptism and confirmation. The family loves us now. I like to talk to members and just be nice to them for a lot of reasons. They give you references and they give you food and stuff. An embarrassing moment i had was some guy gave me a card during sacrament meeting and i opened it and it started playing music super loud... It was good though because it woke everyone including me up so i guess it was a blessing?

It is super weird to think christmas is almost here, it doesn´t feel like it at all! The only difference it makes is because everyone where we live is rich they are all gone. We have had so many people say oh I really am interested in you guys but I am so busy, we have a ton of dates marked in like 3 weeks...

so some guy we are teaching is living with a less active lady and has kids and everything. He wants to get baptised but can´t because he isn´t married but the only problem is she is married but not divorced and they are very poor. We found a member lawyer that said she would do it cheap we marked his baptism for jan 31st i know super far away. I have never set up a divorce before it is weird. Here on i mission i feel like a marriage concealer the only problem is I have never had any experiance with that so all i go off is what i seen of my parents and it seems to work pretty well. So good job mom and dad. well sorry this email is so short today. love ya all have a great week!

 

an awesome fruit that grows here!

Just a look out my window

brazilians plants...grown to kill

a bar where i flirt/ be nice to the 80 year old owner so she gives me food for free

we went to a graveyard, they are all above ground and super fancy, even the poor ones are super fancy!

My babe

random chicken things

 

This last week was amazing! It was just full of miracles!

So first off sorry i don´t have any pictures for you all today, I forgot my camera at the house today. This last week was amazing! It was just full of miracles! I didn´t get to go to the zoo today which kinda sucked. It is only open on holidays and saturdays for some reason, so i guess i won´t get to go to this one.

Monday: in reality on mondays not a lot happens. We set up a FHE with a less active family and it went so well! The mom, the daughter and the boyfriend were there. We did a lesson with our ties about prayer, did an awesome game and it was just so dang spiritual and amazing! The daughter and her boyfriend are not members. the BF said he was very interested in our church so we got his info but it wasn´t in our area, so that sucked but we set up a couple new appointments with him and the daughter at her house. 

Tuesday: we had a party kinda thing for the last district meeting with this district. We had food and signed everyones journal thing, it kinda felt like yearbook day now that i look back on it. We then later on in the day had like 3 people fall through so we were thinking what to do and this guy walked past and i said lets follow him. We did for quite some time and i was like lets stop here. he then after we stopped went into a house up the street, my companion was like why did we follow him and i said i don´t know lets just knock doors to his house. Every single house from where we were to his house lived freaking awesome people that we are now teaching. in one of the houses they had a catholic women night party thing and we went in and there was like 19 ladies and we showed the ele e o presente video and we are meeting with 6 of them next week! It is crazy how stuff like this happens.

Wednesday: so we have 2 district leaders and one is my companion you know, yeah the other one got released until transfers because he is an idiot, so all day wednesday we were doing interviews i spent like $20 on the bus alone, it is good i guess that we are getting that many baptisms.

Thursday: so again we taught some of the people we met on Tuesday and they are so wonderful i hope so much that they will stay strong. The rest of the day we did interviews for baptisms...

Sexta: we had a ward natal party on friday and it was so not planned so they were like here missionaries bs it. we did and it was so great. It turned out being super spiritual and we played some game that you hold an animal on your forehead without knowing what it is and you have to go find the person with the matching animal. they also had a ton of leftover food from it which we took home. the next day it was gone... the brazilian kid eats so much... he left the bag of salad for us i guess that was nice 

Sabado: we did half day splits. during splits i went with someone that is getting sent home the next plane ride available and it sucked he was just an idiot. he would just tell people the stupidest stuff so rather then make a bad name for missionaries we just went to the house and i read the book of mormon. it was so annoying!

And every one of these days except for tuesday it constantly has rained like non-stop even at night it makes it really hard to want to go outside in the mornings. It only just stopped yesterday afternoon. I was 100 percent wet just always. i just got used to it. I was in the rain so long my fingers got waterlogged it was ridiculous. I am not getting transferred I am happy because of that everything is staying the same but elder noleto the Brazilian that lives with us is getting replaced by an american so now i will be living with 4 americans... my Portuguese is going to go downhill fast.

Translations by Riley:

fyi to all reading this, ele e o presente means "he is the gift"

also "natal" means Christmas

Questions and answers by Mom and Cameron:

questions from mom
What is your companions name again, from Arizona, right?
How much longer does he have?
Can you send more pictures
Why don't you have food at your place so you can eat dinner when you get home?
What is a typical day like
How many elders live with you and are you all on the same floor/apartment
Are you the only elders in your stake,
Favorite food
Scariest food
How often do you go to the mission home or for zone conferences.
Am I still your favorite?

Cameron's answers

His name is Elder (Nathan) Throckmorton yes from arizona

he has 4 more months

well i don´t take a lot of pictures to send... sorry

don´t have food because i don´t have money they only give us 100R and i use that all on the bus

typical day is after lunch apt. go out tracting for 1 hour then appointments with investigators all day

there are a total of 4 elders with me and yes all on the same floor and only one house per floor

us 4 no it is 4 per ward here 

favorite food i don´t know it´s all the same

they always have like throats of animals and gross stuff in bean soup

never have gone to the mission home it is super far away

i can´t answer that last question mom don´t want to cause contention but really what do you think

Mom: obviously I am his favorite

THE ONE KILO BURGER!

Our freezer froze super hard last week so we had to scrape it out and i made a snowball and threw it at my companion...haha

This last week was crazy! We had a need for a lot of new investigators so we went tracting a ton. We found about 9 new solid investigators and 3 of them moved and 4 work every day for like 10 hours and the other 2 work every other day and this week they worked on Sunday. It is a little frustrating how hard a mission is at times but i just have to remember to learn and grow from all of my trials.

Being close to Christmas and all is awesome that i live around rich people because people like to give you candy, this has been a great blessing. If i eat like i did this last week every week i am going to get so fat. For example one of our investigators named recardo took us to get hamburgers for dinner and they were the biggest thing i have ever seen! It was like 1 kilo and that is not a joke, it was so hard to eat it all but i just want you to know that i did. This recardo guy is awesome, he is super hard to teach because he is actually smart but i feel he will be converted. We had a miracle with him though a member that used to be a catholic priest guy came with us to teach him and all of his questions he had he was able to answer with ease. You know missions are super hard but the lord always provides a way for you, you just have to look for it.

We were tracting and found this 7th day lady, she was like oh i have a book for you and she gave us her bible thing and we gave her a book of mormon. She said we should come back and teach her and she can teach us also. I don´t know if we will but i guess we will see. 

You know i really really wished I knew how to cook. It is always a bummer when the lunch gets canceled and all i know how to cook is noodles. So you were right mom i should have paid more attention when you were trying to teach me how to cook. This last week i bought a bunch of junk food. Junk food is nice here in brazil because it is so so cheap like in USA money like .30 for a thing of cookies, so yeah mom i am not eating very healthy. 

Another example of how amazing people are with giving me food, just now a man came up to us and said oh hey missionaries the only thing better then emailing on p-day is emailing on p-day with chocolate and he gave us chocolate. I love it! 

Well that is all I hope this email was better with periods and stuff I am trying to be better at that. Have a great yall!

i forgot the best part this last week i met an American! He is an Atheist. I am so glad i am in Brazil we taught a lesson in English and it is hard. You don´t have any excuses if you mess up. Also Americans are mean. I feel bad for anyone in United States Americans are a lot meaner at saying they don´t like you. Also i heard so many swear words in English it was so weird i haven't heard that for so long. so yeah that´s all.

BYE

stuff i like to drink

 (No punctuation was added in this blog. It was all Cameron!)

I like to sing?

 my Thanksgiving dinner

so for all of you (mom) who think i procrastinate a lot of stuff, are wrong, i just let future me have the opertunity to try it out the only problem with that is future me hates past me but oh well, he can deal with it.

i had my first bible bashing experience, it was terrible. some lady just kept on saying one part of the bible then we would show her where it said otherwise in the same bible and she just wouldn't let it go so we asked her: ok if GOD was standing right here and told you this was wrong would you believe him and she said no, so we just left she be crazy.

it is funny lots of people are catholic but they say they wont change because you dont have to do anything in the catholic church, i just feel bad for them...

mom i sang in a choir of about 8 girls and 4 guys so i hope you are proud of me. i really like singing for some reason all of a sudden i am a little worried about that...

we went to eat lunch at some ladies house and when we asked if we could pray over the food she said no i bless all of the groceries when i buy them. she is a active member but she is crazy... it reminded me of the julian smith video pre blessed food.

i was able to experience my first huge rain storm. now i thought i new what a huge rain storm was but oh i didn't. lets just say you could baptize someone being fully submerged in the middle of the street, it is raining so hard... we ran under a bus stop with some old man and did a contact. it was crazy how much water there was.

we had a little thanksgiving. we went to the store and bought some food and i also ate a snickers i was saving for a special day. i would say it was a good use.

so people smoke weed here so so much it is ridiculous, and talking to high people is hard. they are so confusing. it is a third stuff about how satin has everyone in his hands, a third about people they met, and a third about their church. we tried to get to a lady that lives in the same complex as a high guy and he said first his woman then his cousin then his mom, then said there isn't anyone who lives there. it is a hard life...

if you didn't know, Sorocoba, where i am is one of the richest cities in the state of Sao Paulo, which is nice because we get good food but also way hard because all you have is a wall and a door to clap at to hope to get their attention. for this reason it is hard to get new investigators. 

its kinda funny because it is usually like 35 C here and the other morning it was like 20 C and it felt super cold i am turning into you mommie.

we were trying to find this lady that lived behind another house and she sounds super cool and has great potential but the only problem is the person in front always gets the door and she hates Mormons. she wont get the lady in back. so one of these days we are just going to camp out in front of her house. no jk but i don't know how to get to her, it is super annoying.

we have two way awesome investigators, Recardo and Kelly. the only problem is they work every other day so it is hard to get them to church. but the lessons with them are so perfect i love teaching them it makes me so happy. it is weird when i teach i am just so happy and also i don't really notice the spirit with me when i am teaching but after i think back and i realize how crazy strong it really was.

we also have an inactive family we are working with. last night we had FHE with them and it went super well the dad thanked us in private and told us he would clean up his act and become more dedicated to Christ. i love working with people like him!

there is another member family that we talked to and the dad and mom were just so mean the whole time but i looked at the son and just felt he is the reason we are here. i asked if he could let us out at the gate and he did and we had one of the most spiritual experiences i can remember with him. we now meet with him at the house of a member that lives close by. he has such a strong desire to do good. i love how even when we are being yelled at by some crazy drunk dad we still are able to help someone.

it is so weird i will just randomly feel like i need to talk to someone or knock on some door and it is someone in need. for example we were in a hurry but i just felt like i needed to go to this house so we did and it is a guy that i guess was talked to by two other missionaries just a week ago that i have never heard of but they gave them a book of Mormon and our supplies. it is weird because we are the only missionaries in our area so i don't know who talked to him but someone did. he left on a business trip the next day so we told him keep reading and praying. we have an appointment set up with him when he gets back
 december 29th.

it is little things like that that really confirm the truthfulness of what we are doing. how else would i know to talk to this person or knock on this door.

well love you all if you! have a great week.

car of someone living in a homeless shelter

walls and gates make it hard to knock on peoples doors

start of a flood