Ben in Brazil: Two Weeks of Letters from Belem During Rainy Season

Monday, July 2, 2012

Oi,

Hey, everything here is going OK. We had a ward party here Saturday and it turned out to be really cool. The youth of the ward had some dancing presentations, and I filmed a bit with my camera.

Good news: we have set a date to go to the Cartolio to get Magno and Marilene hitched! They are doing well and we have a bunch of other families that are close to getting married here as well.

I have finally settled everything with the members in our ward (their problems with me) and they are starting to bring new families to church! Some members just don’t understand that their food is good but that I won’t overeat, they get really self-conscious if you only eat one full plate of food, and I feel like I’m eating Thanksgiving dinner every day.

It’s pretty rainy here these days, well, it is really hot then we have thunder showers in the afternoons. Thankfully I have two pairs of shoes and I switch them each day so I don’t have to wear them wet.

We got our new mission president and we will meet him in person this week.

My skin irritation left but I am left with a minor skin infection that blisters around my waist line and in my groin. Yeah, that’s pleasant. But it doesn’t hurt, it just itches after the blisters pop (the blisters are under just the top layer of skin). But I have a cream to put on them every night.

I am doing well. I hope you all are doing well too. Today we spent a few hours with an RM and made lemon bars with maracuja [passionfruit, picture downloaded from Google] instead of lemons. Out of time.

I will write a letter later today!!!

Love you all!!

Ben

Monday, July 9, 2012

Man this past week was bit crazy. It had the regular ups and downs. We have a lot of people almost baptized we just need to finish teaching then and give them a baptismal date. We are going to marry some people in the next few weeks as well.

My comp is interesting. He is pretty good. We will have transfers in two weeks and after that I don’t know what will happen. I really want to stay here because I have prepared a lot of people to be baptized but it will take a while for some of them to get married. My comp (after a few weeks) told more of the story about how he messed up his knee. Apparently that was only part of the story. Well, there were a ton of things going on in his mission, and he didn’t like the cold, so he said that he wouldn’t go back to his mission and he is resubmitting his papers. From the stories I have heard from him, his mission there was really disobedient and a ton of missionaries where sent home dishonorably. That sort of stuff is always sad to hear. No one is perfect on the mission but to get sent home from the mission dishonorably for breaking commandments is pretty close to denying the Holy Ghost.

Well cool things that happened this past week. I met the mission president. He was really nice. And I took a shower in a rain storm last night on our back patio (it is surrounded by a wall so no one could see). We got 12 investigators to church and I tried the classic açai and peixe food combo at one of the biggest open markets in South America [fried white fish with purple açai pudding/sauce on the side, pictures downloaded from Google] . That was pretty cool.