Week 4

Friday, July 25, 2014

Happy Pioneer day yesterday, and happy birthday to Jillian as well!
Things are still going great here in the CTM. Elder Chamberlain leaves for Brasilia on Tuesday, and Elder Caldwell and I leave the following tuesday with the rest of our district. I went to the Sao Paulo temple again this morning. Next week I think we might go to the Campinas temple which I'm pretty excited for. Since most of the elders that go speak Spanish, they do our session in Spanish. We get headphones that have the option of Portuguese or English, and today I listened to the whole session in Portuguese. Last week they actually did two separate sessions because there were more missionaries than usual. They did our session in English, but it was an hour and a half later than the other one. While we waited, we got to help in the temple laundry room. I also got to help in the Baptistery and my companions helped with sealings.
This week went well besides the fact that I've been sick. I've just had a cold for the past several days, but it's pretty much gone now. I'm working hard in the language and doing my best to always speak it. We try to sit with Brazilians or Hispanics for every meal. Most of them are really patient with helping us on our portuguese. My district does a really good job at always speaking portuguese. A lot of the other Americans don't really take that rule seriously and speak English to each other a most of the time. It's hard, but it's helping us a lot! All the elders are so friendly to us. Every week before a group of Brazilian/Hispanic elders leaves for the field, they come into our room and want to take pictures with us even if they barely know us. I think they appreciate that we always try to speak portuguese. Portuguese really isn't a very hard language to learn. There are lots of cognates, especially with gospel terms. A lot of the time if I don't know a portugese word I can just guess and get it right.
 
We teach our two "investigators" every day and they are both getting baptized tomorrow. Pretty exciting, right? ;) We also have a "TRC" lesson once a week where we get filmed. These lessons are supposed to last from about 30-45 minutes. The first one we did was pretty hard for us, but the one we had last night was awesome! We were able to communicate with the investigator much better than we could on our first week.
The weather in Sao Paulo has been kind of chilly lately. It's been overcast and rainy the past few days. All the people on the streets wear sweaters, long sleeves, or coats, but I feel fine in short sleeves haha. I'm excited for the weather in Natal. I'm sure it'll get really hot in the summer though. Whenenver I tell people my mission, one of the first things they say is that it's "muito quenche."
Have a great rest of the week!
Ate mais,
 
Elder Church

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