First letter home

Friday, July 26, 2013

Hey everyone!!!!

Sorry it took so long for us to get to email y'all, we should have had a p-day last Friday but because we were new they didn't think we should have one.  This week and a half has been crazy, and it sounds like yours has been as well.  The first day I was one of the first to arrive so I didn't have to wait in any lines which was nice.  They took me around and gave me this huge yellow bag.  Right on top is a water filter :)  Inside the bag there are copies of English and Portuguese of everything-PMG (Preach my Gospel), scriptures, pamphlets, language guides, dictionaries, etc. They took me to my classroom and right off the teacher was speaking Portuguese.  She didn't say anything English until the last two minutes of class.  So that was stressful, but in the past week and a half our language abilities have exploded.

Visiting with Grandma and Grandpa Anderson on the way to the MTC

  My companion is from Colorado and was in the dorms right next to mine.  We know some of the same people.  The second day of class they had us teaching an investigator!  His name is Carlos and he is a native Brazilian.  The first 3 lessons we had all our stuff written down and just had to read it.  But the last 2 lessons we didn't take any notes in and just talked.  We got him to stop drinking and even set a baptismal date.  He is actually a teacher here so yesterday he began to teach us, he is really cool.  What they do is they have the teachers pretend to be an investigator from their own mission and to have us practice.  The first day he asked me where I was from and I said, "tejas", thinking that the word for Texas was the same as it was in Spanish.  It isn't.  the word "tejas" sounds like the Portuguese word "terras", because the rr is pronounced h, which is the plural for terra-world.  So I told him I was from worlds, he looked so confused so I said Texas and he instantly says cowboy and does a lot of cowboy actions.

With Grandma and Grandpa Tadje at the MTC, July 17, 2013

This Wednesday the new missionaries came in and they wear orange dots on their name badges to let others know they are new.  Well when I came in my companion and I didn't like the dots cause people bug you. So we threw them away, but now we want them so that people will talk to us and we can speak Portuguese back.  So Elder _______ and I went into the new missionaries room and I faked a Russian accent, just because, and they gave us their dots.  It was pretty funny. This week has gone by so fast, I can't believe we are almost on week 3 of 6!  The food isn't that great and I am still getting used to the schedule, but it is so much fun.  We get gym everyday and I run the track and lift weights.  The whole district is really cool, we have a lot of fun.  Yesterday we had "um jejum de ingles"(a English fast) were we tried to not speak English the whole day.  It was hard but we did pretty good.  It is so different from Spanish, the di and de are pronounced with a g and te and ti are chi's. A lot of words are the same as Spanish, but just slightly different to mess me up. I have seen a couple people from school here.  Devotionals are really cool, we had a emeritus seventy come this week.  They have us 6 to a room, but there are only supposed to be 4, so the room we have is a little cramped, especially with only four closet spaces but we are having a blast. We had cleaning checks this week and my bed was the only thing in the entire room that got a commendable. 

With MTC companion

Hope y'all have a great week.

Love,
Elder Anderson