Okay! Itabuna! Haha Brazil is crazy! I should capitalize it because it is really crazy. It is quieter here at night though, because Itabuna is a lot smaller than São Paulo was. Let me just say, I had no idea! Serving a mission is a lot different than i thought. Haha My new companion and I work a lot. We are working hard and had a baptism on Saturday! We´ve also been working with a Mother and her 3 kids, they have baptismal dates for the 27th, we´ll see how that goes. So i am sitting in some Internet Cafe, and it is 4:30 my time. Haha there are some loud Brazilians in here. Anyways let’s see. So my area is Fátima, it consists of the Bairro (neighborhood kind of) Fátima and a few others. We have a really strong ward. I love the members so much! haha it´s funny because everytime we leave a members house i say to my companion, I love the members. We have lunch with a member everyday. My first lunch was last Wednesday i guess. haha that seems so long ago. I don´t know anyone´s names yet but my first lunch was with this old lady in my ward. She is hilarious, probably the happiest person in the world that i´ve ever met. She just laughs heh heh heh all the time. Pretty fun. What else, i mentioned last week that we had that 7 hour bus ride right? So to get to Itabuna we just jump on a bus and try to sleep all night. It was a good ride though.
So the weather, Haha i don´t think i´ve ever sweat so much in my life! And it is winter! It is probably a solid 85 right now with some humidity, and it´s only going to get hotter. I´m excited though. Haha at night i get eaten by mosquitos. Lots of them! I have a lot of bites but they don´t itch that bad. It just bites haha, pardon the pun.Anyway, i feel bad for one of the Elders who lives in our apartment too, I have literally never seen so many bites on one arm in my entire life. Literally he tried counting during a lesson once and he lost count at like 125. We are guessing he had bed bugs. So we did the wash today.
It is great here, but there is definitely a strategy to working. We like to work with less actives and appointments after it gets dark every night because after about 7:00 o´clock it’s really hard to work the streets and houses etc. But we do hit a lot of doors. Here in Brazil most people have these little porch things. So they have a gate, lots of people even park their little cars there. Well so to knock doors you stand out and clap your hands till they come. Anyway most of the time my trainer just kind of disappears when i hit doors. Haha it´s for my own good but it is hard because i can´t understand a thing anyone is saying! Bahianos have slang and all, but their accent isn´t as bad as some people at the CTM made it sound. So i´m excited because i´m slowly learning and slowly slowly being able to understand. ahh i´m so grateful for my companion though.
Every one we teach a lesson to has such great potential. Every lesson we have i find myself imagining the person as a member of the Church and how their lives can be blessed so much more from the gospel. The sad part is that most most most of these people i´ll never see again because they won´t act in faith. Our message is amazing. It takes so much faith to be a missionary because you have to tell them why they should care. They should care because it will bless their lives, but you have to have faith because you are promising them blessings in the name of our Savior. I love being a missionary! haha i love Brazilians but sometimes they drive you nuts. haha Like yesterday was really really hard to work because everyone and their dogs were blaring music and getting drunk. Happy father´s day. That is something a lot more common here. People make a lot of noise. Blaring music and getting drunk. There are these cars that drive around playing advertisements really really loud too. You can hear it from far away because the sound bounces off the walls.
So we work a lot in Favellas. I think i spelled that right. They are poor bairros and neighborhoods of these characteristic brick houses. It´s so hot the houses are way different. Even when you are inside the house you are still outside. Don´t get me wrong, there are still rooms and houses with insides. But it´s a lot more open. Well i´m only starting to get to know itabuna and i don´t know where the correio is. That´s okay though i´ll figure it out. Our church is amazing! It is really big and really beautiful because it´s new. There are countless churches here, but they are all 1 room with picnic chairs and a band and a pastor up front. It is amazing. I realized recently that if the church wasn´t true i wouldn´t go to church at all. Other churches are so weird. It´s like what Heavenly Father said to Joseph Smith, they draw near to me with theirt lips but are far from me with their hearts.Anyways, the Portuguese is coming great. I don´t understand much because people talk so fast and i need to learn so much more. but i love it!
