Week 5

Olá meus amigos e minha família!

 

week 5 -- Companion: Elder Rindlisbacher

 

This was yet another great week here in the beautiful country of Brazil! They do have valentines day here, but it is on a different day, and im not quite sure when it is because we wont be doing anything special for it! congratualitions mother on all your running! thats so awesome that you are running so far now! i have also shown all the brazilians the pictures that i have of snow. Its so funny because they think it is so crazy and get all wide eyed when they look at it. I definitely miss skiing alot, especially when dad talks about how you guys got 3 FEET!! its also super crazy that 5 people died there not that long ago, it really shows that you need to stay inbounds (like that mormon messages video). I´m glad that Dylans farewell talk went well and its super exciting that he is going off to south Africa! when i mailed him a letter today, the lady was surprised and asked me if i was sure it was supposed to go to south africa :) its so exciting that all my buddies are leaving on missions and such. today i bought a cookie shake :) my taste buds were on overdrive because i have not had anything close to that in over a month now. its crazy to think that i am now 5/9 of the way through my CTM time!

P.S. i found out today that the way i have been sending letters is super slow, so if anyone has sent me a letter, i promise i have replied. if you havent gotten one and you are waiting it should come eventually!

 

Wednesday was just an average day. all the days are starting to blend together and not much is different that i can talk about. the thing that i wrote down in my journal was that it was exciting because Carnival was over so we could recieve mail again! those statistics that you sent to me about carnival were crazy! its a wild holiday here in brazil. We also got two new brazilian roommates who filled in for the ones who left of tuesday. They were really quiet at first, but one has started talking to us alot. its way cool because they only speak portuguese, but can understand a tiny bit of enlgish. this is SO helpful because we talk in portuguese alot more and the one who talks helps us out a bunch. This sunday he said he was going to help us alot during our break from meeetings!

 

On thursday we found out that we were getting a new teacher for our afternoon class. it was super sad for all of us because we all LOVED our teacher (Irmão Romeu). he was super fun and he loved our class as well. Another bummer is that because we got a new teacher, we had to start our lessons over with them as a pretend investigator. My companion and I had already taught Irmão Romeu a ton and challenged him to be baptized a week ago and were almost done preparing him, but now we are back to the beginning! this will be my districts 7th teacher...

 

Friday morning i signed up to get my haircut. it was getting pretty long and because it is so hot here i wanted it shorter. the barber was a brazilian member from the area who spoke no english, so that was pretty interesting! he was super funny because he used all this old fashioned stuff and was whistling the whole time. he reminded me of a barber from an old movie or something. also that night my district was running through random videos of people teaching to see different techniques and strategies. the practice rooms for teaching have cameras that record so you can watch them later. we found a couple groups who are on their 7th week here and everyone in my district felt as if our portuguese was alot better than theirs. Its kind of mean to compare ourselves to them and say that we are better because we are 2 weeks behind them, but it was really comforting to watch :)

 

Saturday was a pretty spiritual day for me. the first cool thing that happened was that Irmão Romeu came into our class during our personal study time and asked our class for a blessing. He was feeling really sick and because were his favorite he came to us. the coolest part was that he asked me to do the second half so i got to give the blessing! i love blessings so much because i can feel the spirit really strong and they are just super awesome experiences. in our evening study time we worked some more on our song that we are going to perform sometime. we got all the parts down so we can sing more than just the melody. its sounds super duper cool and its fun because its mixing songs and languages! look up hymn 321 in the english hymn book. we are using verses from that song and verses from if you could hie to kolob all to the if you could hie to kolob music. it works perfect and is all about misisonaries! The last cool thing was that we got to give another blessing right before bed! one of the elders in my district sprained his ankle during volleyball by landing on my foot trying to block my spike. it was swollen pretty bad and it was bothering him so he asked us to give him a blessing. he asked me to give the first part and his companion to do the second part and blessing. it was awesome do both parts of a belssing for the sick in one day!

 

Sunday was awesome like always! i love sundays because they are relaxing and we just get to take a break from all the studying. my district came up with a really funny idea while writing our church talks. each week we will have a theme, and each of us have to include something in our talk that someone else assigns them within that theme. this week was animals, so everyone assigned someone else an animal. i chose elder adams to do three toed sloth, and he was chosen to speak that day :) it was super funny. one other guy had to speak that day too. ill let you know how this next sunday goes. during all the breaks i wrote some letters and just talked with my buddies.

 

P-day was awesome like always as well! we got to go to the temple again and what was really cool was that i got to go through for someone with the last name lambert! it didnt have a date on it, but he lived in France. we polished our shoes and went out and cruised around town.

 

I am still going strong and love it so so much! i know i am doing the right thing and i want to thank everyone for helping and supporting me. you are all the best :) Eu sei que esta Igreja é verdade! (i know that this church is true)

 

I love you all so much and ill keep you in my prayers!

-Elder derek Romney Lambert