Hey familia!

MTC Week 3

July 30, 2013

 

How is everyone!? I'm doing just dandy. This week was pretty dang uneventful. Everything has begun to become routine and normal. Although one thing that happened this week was one of the elders in my district ended up going home on Wednesday. It was sad, he is a great kid, he just wasn't ready yet. But he is going to get things figured out back home and come back as soon as he can. So that threw off the whole vibe of our district, most of the last week was just a little strange without him. But also on Wednesday we welcomed in two new districts to our zone and I got to lead the orientation stuff for Marcus' district. It was fun and a cool experience and I get to do it again tomorrow and every Wednesday.

My Portuguese is still improving and I'm still getting better at teaching. I am really starting to love the language, though. There's so much nasalization and it sounds really awesome. Just so that when I start to email some more Portuguese stuff, here is a quick and easy guide to pronunciation.

So to start just pronounce everything like you would in Spanish, but with all these exceptions:

1. All "g"s and "j"s make their hard sounds.

2. All "di"s sound like "gee" as in "gee whiz Portuguese is neat-o".

3. All "ti"s sound like "chee"

4. You pronounce "de"s and "te"s normal except when they are alone or the last letters of a word, then they are "gee" and "chee".

5. Whenever you see a "ç" it is an "s"

6. Whenever a word ends in an "m" you nasalize the vowel before it and you don't close your lips, so like the word falam (they speak) sounds almost like fall- oww.

7. Nasalize whenever you see a çao or a çoes. the first sounds like s-oww and the second sounds almost like your trying to say the word "coins" but with an s instead of a c.

That's pretty much all there is to it. A fun word that I like is diligentimente (diligently) but it is pronounced jill-e-jenchi-men-chi.

Also, fun story. We have our service assignment on Wednesday mornings and I have to wear jeans to that. So we clean a residence hall for an hour and a half and then we get like an hour of personal exercise time. So we were just leaving the hall and heading back to our rooms to change to exercise, and we were starting to run. So I took off running and I had to kind of skip to the side to dodge somebody on the sidewalk, and I felt and heard this loud ripping noise. I looked down and the whole crotch on my jeans had blown out... hahaha it was hilarious, and super embarrassing.

Not much else happened. I know that once I leave the computer I'll think of a thousand more things to say and ask for, but for now I have a couple requests.

Another pair of jeans, my soccer pants, other things that you feel inspired to send me. I honestly blank every tuesday on all the things that I need to ask for from you guys. Just pray to know what I need and send it as quick as you can. I want a package!

The Church is True. Keep the faith. Fique forte.

Your boy, brother, friend,

Elder Evans

PS Tell my friends to send me an email this week, like Mark and Michael especially, but just post it on my facebook for me, and keep sending me dearelders, they are nice to get every night.