Elder Alex Evans has been called to the Brazil Rio de Janeiro Mission. He reports on July 10th, 2013, and will serve for a period of two years.

Monday, January 20, 2014

January 6, 2014 Water and Carpet

In my next package I would like to get an air conditioner, ice, and American Milk. It's -13 degrees there in Kansas right now, and you want to know how hot it got up to here in the great state of Rio last Friday? 50 degrees Celsius, which is 122 degrees fahrenheit. Rest assured that the pounds are just melting off me here in Brasil. Which by the way, I've dropped under 200 pounds again. I'm pretty sure. The last time I checked I was 90 Quilos (Kilograms). Walking everywhere is so tiring, I've never been so exhausted in my life. Plus it's incredibly hard to sleep in a house that is hotter inside than it is outside. So sleep this week has been pretty frustrating to be honest, we've both woken up at 2 and 4 every morning and had to go outside on our balcony and try to cool down a little. But despite all of the heat and the stinkin sun, everything is picking up and getting going down here this week.

Like I said the week before was a bit of a struggle for us with health issues, Christmas and everyone being at the beach 24/7, and my comp almost going home, but this past week we set some good goals for ourselves and pushed ourselves to work harder and do more, and we've begun to the blessings of the Lord here in Maricá. It's actually been pretty funny because ever since I've been here, nobody has recognized us as mormon missionaries because the church presence here in Maricá is sooooo small, and missionaries haven't been here for years, but this week at least once a day somebody has stopped us on the street or called out "hey its the mormons, come over here I want to learn more about your church!", so we've had a lot of good street contacts this week where we were the ones being contacted and not the other way around. But also this week we've found a couple very solid investigators. One family that is friends with the presidente do soc. soc. here (Relief Society) is moving here this week, and we started to teach them and help them move a little bit. The best part is that they are married legally!!!!!!! So we don't have to figure out how to marry them and then baptize them, like a bunch of our other awesome investigators who aren't married legally. They weren't able to come to church yesterday because they went back to their old house on Saturday to finish packing up stuff, but we're working with them and I'm sure they'll be there next week.

The next most awesome story of the week is the other really cool investigator that we found. We were finishing our required 30 street contacts a day out on the plaza on wednesday. It was about 8:30 at night and my comp had one more to do, and he saw this guy walking across the sidewalk listening to music. He went over there to find out that the man harldy spoke Portuguese, and wasn't actually from Brasil. His name is Junior, he is 25 and from Haiti. He moved here with his cousin a year and 3 months ago, but he still barely speaks any portchy. He is way nice, though, and a good guy. He speaks French and Creole, and a little bit of English. But after we met him on that contact, we taught him the restoration on Friday and he came to church with us yesterday, and already you can see the progress that he is making in his portuguese and outlook on life. He lives alone, works in a meat factory that doesn't pay much and makes him work a lot of hours, and he basically goes from work to home and from home to work without much interaction with people outside of work. We promised him that if he would learn about the restored gospel and continue to come to church with us and read the book of mormon and pray for help  from his heavenly father that he would begin to see the blessings that are available to him. We are helping him with his language skills and learning about the Gospel and everything looks bright for him. It's awesome to see the help of the Lord in the lives of people you are serving.

Besides that this week has been a lot of walking in the sun and sweating some more. Everything is good. Just wish we had AC and water that we could drink. Oh yeah, everyone who lives in the United States needs to be thankful that they can just drink water at their houses. Here we have to buy all of our drinking water, and it runs out sooo fast. It's just way more inconvenient for everyone. Count your blessings. even the simple things like water and carpet. Those are some of the things I miss most!

Love
Elder Evans

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