Monday, February 23, 2015

I have 19 years.‏

Im making my bolo. Its ready for tonight.

This was this morning when we went out to play basketball, I was wearing my Brasil shirt my companion got me. The first one are the bleachers set up for Carnaval again in march.

Well, today I make 19 years. Lol, ok, my English hasn’t gotten THAT bad, but, who am I kidding, yeah it has. I found that one out while doing splits with Elder Hintze. More on that later in the email.
First of all, I have to say, I am shocked at the amount of support that I have received just for my birthday! Not to minimize the individuality of each of your emails to me, but I received a total of 21 emails for my birthday already. I am a lucky Elder!
There is a custom here that people crack an egg on the birthday boy’s head, and throw flour on him. I have thankfully avoided the tradition thus far, and still have perfect hair :) Anyways, so my Big Day is as planned: Wake up at 5:50, go play basketball, make cake, clean apartment, study, write letters, eat lunch, buy shoelaces for my companion, go grocery shopping, SLEEP :), wake up, teach Larissa (we got back in contact with her!) and have a family night with Lúcia, go home, eat pizza, cake and ice cream, and sleep. It’ll be a normal p-day, but it will be good. After all, it has been 19 years since I first used my lungs.
OKAY. So starting at the top of my list, I have to count to you a few interesting Brazilian culture stories. There aren’t very many big, interesting differences, but I like to tell them when I can. So before my mission, I was imagining the "hear howling monkeys at night, use machete to save companion from anaconda" Brazil. Well, I was wrong. Until this week, the only difference that I had noticed with the animals were that there were ugly stupid dogs everywhere, and horses just roaming the streets. Well, let me tell you something. There are two words in Portuguese: Lagartixa (Gecko) and Lagarta (Lizard). At nights, we see geckos everywhere. My companion told me that there are also lizards that are pretty cool to see. Beleza. So I was imagining something green, more or less twice the size of a gecko. Well, on Tuesday, I figured out what people were talking about when they were talking about lagartas. We were teaching Mariangelica, and she had left some eggs out on a little plate off in the distance to feed the lizards. And surely enough, they came. But they weren’t the cute green 8-inch reptiles I was picturing. They were big, black 3 foot (minus tail) Komodo Dragons. So that threw me for a bit of a loop.
Also, I had talked about the only interesting thing that I had eaten thus far was chicken hearts. Add one to the list: Capybara. For those who don’t know, Capybara is the largest living rodent on the planet. To describe Capybara, imagine a rat. Now make it the size of a buffalo. When I first got here, I had like one piece of a Capybara sausage. Last night, we had capybara ribs. It was pretty strong. Not bad, but I definitely prefer chicken.
Okay. So on Friday I had splits with Elder Hintze, one of our ZLs. He’s from DC, been out for a year and a half. Both he and I were a little excited to actually have a conversation in English, that we (tried) to start one. Well, both of our English is pretty bad now. So we gave up and just talked in Portuguese. The splits were good. He likes music theory, too. Haha. Funny thing is that all of his investigators said right to his face that they could understand me way better than him. Poor Elder.
So now that I had my G.H. moment (gloria dos homens - missionary acronym for boastful/prideful) we had a good day together.
Yesterday, we were teaching Josemar and Elizangela (less actives), and they wanted to know what we ate in America. She asked if we ate rice and beans. I responded with "well, we have them sometimes, but not everyday." She then incredulously said "Well, what do you EAT then?!" I laughed.
So the work. The work is awesome, good enough to make a missionary very happy. We will have the baptism of Irmã Zaira this Saturday. We are very excited. At first February looked like my first full month without a baptism, but then Zaira popped out of nowhere, and bam. Also, Dorival and Mara went to church again, and accepted the invitation to be baptized. They will have to get married first, but it’s a good step to plan ahead. We had 6 investigators at Sacrament Meeting, which is as high as it has ever been since I’ve been here. March is looking to be a good month, indeed. For it is.
It has cooled down the last week. We had a blistering hot day on Thursday, but other than that, it’s been rather comfortable. Right now it’s cloudy, maybe 75 degrees. Maybe more. But not bad.

And, again, thank you all for the support. I’m doing great. Really.
Com Amor,
Elder Wassom

Useless word of the week - Castisal - Literally means "Candlestick", but it also takes the meaning "Third-wheel on a date"

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