I know I always talk about this but time is really weird on the mission. There are days that seem to go on forever but I feel like I just barely wrote you guys yesterday at the same time. I've almost got a month out in the field already and that's crazy to me. The days are long and the weeks are short. Waking up has been real difficult some days because I've been real tired from all the walking we've been doing. The ideal day consists of one lesson right after the other but that hasn't happened yet. Keeping commitments is a problem here just like every other mission. Every time someone isn't home when they said they would be or decides that they don't actually want the missionaries to come we get around 40 minutes of contacting. We try to have backup plans but it's tough right now. Everyone here is Catholic. Our contacting consists of only talking to people on the streets. No door clapping for us (people clap; yell the name of the person they are looking for, not knock here). And during each encounter we invite them to church at some point. It really threw me off the first time we talked to someone because my companion just said, "Hi good day. Can I extend an invitation to you:"then "What are you doing sunday morning?"then "Would you like to come to church with us?". We had just barely met them and were already inviting them to church. It's really normal to me now though.
I performed my first confirmation on sunday! I was very nervous for obvious reasons and I know I said some things that probably made no sense to everyone but it wasn't too bad. Luckily the confirmations are really short here. And just a quick update on the language... I still can't understand anything! I think the people here are actually speaking another language other than portugese because I swear when we are reading the scriptures they are saying completely different words. I'm studying vocab cards every day by cutting up paper and writing the english and portugese words on it so I have something to do while we're just walking, and I study grammer during language study time. I also have a little book I keep in my shirt pocket of new phrases and vocab. I try to write down words that I think I hear during conversations and lessons that I don't know but most of the time the things I write down aren't actually words and I just wrote down a combination of 2 words or something. And there are definitely a lot of baptisms here. The mission goal is 1 per week. Sadly the guy we wanted to Baptize just couldn't give up smoking so we couldn't baptize him. But we have another that came to church on sunday and really liked it so I hope things go well with him!
I think I found my new favorite drink this week. There's this herb mixture thing called tereré that you put into a cup and pour juice into it then drink it through a filtered straw. It's really really good. But because my comp and I are professional cooks we took it up a notch. We carved out a pineapple and used the pineapple to make some juice and used the outside of the pineapple as the cup. Man that was a good drink. We also upped our game on the pancakes. Now we have coconut pancakes with banana and chocolate cooked inside. It's delightful. My companion continues to be surprised by the amount that I am eating here. I don't know what's happening. I'm gonna get fat. He always tells everyone that I love bananas (because I do, we buy like 4 bunches per week) so now all the members bring me bananas during lunch. It's awesome. And more recipes please! Food is my hobby here and I need to make more!
But i'll be able to listen to conference in english i think. I'll try to download it onto my comps usb stick. And that is pretty gross that I had sandwiches in my backpack... I'm sure they smelled great. Not that smells effect me anymore. The streets smell like poop here because there's poop water everywhere (and it definitely effects me still i was kidding). I already emailed paul and gabe and corb and kaden so don't worry about that. Sorry I don't have as much this week. Sometimes I just want to take a little break at the end of the day and forget to update the ol' AlphaSmart.
Elder Odom
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