Temple, ice cream and English

Monday, October 14, 2013

This week was amazing.  First a story that happened in the house of the bishop last week.  So like I said, we had that beans and pig parts stew thing,  but for dessert we had ice cream.  In Portuguese the word for ice cream is “sorvete”.  They gave us a strawberry sauce to put on top and so I started to put some on and one of the elders asked if I liked strawberries.  I said "Yes, in fact one of my favorite types of cerveja is strawberry."  The problem with this sentence is that “cerveja” isn´t “sorvete”, it’s beer.  And for some reason the two keep getting mixed up in my head, but everyone thought it was very funny.

Elder Anderson (r) with his companion, Elder Gillespie

This week we started involving the youth, we started a mini ctm.  What this is a mini MTC (missionary training center). We taught them how to invite their friends to church and to bear testimony on facebook and things like this.  We have points for every different thing and after 2 weeks the person with the most points gets a prize.  One of the things is going out with the missionaries for lessons, we already have a couple of the youth that have gone out with us.  

Also this week we started Aula de Inglês, English Class.  It was a lot of fun because of the three Americans that are here now, (one of them got transferred and we got a Brasilian that is really cool),  I am the newest. The other two forgot a lot of English and we all had to think about how to speak, it was funny because we had to try different sentences because English is a little weird now, even now writing this is strange because everything looks wrong and everything is underlined red because they don’t have an option to change the keyboard to English, so if there are mistakes, sorry.  

But this Saturday we ran into two couples from America.  One had served here 17 years ago and was here visiting and the other lives near the mission office.  The couple that live by the office gave us 50 reais for dinner, and we were so excited that we talked about it for at least 20 minutes.  We went to one neighborhood to teach and later that day walked to the other side of the city up the mountain to teach some more.  It was about 8 at night and I asked my companion what we were going to do with the money.  He reached into his pocket and realized he had lost the money.  So we spent the next hour and a half walking our past route looking for the money, but didn´t find it.  So now we pray for the person that found it, that they can use it righteously.

Last night we had a meeting with our new stake pres and President Pinho.  It was so amazing, imagine two men that have the spirit of God and can hear it clearly and that have visions for the area.  It was incredible.  We now have a plan for every companionship to baptize at least 1 man per month and in two years by doing this we could split the stake.  

The temple was amazing!  We rode the bus to it, took about an hour and went to the Walmart that they have across the street.  Our zone leaders bought us all donuts for our hard work the past 2 weeks.  While in Walmart I saw one of my friends from the Provo mtc riding up the moving sidewalk, it’s like an escalator, but flat like those moving sidewalks.  It’s in a three story Walmart, and I was so excited.  At the temple I saw two other friends that got their visas this past week!  Soon everybody from our group will be here!  The temple was awesome though, so nice to be there.  Afterwards we went next door to a Fogo De Chão type place that was amazing, I had to learn all the different types of meats, but it was incredible. Was only 20 reais, $10, and so good!  Can’t wait to go to the temple again :)  Hope all is well at home, love y’all.

Elder Anderson