First Week in the Brasil CTM

Oi!

I have tons to tell y'all about! (and sorry but there's gonna be typos, i'm not used to these Brazilian keyboards yet...)

São Paulo is huge and crazy!! I slept for maybe two hours of that ten hour flight, but right when we got here it's work work work! The city is beautiful in the way that chaos and personality is beautiful. I honestly am in love with all the graffiti on the walls of EVERYTHING. It's art. Sister Knapp is my companheira and we both came from Provo together. She was a week ahead of me so she's going to be leaving this week for Teresina, and I'll be back with my old companheira and homies. It's seriously so much fun here! We are working so hard to learn the language and I've definitely learned twice as much being here in a week than I did in Provo! Learning language by immersion is a real thing, but even more real is the gift of tongues! It blows my mind every day. So yeah, most days sis Knapp and I are somente falando em Portuguese and it's awesome. We've made a ton of brasileiro friends and I'm actually really glad I learned how to sing Let It Go in Portuguese before I came because now I have a friend who's from Rio de Janeiro and yeah we sing frozen together in the cafeteria. Speaking of the cafeteria.... the food here is straight from heaven. There's always feijoada (rice and beans) with every lunch and dinner, pão de queijo, super good bananas, pinapple, papaya, and watermelon, and reeeally good meat and stuff. And in the morning we can always count on this like cream of wheat mystery goodness. muito bom. Anyway, enough about food, last Friday we had the opportunidade for PROSELITISMO. Yeah so on like our 3rd day here our district hopped on the onibus and we rode it to the middle of São Paulo to teach real people who have never heard of the gospel. We each had 2 copies of the Book of Mormon and we went and taught. I'm so lucky to have sister Knapp as my companion, she's learned a ton of Portuguese already and she already knew Spanish before. Anyway, as we taught I have never felt the Spirit like that before! We went up to people and at first some of them didn't want to hear our message, but we explained a little more what it was about and asked them to just read and invited them to pray about it and it was AMAZING how their countenances changed! Particularly one woman who was sitting on the corner texting and we walked over to her with some other elders to help them give out their last book. She just kept looking down as sis Knapp was talking to her and she seemed a little annoyed at us being there, so I said a quick prayer in my heart that her heart would be softened and as soon as I finished she looked up and started to talk with us. I literally have never felt the spirit so strongly as when we were teaching this woman. That feeling left as soon as it came though because some homeless druggie came up to us and stared putting his arm around me and saying a bunch of things I didn’t understand!! Ahh! Thankfully the elders got him to get away from me, but as i found our later, as this guy was giving elder pitcher a hug he lifted his yellow laminated verb card out of his front pocket thinking it was money. Well that guy could have the gospel and really great Portuguese one day! When I finally did turn around after the commotion was over, the woman was smiling and thanking US for giving her the book and talking to her. That's basically how every one of our mini lessons ended and I have such a strong testimony now of the spirit teaching people. Ahh man missionary work is so cool and I am seriously having the time of my life. Once again, its hard, but it's already the best thing I've ever done in my 19 years of life here on earth.

I also want to just include some other fun things that have happened this week:

-I was talking to a sister about star trek and she was saying that she liked Spock more than.... and she couldn't think of the other character's name so I was like "oh Elder Kirk?" and that's when you realize that you've been in the MTC for a while...

-We have a brasileira roommate who is the cutest thing since puppies. She doesn’t know any English so she helps us with our Portuguese and we basically play charades every night. and she gave us earrings and chocolate. She's from Bahia:)

-We went to the Sao Paulo temple today and I was gorgeous. I listened to have the session in Portuguese:)

-I play volei now. What? I'm still pretty bad though haha

-Our teachers here are absolutely hilarious! Irmao Mello has a song about the lei de castidade so that's fun…

I love you all so much have and otimo semana!

Vida Longa e Prospera.

-sis Pace