well I have been adopted...

novo companheiro. Elder M. Sousa

So there is this awesome couple of 69 and 68 years of age and we have been teaching them for quite some time now. Their names are Antonio and Sueley. Antonio is the guy that we baptized.

nosso presidente estava aqui para nosso batismo! era muito legão ele duchou uma mensagem.

I love teaching them. At their house they just tell me, hey do you want food and I say no I´m fine and they say no you aren´t, I already made cake and tons of food that you are going to eat. Sueley says I need to get fat and she will help me with that. She is super hard core catholic but this last Sunday she finally went to church she seemed to love it. we are teaching her tomorrow. Her husband was baptized yesterday at church and man it went so well.

President wanted to visit our ward this last week and man was it a good week for him to visit. There were 10 investigators in church and a baptism. President gave a message at the baptism and Antonio´s família of 10 was all there and they all, except 3, said we could come over and teach them so that was super awesome.

I am loving working with my new companion Elder M. Sousa. Me and him get along super well and it is starting to get really easy to speak in Portuguese. We work super well together, it is really fun to work with him. I have started to dream in Portuguese, for some reason only mom speaks English, the rest of the family speaks Portuguese. I never knew you guys knew how. Why did you never tell me!

Well love you guys Bye

wow mountain!!!!! it is part of our area

oh man i forgot some very important info i guess. My companion is from Fortaleza. he is very fun to work with. It isn´t always quiet like all the other comp´s. My new area the only new thing I have seen is a huge catholic church and that mountain I sent to you.

um i don´t know anything else that has happened. President said he was super happy with the work I have been doing so that is cool. um that´s all I can think of sorry people (DAD)

sup my people!

So yes it is true I have been transferred. My new area is sooooo dang beautiful and it even has a little mountain kind of thing!!!! It is called pico jaragua if you want to look up my area. Man I love Brazil so much!

I was transferred to the area vista verde. my companion´s name is Elder M. Sousa he is from Fortaleza Ceará.

the new house we have is so freaking huge! it has a 3 car garage to start 2 refrigerators and 3 bedrooms 3 bathrooms and a huge kitchen and 2 big study rooms and a balcony that you can sit out on just looking at the city. man I like this house it is freaking nice.

Anyways, this last week was great! When I got to the new area there wasn´t any investigators because my comp and his previous comp are super trunky and didn´t do a lot. When I got here we opened up the area book and started lookin and prayin for some new investigators. We found this family of 3 girls that we went and taught and the lessons were so weird. We would explain stuff and then ask what we said and they would say what we explained then ask if I am single and talked about my eyes and wow how tall you are and man an American how cool, Yeah I am a little worried they do readings and went to church for the wrong reason. They told me they would only go to church if I sat by them. My companion won´t let it go, he is a little jealous. So we need to make sure they actually like the gospel of Jesus Christ and not just who´s talking about it. 

 

We also had a miracle from God this guy came to church alone and we went and talked to him and he was like yeah my friends always told me to visit this church but I never did but I decided to today. We gave him a  Book of Mormon and didn´t mark anything because we were in a run and went and visited him and he had already read like all of first Nephi. He was like yeah this is good stuff, I was catholic but lets be honest we all know that stuff isn´t true, they baptize babies there. He accepted a date for day 29 of this month. He was so well prepared by God before we got there. He has some health problem that makes it so he can´t drink coffee or beer or smoke so man he is just perfect. I also really love teaching him because they are old and so they are rich and have the culture of give food to anyone and everyone who enters into your house. I love how we are blessed when we are doing what we are supposed to. 

 

This ward is super cool we are always going on divisions with members to find even more people. The only downside of this ward is they always just give money for lunch so I have only had ramen and bread to eat for the last week... I know how to cook, I just don´t want to buy the stuff to make the food. I know mom sorry, I know not very healthy for me. 

 

I have been reading Mathew Mark and Luke for Easter and man I didn´t understand a ton of Jesus´s teachings before so many things I have missed out on. 

 

Well love you all sorry the quality of my letters is going down. Bye

maybe pray for rain a little less...

Foto da Zona São Paulo Norte

Sao Paulo North Zone

Man we really need rain here because if we don´t double then Sao Paulo won´t have any more water in their reserve in 5 months but some days in the morning when I am feeling really lazy (every morning) and I don´t feel like taking my umbrella it really sucks. The rain isn´t the bad part, it´s the getting sick and never getting better part that starts to get annoying... no that´s all my fault, I need to stop being lazy.

So I kinda realized that I have never really told you about people that are progressing, I just kinda do a quick summary when they get baptized so sorry about that, we will see if I get better. I will just say what every Brazilian says, if God touches my heart I will. To that I usually like to say, if God touched your heart you would die so you probably shouldn´t wait for that. I usually get a good response with that.

Man yesterday I gave a talk and it was probably the worst thing that I have ever made before, even worse then when I made peanut butter by chewing peanuts and spitting them out. Yeah so I need to work on my talk giving skills in Portuguese, I am just not very good at making the stories make sense.

So yeah this last Sunday there was a huge strike that went on to try and impeach the president Dilma so that was fun. we went to church, went to lunch, and then went home and played cards we called it p-night it also gave us a good opportunity to pack for transfers. I guess that leads to my next subject, I am getting transferred tomorrow. yeah! I am going to just the next stake over but the best part is I am getting a Brazilian companion which will help a ton!

This last week I gained a new testimony of the importance of the 5th lesson, other churches have some of the sameish things in the first 4 lessons but none have anything of the 5th lesson. Man with this Maria lady we baptized we had the most spiritual lesson I have ever had teaching this lesson. It was super cool words just fell into my mouth. 

 

that lady that i am next to, her name is maria, man she is so cool every lesson she would just cry from the spirit being so strong i love this lady. she is going to be a super great member to this ward she was like why do i have to wait 2 weeks to get baptized i just want to now. she told us man when you walked in I just felt i needed what you had.

mom these are for you she is a daughter of an investigator and she gave them to me to give to you for day of the moms

(extra thoughts from Cameron)

the baptism retain rate is not very good in general here but it all depends on the mission. so far I have only 1 guy that we baptized that i am a little worried about all the others love going to church. Church is a thing that everyone just does in Brazil so it´s not that hard to just keep people going here in Brazil the hard part is to have the ward help them to actually progress in the ward. We are supposed to help the ward members help our new members out, which is super hard at times when you only have like 4 people in the ward willing to do that. If that happened the ward would be so much stronger. That is a problem here no one is willing to do anything unless they think it will benefit themselves.

all the food here is very basic but the juice man it is to die for! the other day some lady made a juice out of a coco pod (like the chocolate) man it was so dang good it was the best drink i have ever had!

 the bus system here works super well it is just expensive when you don´t have a steady income.

 well sorry to run but got to go by love ya!

yo no hablo español

what happens to me when I don´t shave, I think it is almost as good as my dads

It´s kinda cool my companion is of a Bolivian blood line and because of that his whole family knows Spanish. Whenever we see a Bolivian on the street they always stop him and start talking Spanish to him it is kinda funny. It is cool because I can understand everything they are saying but I don´t know how to respond in Spanish.

So this last week we moved. It is a very sad thing that we moved. We are now living with the 4 secretaries of the mission and the 4 assistants so it is a little packed in the house. Hey but on the bright side I get to know and be friends with more missionaries! The house itself is really nice and big so there is no problem with room to sleep or anything it is just hard because we only get water every 2 days for 2 hours of that day. We have a box that fills up with water but with everyone there it runs out very fast. To shower in the house, when we have water you turn it on and off to get wet to soap up and on and off to rinse. There is also the showers we end up having to take with bottles of water, those are fun. Man you really start to realize how much you liked something so simple once you don´t have it anymore.  

This last week during weekly planing me and my companion did a super long companhieroship inventory. Man those things really help. We were having a few problems getting along but now everything is great between us, I am just sad we didn´t do this earlier in the transfer. These things really help, I have a new testimony of these. Because of this we have been able to teach much more with the spirit and are being a ton more productive. 

baptism of that kid in the striped shirt. His name is Filip he is super cool. 

We forgot to take a pic before the baptism so we just took it after. oops

I think we were blessed with this baptism that we had because of this. Here is the story with him. He used to go to church a ton then thought it wasn´t cool so stopped going. We taught and baptized his dad Vagner and this last Friday he said hey you know, I see how happy this church is making my dad and I want this happiness in my life as well. Then we had a super fast interview on Saturday and had the bishop baptize him on Sunday. It is really cool how much the gospel blesses lives and especially families. I have learned and still learning to just do things that we know we are supposed to do like with the companionship inventory thing. Sometimes I just don´t like doing a lot of things but when it is from the lord it will always be good.

look at that stud, future missionary right here!

Ok one more quick thought and then I will stop writing so you don´t have to waste anymore of your time reading. Our stake president told us this. He said with you wife you choose but your kids and your families are organized groups by God. He gave us our brothers and sisters. Everything he does he does for a reason and even in hard moments it will always be possible. I don´t know I just thought that was cool because families are hard for a lot of people but we can know they were organized by God and he doesn´t do anything without reason so all these difficulties all these families have are because we cause them.

That probably didn´t make much sense my stake president said it a lot better. Oh random but he was a 70 so it is super cool to talk to him when he talks in church the spirit is just super strong he is awesome.

well that´s all for this week love you all!     and especially you:) 

(see how i just made this letter seem personalized hahaha so smart)

 so yes we did move but we get one free bus ride every day to get to our area so we just walk there which takes like 1.5 hours and take the bus back i hope we find a house here soon

oh Brazil, how i love it here in the ghetto

 what i did today during p day, feeling like i was in NY.  This is all São Paulo city on a street called 25 de mars

we went to the big city to look around sorry not very specific

finally went on a subway now i can cross that off the bucket list

well another week I am lucky to be alive

wow look at that fancy knot

a bananna spider. almost the death of me

There is a spider that is very common here in Brazil known as the wandering spider also known as a banana spider. These things are usually just in the forest areas, but we were walking on this street right next to this huge forest and my companion suddenly says stop, sounding kinda nervous. Man it sucks to be tall. there was this huge web of this wandering spider right at my head length, him being short just walked right under it. Man I hate spiders. Later we were walking and there was one on my shoulder that kinda made me freak out like a little girl...we ended up seeing like 5 more huge webs of theirs on this street. Needless to say we just changed our path.

Well not a ton happened this last week because we got evicted out of our house. The owners of the house came and said the contract is up and you have until next Saturday to get out. Well that was fun so this last week we have been packing everything and taking everything apart in our house. They say the mission prepares you for life right, so i guess now I am prepared to be evicted. We are going to go live in the church office building for at least 2 months they say, It sucks because by bus that is like 30 min from our area. so that will throw a wrench in our work. 

Oh so we had interviews this last week and well i´m coming home, I guess I am just a fubeca. No jk they were awesome. our president just loves so much, you can feel it. it is the same feeling I got with the interviews for my mission.

So my mom informed me that I have been spelling baptize wrong. Man how embarrassing I am going to blame it on the fact that in port it is batismo and the s makes the z sound so it´s just how I think of it. I will probably keep on spelling it wrong I guess you will just have to deal with it. (mom has been correcting spelling when posting letters)

oh I just remembered, yesterday I decided to wear one of my long sleeve shirts that is all white and fancy for church. yeah so in my fancy white shirt a toucan pooped on me and toucan poop looks and stains just like grape juice. (it looks like that because they just eat açai). So that was a bummer it was so warm and just got all over. it made such a mess.

So the supermarket here thought it would be a great idea to hang a bunch of chocolate eggs from the ceiling for Easter. the only problem is they hang 6 feet from the ground and I am 6`6``. so to try and prove a point today I just walked with out bending over. all the workers say and said, oh we should probably hang those higher. Man those short Brazilians not thinking of us gringos. 

Well not a ton happened this last week because we have just been packing up the house most of the week so sorry I don´t have any amazing stories. But love you all and Just remember we are so blessed to be a part of this church!

I just love the view here in Brasil

oh I got the PB and it was awesome. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the first time in so long this morning. man those things are good