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
