1st Week Accomplished

Well every one said that the first week here was crazy... they were right, talk about drinking from a fire hose! So my district is great as seen in previous picture, we get along awesome and there are many spiritual moments and sometimes obnoxious laughter (we are trying to work on that haha). Their names are Sister Sw., Sister D., Sister M. (from Hickory), Sister Sh., Elder R, Elder M., Elder Sa., Elder St., and Elder Si.. Apparently we were super, super lucky because only 2 Americans came in this past week so they are alone in their district and we got a full 10, really grateful for that! Also our district is literally the first to get this new language learning program with like different ways of setting goals and application and stuff which is awesome, and kind of stressful when our instructor make us spit out new words that we were supposed to have learned today without notice. 

 

 So from our first day we have taught a lesson with an "investigator" in Portuguese every night... like in Portuguese... the first lesson was like 5 minutes and we found out the next day it was supposed to be 20 to 30, opa (they say opa like we say oops OPA!) So our entire day, studying personally, with companions, with our teacher, with the language is all geared toward teaching the lesson that night, or at least we try to make it that way. Oh and on the first day I conducted the music for our districts little welcome and the CTM President’s wife (they are new by the way and got here the day before we did) anyway, she heard me sing so she came up to me at lunch and 2 minutes later I’m signing a solo this Sunday and will conduct the entire CTM choir (which is the entire CTM and we like only sing for the President and CTM doctor odd...) some time in the upcoming weeks, pretty cool. Sister Swenson (the President’s wife) is going to play for me and we already practiced which was interesting because I haven’t really practiced in a long time and like 2 different classes came in to watch when they heard me from down the hall.

 

 So Brazilian things, we have beans and rice at every meal, and I’m actually to the point where they didn’t have beans one day and I felt kind of jipped! Also, they go entirely in military time and their floors start of floor T for Terra and then go 1o 2o 3o 4o etc. (the o for primer"o"-1^st, segund"o"- 2^nd ) which is all pretty confusing! Our room is on the 4o floor which means we a on the 5th floor which is a lot of stairs... yay. So little tid bit (not little at all) we had a little companion switcheroo and my comp isn’t Elder Sa. anymore its Elder Si. He and his companions were suuuuper struggling with the language so they had to be split up. I’m glad to be able to help but I was kind of really random for me and Elder Sa. so it was hard and also thing were going great with our lessons and stuff and we had to switch all of his stuff out of our room, but its all good, tudo bem (btws we say that for anything and everything) It is an opportunity to exercise humility and have the faith to receive the gift of tongues. Our district is apparently really good at Portuguese already. We try to talk Portuguese as much as possible everywhere and we sit with Brazilians at meals and they are kind of shocked to figure out we’ve been here for only a week and we are like talking with them, legal (cool, and all ending "l"s are pronounced kind of like a “w”). We also say feijão legal, cool beans, and none of the Brazilians get it, it’s really funny. Oh and in our room it’s me, Elder Si. and 2 Brazilians- Elder C. and Elder B. they are great and really fun. At night we read scriptures in Portuguese and they read in English and we help each other out, it’s great. Today we got to go to the Sao Paulo temple which was beautiful besides the crackly white noise from the headphones we had to wear for the translation.

Anyway times out, I love you guys so much!!! Keep emailing me! Oh and dad we do have dork dots and I’m super glad to take mine off today! Oh yea p day is Friday.

Love!!!

Elder Pierce