February 17, 2014

Yay for another week on the mission! I now have a little more than 7 months here in Brazil. And I guess I'm used to it. This week included a lot and a lot of hard work. So I'm pretty much burnt out. I can't remember much of what I did, but I remember that I didn't do much eating or sleeping. But I have to thank the guy who invented daylight savings time, because he pretty much saved my life yesterday. One extra hour of sleep was wonderful.

We taught a bunch of people this week, since we're looking to grow our teaching group. Ronaldo is one of the cool people we found. He has millions of questions. He's never frequented any church, but he understands a lot of the bible and stuff. And he has lots of good questions that I've never heard before. It's fun to help him understand. We'll teach him the Plan of Salvation tonight.

Adriana was baptized this week. She's really cool. She works as a security guard at the BIG (which is a supermarket from the Walmart chain). So she probably always has a bunch of knives and stuff hidden in the heavy boots that she always uses. Her daughter was baptized a long time ago, and she's had a lot of contact with the church. Now, she's looking for something more solid in life and found the church.

Adriana's baptism

Adriana's baptism

We worked more with Marcio this week. He'll be baptized on Saturday, if everything goes well. Even though he lives in poor circumstances, he's really smart. He'll make a great missionary someday.

This week we had our Zone Conference. We met in a different city, about an hour from São Leopoldo by bus. We stayed there for lunch at Elder Rech's Uncle's house. (Imagine visiting your uncle on the mission) Elder Rech's brother was there too. Cool. (Elder Rech will finish his mission next month, so it was probably hard to see members of his family when he's already close to going home)

When we returned from the Zone Conference, we got stuck in some terrible rain. And us four ran for our apartment. It was funny because everyone was staring at these 4 guys in white shirts and ties running in the rain.

drenched by rain!

A highlight of this week is that we found an old typewriter in our house (in a forgotten closet). Elder Rech and I pulled it out and fixed it up. So now we're joking and calling it our "iPad of the mission," because we're hearing that several missions in the US are using iPads now. It's fun to mess around with it.

iPad of the mission!

using a typewriter
(Editor's Note: for the first time?)

I'm sure I did a lot of other wonderful things this week, but I've already forgotten. Elder Wilker tells me that I'm just getting old and that losing my memory is part! I don't know about that, but I'll be 20 pretty soon, and that's pretty old.

Elder Jasperson

At the bus station after zone conference
with the other three elders from my group
(i.e., the elders who arrived in Porto Alegre with me)

my Christmas package from home finally arrived!
Thanks for the new ties