December 24, 2008

This week was interesting. It because gradually harder and harder until we thought we were going to drown, and then it suddunly became perfect and successful and awesome. A few things, we had our christmas confernce this week. Thankyou so much for the letter, and the recipes. Those were awesome. We bought yeast today (i think, my random ingredient vocab is not all that great) so we´re going to be making some cinnamin rolls for sure, maybe tomorrow, we´re going to go over to the Esteves (the awesome member family) tomorrow morning to make breakfest and we´ll call from there later in the evening, and we have dinner there, so we might try to utilize their kitchen for some cinnamin rolls (with their permission of course) because our oven is not so great. Oh, yeah, that´s a good thing for you to know in relation to recipes. I have not yet tried our oven for anything, i tried to broil something once and it turns out there´s a giant gas burner on the top that doesn´t broil very well, so i doubt it works very well, but we´ll see. By the way, the estevs are great, they do so much for the branch and the missionaries. AND, their son, Filippe, who is such a great kid, got his mission call to mozambique this week. He´ll head out in febuary, and with luck i´ll still be here when that happens.

But yeah, other things that happened this week, We had someone read and pray about the book of mormon! It´s shocking how difficult it is to convince people to read and pray to find out if this church is their only key to happiness on earth and in the next life, it´s one of those things you´d think people would want to know, but yeah, it´s great. M. is the investigator, he has a wife (at least we´re hoping she´s his legit wife, a lot of people here say they´re married but aren´t because it´s to expensive and complicated) and two kids who are all great. We´re going over there tonight to talk about what happened, so we´re cautiously hopeful about that.

Oh, more respostas: I can get chicken (i think, we haven´t really tried yet, but generally meats here are easy to come by, though they may be expensive by our standards, we try to spend about 30€ on groceries each week.) Pasta is easy, and it´s one of our staples, we don´t have any basil, but i bet they have it. We generally make some kind of rice or pasta with some sort of vegetable and chicken boulion or bechemel sauce (a great, cheap, premade white sauce) and probably some bacon, because they have these great things of tiny sliced bacon strips that are very easy to put in food. Other than that we have eggs and sandwiches and occasionally some sort of fried stuff (french fries, these little things called risões that are really good, etc), oh and oatmeal, i realized i like oatmeal a lot, and i further realized that there are tons of possibility when you also have fruit or jam. It´s good stuff.

Oh, right, crazy success the past couple of days. So last week was hard, we all know it´s not about numbers, but the numbers are generally a good reflection of how your week went, and last week our week went poorly. We had a couple investigators quit on us, an investigator hang up on us, the irmãs had their golden investigator and husband who were both marked for baptism have marital troubles and now things are very complicated so the baptism on saturday got cancelled, so yeah, last wek was hard. But we had a great district meeting as led by Elder Oram (there are only four missionaries in our district, us and the irmãs) and now are feeling better and rarin´to go, and the past two days have been excellent, we´ve made about 10 great contacts, taught a family who is very catholic and the father says they´re never change, but they´re also brazillion and so they´re infinitely gracious and said we can continue to returns occasionally and teach them.

Hm, i had alittle bit more to say, but it all disappeared and my picture vanished. I'll call tomorrow though at noonish, probably to the land line, but have the cellphones charged and such. It will be fourty minutes. I'm pretty excited, although i've already said pretty much everything that happened to me, so yeah, Até Amanhã, boas festas

Muito amor,
Elder Ammon

December 17, 2008

So, this week. This week was good. Since that first week with nothing but rain, the weather has been a lot nicer, it´s only rained once or twice, which is great, because my clothes are dry, and it´s much easier to be in a happy mood when your clothes are dry and there´s sun.

Christmas is coming up fast, next week it will be christmas eve. We still have p-day christmas eve, so we´ll probably have some sort of christmas festivities (i´m lobbying for a giant pancake breakfest) and then i´ll email what the phone plan is, but from talking to the other missionaries, it sounds like i´ll by a phone card and maybe call you, and that will be the cheapest way. We´re planning to call at around 6 our time, which will be noon over there. so plan on that.

This week was good, we had our christmas party, which was lots of fun, and i got andes mints, which made it feel like christmas, and made me just a little sad to not be at home. Heh, there´s a christmas card with a santa saying Oh, Oh, Oh! (in portuguese they don´t say h´s at the beginning of words).

Rogerio, the investigator with a baptismal date, is doing great. Well won´t say great, but he´s going to be baptized. We did end up moving the baptism back, because he´d missed 4 weeks in a row. But this week he came, even though he was feeling sick and threw up several times in church. We´re hoping and praying that he gets less sick, but even if not, his dedication to being baptized is remarkable. So if, by great, you understand that he threw up several times in the Church bathroom, then yeah. Otherwise, the work is coming along well. There´s an investigator named Domingos that had been given a book of mormon 20 years before and then 8 weeks ago Irmã Maxfield (one of the sisters in my district) ran into him on the street and invited to come to church and he came, and he´s been coming ever since. Anyway, this week we, or rather Irmão Martinz who is a former mission president, stake president, all sorts of president, and likes teaching domingos lessons, committed him to pray about the book of mormon and whether to be baptized. He (domingos) is so incredibly humble. He´s a farmer, and said something to the effect of he didn´t think he was worth being baptized, but he´s a great guy.

Oh, I went to a funeral this week, that was interesting. Afterwards we got roped into eating lunch. I havefeeling sort of like a fubeca (basically, the portuguese don´t have a word for ´slacker´ so the missionaries made one, and it´s stuck and most of the members use it and so nows it´s starting to spread to other people as well) because we´ve had a bunch of conferences and we had a 3 hours lunch and then we had the funeral and then another really long lunch, but this family is awesome. One of the daughters (who´s in her 30´s or so) is getting baptized on saturday, and she got married recently and her husband is marked to be baptized on the 3rd of january. Rogerio, by the way, is marked for the 10th, and we´re hoping that we can help his roommate ezekiel, who has started coming to church and church activities, ready to be baptized too. So yeah, the mom really likes the church, and will probably be baptized, but the father is very traditional and a bit of a drinker and originally was very opposed to the church and wouldn´t let missionaries pray or read scriptures or anything in his house. But we did service for him, and attended the funeral, and went to lunch, and President Esteves (the branch president and father of fillipe) stayed at his house till 1 am comforting him because it was his mother that died. It´s interesting because the Irmãs has been praying and fasting that his heart would be softened, and then his mother died, and he opened up to the branch president. He also came to the Ward party and liked that alot, so he´s slowly but surely opening his heart to the church. There´s another guy, Lois, who is way awesome, who is the boyfriend of their other daughter, and he has a lot of respect for the church and loves the mormon tabernacle choir, so he´s on the list of people we´re patiently waiting for an opportunity to teach, because he´s way nice and a great person.

Hm, 18 minutes, First, it´d be cool to know what areas Logan served in incase i end up in some of those. It´s pretty unlikely that i get transfered this transfer, but it´s possible, and definitely that i´ll be in new places eventually.

So yeah, I need to tell what happened yesterday. Yesterday, we´d planned to go to pinhal to talk to this guy and bater algumas portas, but elder oram was feeling like we needed to do something else, so at the last minute we decided not to go to pinhal, and to head over to the mafra area to look for whatever we needed to be their for. So we were heading in, and i think i said a couple weeks ago we went by this trailer where people were living where an old man smoking under a table yelled at us. For some reason, I´d been feeling like going back, and so as we went by i said lets visit. We went in and ended up talking to them for about 2 hours. We didn´t really teach a lesson, we just heard their story. They were living in Angola and everything was beautiful, but in the 70´s there was a war and so they came to portugal. I´m still not entirely sure how it happened, but at some point they ended up living in this trailer, the sort that goes on a freight train. They have no running water, they have electricity, but they´re living in such terrible conditions. They straight asked us for 200€, but we´re not supposed to give money, but i really want to help them. That very morning, and this week in general, I´ve been studying and praying for Charity, and this definitely helped. It´s hard to feel bad about anything in your life when you have a house and all the food you need and warm clothes and blankets and all. So we´re going to talk to the mission president and see what we can do about that. They need blankets, so we´ll start with that. So, yeah, I´ve just been feeling really greatful for everything i have. I about started crying looking at their pictures of their life before, they were all so happy and normal.

So, with that in mind, two christmas presentts that people can give me without worrying about postage:

1. Invite the missionaries into your home and listen to them, they´re good guys, and they get worn down knocking doors all day, and you can think that your good friend Ammon is in some reletively warm home happy to be able to teach in a language he just barely speaks.

2. Do something nice for someone in need. People here still have such a clear vision of the American dream, that in america there are no poor, no homeless, but the truth is there are lots of people that don´t have a trailer with electricity and beds to live in. So do something for them.

Something i learned this morning in 1 Corinthians (i want to say chapter 8 or so) is about charity. Paul says something to the effect of, though i give all i have to the poor, and give my body to be burned, and have not charity, i am nothing. So yeah, fun fact: Charity is not giving money anymore than faith is saying that you believe. Although Charity and Faith both produce action, these actions should not be confused for the attribute itself. Charity is love, and without it, though you have everything else in the world, you are good for nothing, so yeah, i just thought that was interesting. Vamos ver, i think that´s about all that happened this week. As always, thanks for your prayers, and your support.

Então, hope everything goes great getting ready for christmas, I´m looking forward to talking to everyone and getting presents, and it´s completely ok if they´re a bit late.

Com Muito Amor,

Élder Ammon

Dec. 10, 2008

So yeah, Week 2 was great.  Probably the best part was that it got sunny.  Until monday, we had had almost two continuous weeks of cold rainy weather, but the past few days have been sunny and beautiful.  Yesterday we had a very unfruitful walk out in the hills north of our house.   It´s beautiful out there, but it turns out there aren´t many elect, mostly on account of there not being many houses, and most of the houses that were there didn´t have doorbells (the houses in portugal almost all have fences and gates, so usually we do more ringing doorbells and talking to people through their voicebox that nocking doors.  Most people actually live in apartments, and not houses, so most of our doornocking is going down the panel of buttons.  It´s quite a bit more efficient, but it feels a lot less effective.)  So yeah, we ended up walking for about 45 minutes to talk to one very old very catholic old man.  So that was probably not the most effective two hours of my life, but he was a nice old man.  Portugal is so beautiful.  I didn´t realize that much last week because the constant rain and cold sort of sucks out your soul, but it really is amazing.  There are orange trees everywhere, this one house we went past had some sort of plum trees or something.   I wanted to eat one, but that would have required jumping a fence and stealing this guy´s food, and that would have been bad.

Oh, in other happy news, Out here, family is defined as family, so the sisters and isaac are good to email me and such.  So that´s cool.  I did get the thanksgiving package a day or two before i left, which was really nice.  I don´t remember if the fruitsnacks were in that one or a different one, but they were delicious.

I do sort of know my address now, but i would just keep sending it to the main office, i don´t trust the postal system out here in Mafra, and I end up going into Lisbon every couple weeks for conferences and interviews and stuff like that.  If i end up out in the Açores sometime in my mission, i´ll defnitely get you my real address, but for now this is fine.

One of these days, probably today, I´m going to need to withdraw a bunch of money from my savings.  It turns out that exchanging money here is really really expensive, so they suggest mailing the american money home and just withdrawing from a checking account.  I wish they had told me that before hand, but todo bem.  But i still need my emergency money and i´d like to have a bit of personal money to spend on stuff.  Speaking of Stuff, I lost my watch yesterday, i almost went two whole weeks.  So yeah, i´ll buy a new one of those one of these days.  Being a missionary without a watch just doesn´t work.

So, in missionary news, this week was good.  I had my first legitamate contact, this nice woman Ana on the bus.  We invited her to come to english class and she said that we could teach her the gospel sometime.  So yesterday we had the english class, and it was getting to be time to start, and we couldnºt decide whether we should call her or not, it felt very high school, but right as we were about to give up and eat a pear she showed up and had brought her daughter and her duaghter´s boyfriend, who turns out to be a less active member.  So that´s pretty awesome.  I was in charge of english class, and I think it went pretty well.  I like teaching English, it´s a lot less laid back than teaching religion, although it doesn´t need to be.  I need to figure out how to be as comfortable teaching lessons as i do teaching english, because i do a much better job teaching english i think.  I also decided that i would enjoy teaching at the MTC a lot, so I think I might try to make that happen in two years, but i have plenty of time to think about it.

Our investigator (by the way, investigador is a word in portuguese, but it has the connotation of a government type character, so here they´re called pesquisadors, which means searchers.  I like that more) with a baptismal date missed church today on account of being in a bunch of pain and having to go to the hospital and bed ridden.  It is complicated though because that´s his fourth time to miss church in a row, so we´re going to talk tonight about moving the baptism back a bit, but it´s all good, he´s very determined to be baptized and he has a strong testimony and has already made huge changes in his life.  He´s got a doctor´s appointment today to see what his medical situation is going to be, so hopefully he won´t have to work (they´d force him to work to get retirement benifits if the doctor decides that he´s able, which i don´t see possible, but apparently people in more pain than him have had to before, so vamor ver) and will be able to go to church.  We´re shooting for a very fine line of health.

Monday night, we gave Rógerio (the said investigator) a blessing, so that was my first português blessing.  It was great, It´s always cool that the church is the same in every language and every country.

Lets see, what else is going on?  I had an amazing lunch on sunday.  We are supposed to not go to meals with members for more than an hour, but she was our ride out, and it ended up taking 3 hours.  We´re going to have to talk to the branch president and the members about changing the mindset of feeding missionaries, we did leave for a bit to do some tracting out in Nova Igreja (the town we were in).    Lunch was incredible though.  It started out with the rice soup and bread that was great, even more so because we had been fasting for 24 hours.  Then we had Salad which was lettuce and tomatoes and onions and olive oil and vinegar, and then meat and fried potatoes (not really french fries, pretty close to chips, the british kind) which were great.  It was essentially Roast beef, so that felt very home like.  And then we had desert, which was chocalate mousse and this arroz doce like stuff (arroz doce, sweet rice, is essentially rice pudding, but this was a little different, and it had cinnamin).  And then we had fruit.  All in all it was incredibly delicious, and sort of a lot of food, but that was ok.

Oh, yeah, you´ll probably be relieved to know i had a little bit of homesickness earlier this week.  It was probably the first time in my life i could really describe missing home, but yeah, we were singing christmas in sacremement meeting, and i realized I´m not going to have christmas eve at home.  Foi triste.  But, it passed, and I´ll survive.

Lets see, i know there were a couple other things i had meant to say, i only have 7 minutes left.  The portuguese is getting better, I´m starting to have some idea what people are saying, which is nice.  What dad said that you learn humility and how to trust in the Lord is definitely true.  We had my first zone conference on monday, which happened to be the one zone conference a year where a general authority comes, we had Elder Claussé, who was really cool, and french.  Anyway, he read Ether 12:27, which was probably the most applicable scripture to my life ever.  I am daily being shown my weeknesses, so I´m really looking forward to having those be made strong.  Lets see, that´s probably about all that´s going on.  Oh, i need recipies, of the simple variety.  We tried to make fried rice last night, and that went very poorly, we salvaged it in the end, but yeah.  The grocery stores here have pretty much everything, but the goal is quick, cheap, and delicious.  So that would be really great if you could send that.  Oh, and Between this week and next Iºll figure out what the deal will be with calling for christmas, I think you call me actually, but we´ll see.  Até proxima semana

com amor

~Elder Ammon

Ammon's First Letter From Portugal!

Olá from Portugal! I actually already did this once, but it didn´t come through for some reason, so i´ll just copy that in again i guess:

so, its hard to type on this keyboard, because it's a portuguese keyboard, so things are in weird places, but it is good for typing in português. Anyway, I made it to portugal ok, today is my pday, so i won't send a real email or letters until next week, but i'm just sending to say that I'm alive and Portugal is amazing. I am absurdly tired because i didn't sleep on the plane at all and I barely slept the night before so basically I've got about 3 hours of sleep in the past 40ish hours.

Elder Ammon

So yeah, i don´t know what happened with that, but i tried to send that last week. So, first I´ll answer questions:

1. I basically have no idea what my mailing address is, roads aren´t very well marked, so we have a vague idea of what road we´re on but we don´t know what town we´re in and i think the only really useful thing is this number that i don´t know, so all this to say, i´m not sure what my address is, but you can send letters to that general address i have and it´ll get to me sometime, either when i get a real address (which will hopefully be by next week) or when i head over to the mission office, which will probably be for transfers or something, i dunno, i´ll try to have it for next week.

2. I did get my messenger bag, it was extremely helpful and now it has traveled all over the world.

3. Christmas box...Warm things, scarves, socks, thermal garments, thermal anything, etc. And just cool family stuff. For most things it will probably be substantially cheaper to just have me buy it here, maybe not though, things are expensive.

4. Today is my Pday, so quarta-feira, or wednesday as they say.

5. The weather here is cold, ergo the christmas wishes. It´s not that cold, probably in the forties or fifties, but it rains almost all the time (yesterday was a blessed relief, especially because it meant i could have dry underwear). No one in portugal has driers, ourselves included, which means we have to hang our clothes up to dry, which means if it rains, we have lots of wet clothes, or we have to hang them up inside, but it´s so humid and cold that they don´t really dry. A full length raincoat would probably be handy, but my coat and an umbrella works fine. I wear the thermals i have everyday (which might be a little gross) so my legs stay warm enough, so if you have something handy i´d love it but don´t spend a ton of money sending it over here just for the winter..

6. I have an hour for email, which should be plenty, and with the letter situation up in the air, write all you want.

So yeah, I´m in Portugal! Ok, so i´ll talk about my travel first. It was absolutely absurd. So we got up at 3:30 a.m. because we had to finish getting ready and clean our rooms, so we do that and then head over to the travel office who gives us our passports and stuff and sends us over to the bus. We said goodbye to the elder and Irmã that were going to cape verde, since we won´t see them for a couple years, and then we were off. We got to the airport at 7 or so, that's when I called. It was sad that it got cut off, and i couldn't remember Dad's phone number. I had written it down, but it was written down on a piece of paper i threw in my checked baggage.

So. we ate some at the arport and got on our flight. that was pretty regular, just a flight to new york. The new york airport was sort of intense, and we had to go to the international terminal, which made me feel verry intrepid already. We got on air france and and had a bit of time to eat lunch and then we went to our air france plane. That plane was HUGE. There was coach, first class, and then something before first class that was very shwanky, but even coach was by far then nicest seat i´ve had. There was a tv in the seat that showed where the plane was and what countries you were flying over and altitude and temperature and stuff like that. They gave us a several course meal with some really great bread. It was actually the best food i´d had in a while. That flight was long, and i couldn´t sleep, because the guy behind me made weird gutteral noises at me when i tried to put my seat down, so that was strange. We got to the Paris airport early in the morning there.

The paris airport is massive. We got off the plane and there was a lady waiting for us there that led us through the airport and to the front of passport lines at a brisk jogging pace. We probably walked about 3 miles in that airport and that was after the airport had taxi´d for about 15 minutes (it was just driving along for a while) and then we got to a bus which drove us out to our plane which we got to about 5 minutes before it left. It was intense, if we hadn´t had our guide there we never would have made it.

The lisbon flight was nice, they gave us a decent breakfest (europeans know how to do travel, they gave us good meals and didn´t make us take our shoes off in security.) and i actually managed to sleep a little on this flight, but woke up as we were flying into lisbon, which was nice, it was a great view of lisbon.

So, we went to get our luggage, all of it was there except for two bags, so that was ok. One of my wheels had fallen off my luggage and had dissapeared, at the time i blamed the french, but then the same thing happened later as i was walking to my apartment, so i´m letting the french slide on this one. A word of wisdom: If you plan on taking baggage to europe, or really anywhere that has cobblestone roads, go for baggage with solid two wheels. The four wheels are awesome in airports and stuff, but because they can pivot, they're not strong enough to handle the trauma from roads with a bit of history. So yeah, that was sort of sad, one of these p«day´s i´ll have to see if i can jimmy some sort of solution for next transfer.

Sooo...yeah, lisbon. the mission president (President Terry) and his wife were waiting for us outside the terminal and they took us to put our baggage in the van and then off to get our visas validated or something. that took a few hours, and by then i was pretty exhausted from going 30 hours with 3 hours of sleep. But that eventually got finished, and then we drove over to the mission home. Driving in portugal is crazy. There isn´t anyone to enforce the speedlimits, and they´re pretty liberal with things like lane lines and rules about right of way (as in, often neither of them exist) but we eventually got there. The drive was an Elder whose name i´ve now forgotten, but apparently he was from hyde park and had played tennis a time or two with Ben Phillips and had Scott as his teacher once, so that was funny.

We went to the mission home (which is this huge, ex-embassy looking building) and wait, no, i'm getting ahead of myself. First we went over to the office where we were interviewed, had some time to nap and eat pizza and send emails (mine obviously didnºt work) Then we grabbed what we would need for the night and went to the mission home. Where we had some time to relax. I and another elder took a nap. Most people went over to see the Tower of Belem, which is this huge monument where the king used to go to wave to explorers as they sailed off into the world, which is cool, and symbolic, but i really needed sleep, so i´ll have to do that some time later. At some point we had dinner, which was lasagna, and that was pretty good, if a little out of place. Then we had a testimony meeting which was nice and went to sleep, oh, i got to shower too, which was very nice, since i hadn´t been able to do that for a day and a half or so.

The next day was thanksgiving, but it felt like a pretty average day in portugal. We had a very good breakfast, and then went to the church to have some orientation, meet our companions and get assigned to areas. Then we said goodbye to our district members and took various means of transportation to our area.

So, I'll take a bit of time to talk about my companion. His name is elder Oram, he´s from Kayesville Utah, and he´s pretty cool. He has sort of a michael j. fox vibe to him, with a bit of luke skywalker thrown in there. So that´s nice, so far we get along very well and I plan to keep that going.

I have come to the decision that when it comes to Missions, the first few days are extremely different, and then after a few days they suddenly become great. My first few days were very very hard. It was about a 30 minute walk with my luggage, that didn´t roll well, to our apartment. We did eventually get there, and i unpacked a bit and ate a bit, then went to do some contacting. I feel like i know a lot less portuguese than i did this time last week. For the first couple days I actually spoke less than i had at the MTC and i pretty much can´t understand anything the portuguese people say, but that´s gotten better, and now Elder Oram and I are speaking Portuguese whenever we´re out of the apartment, so that´s helped. Anyway, after contacting, we went way out to the boonies of the area. Oh, by the way, my area is Mafra, which you can probably find on a map or something. If you can find the rotary on the north end of Mafra that´s where our house is. But yeah, the area is huge, we drove for about 40 minutes to get to these members house and talked for a while and then they fed us bread and tea and cake. We didn´t get back to our apartment until like 11:30. So yeah, my first day i drank tea and stayed out a half an hour past when i´m supposed to be asleep (it was herbal tea, so that was atleast ok, i just like to throw those two together). Oh, and that was my thanksgiving too, the elders and celebrated thanksgiving on p-day, so i didn´t really do anything for that, triste, mas todo bem.

Ok, I have 8 minutes, so I better hurry this up.

So Mission life has been good. Our house doesn´t have heat, so it is freezing in the morning. I like it when i sleep, because i´ve often said there´s no amount of blankets i wouldn´t want to sleep under, and luckily that´s true. No one adequately prepared me for how difficult being in the field actually is (although Logan described it pretty well, and I´ve been told many time it was hard) I think if missionaries were sent to the field for a week before the mtc there would be no complaints about the MTC. But I shouldn´t make it sound like I´m miserable, I´m loving it. We have an investigator who is going to be baptized on the 20th. He´s been talking to the missionaries for like a year and we actually almost had to give up on his baptismal date yesterday because he missed church again, but it turned out his cousins came over and pretty much held him from going and told him theyd rather have him dead than baptized, but he said he will be baptized anyway, so that was great, to see that he actually is determined to do this. So yeah, what else, I love cooking, the bread here is incredible, and today and fried a pear in sugar, which turned out to be incredible. So yeah, things are awesome ehre. I'll make sure i don't forget my camera cord next week so that i can send pictures.

Moito Amor,

Elder Ammon