The Purple Belford

June 24, 2014

Dear Family and Friends, 

What a long week full of trains, buses, subways, and walking! This week was a little different than normal because my comp is new in Brasil, so we had to go to Flamengo where the mission office is on the Largo Do Machado (a big plaza) so that he could go to the Polícia Federal with some of the other hispanic newbies. I enjoyed my time waiting at the office with the assistants and secretaries. We had a pretty fun day on last Monday. 

Tuesday, like I think that I mentioned, was our Pday last week. because of the Brasil game in the Cup. Just like today too, we have to spend the entire day indoors at our house on Brasil game days. For the best too, it can get a little crazy.  

Thursday we had a very spiritual experience at zone conference. It was the last time that we'll see President and Sister Lima, until after the mission. They both had plenty of inspiring words to share with us. I learned a lot about the things that I need to do better and really about the things that all of us need to get better at being disciples of Christ. It was a really sad night when President gave his last talk to us and bore his powerful testimony. He and Sister Lima are amazing people and I can't wait to get to see him every year at BYU when he has to come up to Salt Lake for General Conference. But that also means that this week will be an interesting week when our new President arrives on Friday.

We have an awesome week planned out. We are going to do a lot of work to make up for this past week that we didn't have the time for, plus we keep on meeting more and more prepared people to teach and bring to church. We planned out an open house for the chapel here with the ward that we are going to do on Wednesday, and we are hoping and praying that we can have lots of visitors at the church on Wednesday night.

 I love this work, and I love Brasil. I hope all of you are seeking to have your own missionary experiences wherever you find yourself.

Thanks for all of the support back home and I hope that everything continues to go well for all of you.

Love,
Elder Evans

 Me and 3 of my comps.

The original District 220, at least some of us!

 Reunited and it feels so good... Elder Mountain (My very first companion) finally made it to Brasil 6 weeks ago. Thursday was the first time that I'd seen him in almost a year now. 

The mission family tree. Me and my son with my dad and my brother and his sons. 

May 26 Another week "Na Baixada"

Dear Family and Friends,

One more week done already here in the baixada (bye-shada) fluminense (what they call this region of rio). Time has been flying lately for me. I'm quickly coming up on my one year mark here in July. Caramba. Sounds like it has been a good, busy week for all of you back at home. My week was pretty good. It didn't seem like much was accomplished but we did what we could.

This week the big news was that we had interviews with our mission President who starting in July will fully take over his responsiblilities as an area 70 for Brasil (He currently is working as both area 70 and mission president). I've got huge respect for President Lima. You can tell that he is incredibly inspired by the spirit and it seems as if he can look right through you into your spirit. Intimidating a little, but amazing because every bit of advice that he gives is exactly what you need to hear every time. Interviews were good for all of us in the zone. My comp got 4 packages delivered to him too, so that is nice for me as well! There is a funny story that goes along with those packages, but I'll explain later.

There was a fun thing that happened here in Rio this week that I'm sure will scare mom a little. On Wednesday there was a 24 hour police strike in the entire state! Zero policemen were on duty for the entire day and night! Crazy! Don't worry too much. We got sent home early before dark so that nothing bad could happen, but that was definitely a neat experience. You don't hear that too often, all the police stop working for a day AND announce it to everyone. They are protesting for more money because of the world cup, just like everyone else. It's starting to get crazy down here with the cup fever. I wish I could watch some games because nobody is going to be available to teach during any gameday. it'll be hard for sure. 

I ate blood sausage on Tuesday and 3 yr old pumpkin yesterday. Gotta love it!

Hope you all have a good week!

#Brasil #TheRioLife

#ElderEvans

June 16 Training Week 2, Belleford Roxo

Truth is Light

Dear Family and Friends,

This week was great! We have been blessed with an awesome investigator who is progressing amazingly. Her name is C, and actually we started to teach her probably 6 weeks ago. She is the mom of another investigator that we have been teaching.  One day she came in the apartment as we were teaching him and she asked, Who is Mormon? What is that book that you gave to my son? I want to know more about it. Perfect! We can help! We taught her, gave her a book.    We hadn't seen her since and this past week we passed her on the street.  We stopped and I talked to her and she said hey, I started to read that book of Mormon, I'm almost to the chapter that you marked with me. She had read all of 1st and 2nd Nephi by herself and without us there to help her. Wow!   I invited her to church and she came with us. We taught her again after church and she has a baptismal date for July. She is awesome! 

We had to stay inside Thursday.  We found out that every day that Brasil plays we will have to stay home. It's boring, and I'm dying to watch a game or two. It's very hard to be here right now. But it's also an experience of a lifetime.

On a mission in Rio, and while the World Cup is in Brasil. Never would have guessed that.

Well, that's it for this week, I'll have more next week! Stay classy!

Love, Elder Evans

June 9 World Cup Fever Begins!

Dear Friends and Family, 

Man it's hot today. And they had said that winter had started here in Brasil. Caramba!  Sounds like everyone is doing pretty well there in the states, or Canada, wherever you happen to be. I had a good, and stressful week this week as a missionary here in Rio. As I mentioned last week, I got called to be a trainer, and on Tuesday I picked up my new companion, my son, and took him home to Belford Roxo. I felt a little bad for him at first because this is a rough area to have your first look at Rio. He was having a little hard of a time adjusting to everything at once, like all missionaries, but he is starting to feel better, and he is a pro missionary already. My son's name is Elder Montoya, the first thing I thought of was the Princess Bride quote "My name is Elder Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die" haha. He is from the great South American country of Colombia. He is fresh out of whatever the equivalent of high school is there, with 18 years of life, and practically is training me how to be a missionary. We are becoming good friends and are having success already together. I can't wait to see all the things that he will do on his mission.

As in specific stories, we had stake conference this week and it was legit! We all got to go to Salt Lake for the conference to hear M. Russel Ballard, Richard G. Scott, Carole M Stephens, and the Area Presidency of Brasil speak to us. Well, we didn't literally go to Salt Lake, it was a broadcast transmission to the Brasilian states of Rio, São Paulo, and Espírito Santo. It was cool to get to hear the apostles speak to us again. Richard G Scott gave his talk in Portuguese too! the others had to have translators. What was also funny was that Richard G. Scott gave a talk to us while I was in the MTC almost a year ago. And yesterday he gave the exact same talk that he gave to the missionaries in the MTC, just in Portuguese this time. It was about prayer, it was really good.

Many have asked how the world cup will work with us serving in Rio. On the 12th, the day it starts, we were told that we will be at home all day. We will leave for lunch like normal, but we need to be back at our houses by2 PM and we will stay home the rest of the day. But after that we just have to be careful. We are not allowed to even talk about the cup with anyone. It'll be hard. And I hope that everything will be safe for us serving. But that's it. I am looking forward to having a good week and an exciting time in the missão maravilhosa.

Love y'all, enjoy the cup for me, I'll take pictures of what I can. What a time to remember, huh?

Elder Evans

 Me in front of the maracanã! Where the championship games will be held!

 Me and my Brelder, Brelder Braun. We are both training right now. 

 Elder Siebers, Me, Elder Kunzler (my missionary brother), and Elder Heidenreich. Some of my American buds, all training.

Me and my son Elder Montoya. I feel like I look so different now than before the mission. 

January 20, 2014 Update from Brazil

Elder Evans with French copy of Book of Mormon

Froot Loops and Tang - All is right with the world

Elder Evans and Elder Silva with Junior

Chalkboard full of things that Elder Evans misses from Kansas

So is anyone updating my blog or posting a link to my letters on my facebook? I want more of my friends to email or write me.

First off. Holy Crap, Madison Margaret Evans is turning 18 this week??????????????????? Just yesterday you were my little sister in kindergarten and now you are 18? And going to graduate high school and going to college? Não acredito. I don't believe it. Happy birthday Madi, hope you get that pony and the lifesize barbie doll and the furby that you've always wanted ;)

Well, this week we had a miracle. Mark one more baptism and confirmation for the church here in Maricá. Junior the haitian was baptized and confirmed Saturday and then Sunday this week. It was really awesome. So if you don't remember, Junior moved here to Brasil a little over a year ago with his cousin. He started to work at a meat production factory here in Maricá and that's basically it. We found him one night at about 8:40 PM doing our mandatory street contacts on the plaza. He was alone listening to music when Elder Silva contacted him and since then we've taught him everything, his portuguese has improved and he has definitely felt the spirit speaking to him. He speaks portuguese at about the level I did my first day of the MTC, after a year of living in Brasil, so we really became some of his only friends here. He's come to church the past three sundays and he has been Reading the french book of mórmon that we got for him.

So what I've learned through this week is that even when a week is rough, or a month, or a transfer, there's nothing better than the joy that you get when you get the chance to participate in bringing a soul unto Christ. It all becomes Worth it in the end.

A quick update on everything. I hope I get my package tomorrow. We have President interviews tomorrow and if it's there, I'll get it. Did you guys send it to the Rua Dois de Dezembro address? because that is the right one to send it to.

My health is doing good. Only about once a day do I get the squirts, so we are improving, and that also means I don't have any major parasites yet. woo!

My companion is doing fine too. 

I hope all is good for you guys, I enjoyed the updates from Mom and Dad. Congrats on being announced Regional Manager Pops. I guess we can just call you Michael Scott now.

Love you all, say hi to my friends for me and tell them to write me,

Elder Evans

January 13, 2014 Things in Marica

Yo yo yo família e amigos! Hope all is going great with y'all! Everything is crazy here, but I'm happy and looking upward. This week was a bit of a challenge for us here in Maricá. Both monday and tuesday we had to go to Niterói, the nearest big city. It's the one right on the other side of the bay and the sugarloaf mountain, or pão de açúcar. Because my comp needed to get a tomografia, which I believe is an cat scan or mri on his brain to figure out what has been giving him this headache that he has been talking about since november. He is always complaining about it and every word out of his mouth is a complaint about how something hurts. It reminds of me of Madi, "I don't feel good, I can't go to school today, or the rest of the year." ;) jk but really I think he's just stressed and won't admit it to anybody because he's a tough guy, so there's a lot of time that we can't do anything because he needs to rest his head.Wednesday we went to Arsenal, the stake center, for Zone meeting. It was supposed to start at 2pm but our zls didn't show up until 4:30. So we we didn't get back to Maricá until 8:45. Thursday was a more normal day. We walked, contacted, clapped at peoples gates, taught lessons and got more sunburnt.

The rest of the week was normal until sunday. We had the first ward council meeting ever here in the smallest branch of the church in the world, and it just showed us exactly how disorganized this branch is and this area is, and basically the branch leaders don't want to hear what our mission president has to say about how we work and where we should work, they just made it super frustrating for us missionaries and we got a bunch of stuff dumped on us to do for the branch that is contrary to the counsel that we got from pres lima. So we are just figuring everything out here.

This area is great. I love the members and the city and everything, but it is one of the most strange places to do missionary work. It's like a bermuda triangle. You put a lot of work into it, you try different things all the time to try to get results, you fight and fight, and you kinda just have to get lucky to make it out, or blessed. There have been a couple RMs that had served in Maricá several years ago that visited and they talked with us and were like, this area is the strangest area ever, I got here near the end of my mission and the whole time I was here, I was just lost on how to work here. Every where else we could figure it out, but here was just too different.

We're working on figuring it out. 

Also, my package hasn't arrived yet. We have interviews on the 21st so maybe I'll get it then. But I did get the letter from Grandma and Grandpa and a letter from the relief society. Thanks!

Love yall,

Elder Evans

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