23 Sept. 2015

Dear Everyone,

Each morning, after about an hour of studying, the elders and sisters here are given the opportunity to “work out” for 45 minutes. Because of the lack of decent gym equipment here, most often the elders and I play volleyball in the court they have here. However, when speaking of volleyball here at the mtc, its impossible not to mention my good Brazilian friend Elder Leite.



Elder L. is somewhat of a roving blackhole in the game of volleyball. Like Batman, Elder L. has no juresdiction, (he goes where ever he wants, whenever he wants to on the court) and just like batman, Elder L. always arives just in the nick of time, to bat his own team´s ball out of bounds or into the net. Don´t get me wrong, Elder L. is my bro, and hes well aware of his complete lack of volleyball skill, but Elder L. is a wonderful example of the fact that the brazilian population seems to be best at futbol!



Unfortunately all of my Brazilian friends here left this week. I´m gonna miss my room mates and I´ll miss elder L. and his crazy volleyball skills.



Flip-Snapping, Uh-oh Jeans and the homemade splint…

In Brazil, when anyone feels hapiness, exitement or wants you to hurry up, they will ALWAYS flip-snap their hand. ALWAYS! Now I´m well aware of the fact that “flip-snap” isnt an actual word, but after 10 minutes of attempting to create a new word to discribe this indescribable widespread phenominon, “flip-snap” was the best word I could come up with.



Basically to flip-snap you need to flick your hand in such a way that your pointer finger slams into the rest of your hand making a snapping noise. I´m telling all this because in my attempts to master this arcane technique I hurt my self enough to need a splint on my wrist. Of course, being myself, I wasnt about to explain to the medic why I needed a splint on my wrist, so |I decided to build my own. I cut and folded pieces of my binder and wrapped the lot in ace bandage from my first aid kit. A thats right… it fit and worked like a glove. Elder West – 1, Brazil – 0. Unfortunately, despite these efforts to avoid humilation, Catastrophe struck me from behind. Literally. While I was digging in for a spike on the court, both legs of my jeans tour laterally across the back of my thighs. Elder West – 1, Brazil – 1. Challenge accepted Brazil.



Portuguese… Real life isnt as easy as 1,2,3..



This week included our first venture out into Sao Paulo from the Missionary Training Center. Having only spoken portuguese for 2 weeks, its not supprising that I am nowhere near proficient to actually communicate with native Brazilians, but I´m proud to say that I was able to ask for, cummicate my price range of, and buy some brazilian shoes to workout in. (I neglected to bring some with me)



I´m learning portuguese incredibly fast here still. Each day here I learn more than a hundred vocabulary words in my personally study and I know how to conjugate all the verbs in the present tense. I can teach a lesson to an investigator now about almost anything in portuguese and I´m becoming really good friends with my roomates and my companion. 3 of my 4 roomates are coming with my to the Sao Paulo south mission so thats cool too.



I know that god is obviously blessing me here, I dont know how I would be able to learn this fast otherwise.



Everything Else…



This is the section of my letter that I didnt pre-write. This is the section that I am going to mentally dump in. So this week we went to the temple. Beautiful!! My teachers are great. the mtc is great and I miss all of you guys!! I have almost no time to write letters here so I hope you guys liked this little snippit of brazil.