January 28, 2009

Last p-day i went to Castle! It was so amazing. It was like being right in the middle of Lord of the Rings. That castle was started sometime in the 9th century. Portugal is so amazing! I get to be here for two years, i need to make sure i see all the amazing stuff while i'm here. At the same time, adventures on p-day generally mean that our house goes uncleaned and we end up really tired, so todays been a nice chill day of shopping, cleaning, and writing letters. We have an hour of 'relax' scheduled in. It's going to be awesome.

I can definitely see how getting back from the mission would be weird. I already feel really uncomfortable just sitting around because i know how much there is to do in our house, in portugal in general. The idea of watching tv doesn't quite seem realistic.

I'm glad to hear Obama is inspiring the nation, we found an obama comic book in the stoor where we do internet last week. Elder Oram bought four (1€ each) and gave me one for my christmas present. We can't read it until we get back from our missions, but we're way excited about reading that. Portugal is so funny.

Elder Oram suggested last week that you generally type letters the night before, because it's unusual that we do it in the afternoon. Most missionaries aparently do it in the morning, but Elder Oram admits that he is bad at p-days because he's served most of his mission in the more rural areas where adventures are hard to do. Apparently things get pretty crazy in Lisbon, someday i hope to serve out there, but i like mafra a lot. I would love to be here in the summer, it's so beautiful, although i hear in the summer we have to stay pretty far from the beaches. So it's probably for the best that it's winter, since we can go to ericeira, which is way cool.

As far as keeping our apartment clean, i ofcourse put my clothes in my clothes hamper, but i guess that is something i started doing while in the MTC, so it wouldn't necessarily be expected. Our apartment stays about as clean and tidy as possible. We try to do all the suggested cleaning stuff, we're slightly hampered by the shocking wetness of our house and the weather, but it stays cleaner than anywhere i've lived in my life, but then we basically only eat, sleep, and study in our apartment, so it doesn't have a lot of time to get dirty. Oh, and yeah, we make our beds everymorning.

It's great to hear the letter got the safe and sound, everything in there made it it sounds like, a couple days after sending it i started worrying about it and prayed that it would all get their safely. This makes the second post related miracle. Hopefully from here on our letters can get back and forth without divine intervention. Also, great to hear the everythings good with Dad on the cancer front. Rogério has some pretty serious health problems, but he is also fairly patient and faithful in that. I found out this week that D&C 122 is probably one of the coolest sections ever. It's intense. 121 has some really good stuff, but 122 is one of the most well spoken things i've ever seen. I need to start bringing scriptures to the store so that i can quote things.

Lets see, what else is going on Portugal. Our missionary day with Edgar and Carla went really well. It was sort of crazy, we spent most of the day teaching, running to pick up another investigator and then teaching some more. Elder Oram set a personal record for lessons with a member in a week. I guess i did to, but i've only been here for 3 months, so it's not quite as impressive. But yeah, it was really good. We found some really great contacts, i think probably the best part of the whole thing was knocking doors that had already shown a bit of interest with a member. I think two americans in black coats (our call packets say no black suits, but of course all the missionaries end up with black rain coats, and the people of portugal just don't wear black much unless they're going to funerals, so we show up on their doorstep looking like the CIA and they wonder who died)

It continues to be rainy and misty here, but that also means it's a little warmer, but the impressive wetness in our house more than makes up for that. i am starting to look forward to the spring though, i only have one more month to get through, and it happens to be the shortest one, que sorte! We starting teaching this guy, Miguel, who is way cool. He's the first person i've contacted that we've successfully started teaching, which is as much a testimony of my short comings in contacting as the difficulty of finding people to teach. As it happens, we are really blessed with people to teach. We have several people progressing towards baptism, and have managed to teach about 20 lessons each week this transfer. That said, we're hurting for new investigators. It's tough, you can really get that kicking against the pricks feeling sometimes, especially because we accidentally wasted our entire night last night. Well, i shouldn't say that, we set up a suprise 20th anniversary dinner for the branch president who does so much for us and has been under a lot of stress lately, it made him really happy, almost to the point of tears, we just didn't have a lot to do while getting it ready and ended up spending our whole night not doing much, but we've got desire and are working hard on the dilligence, so hopefully we're start seeing, or rather, continue seeing more, miracles happen here in mafra.

That's about all the news from portugal this week. I continue to be reletively happy and healthy and warm enough to not complain. Thermals continue to be a huge blessing, as do all the prayers and support. Keep america in one piece until i get back.

Até proxima semana
~Elder Ammon

Pictures from Elder Ammon!

Note: For privacy reasons, Ammon has requested that only the address for the mission office be posted publicly on his blog and not his current physical address. Anything sent there will be passed along to him and it will work for his entire mission. However, I will continue to update his current address on his Facebook account.

January 7, 2009

I think i'm trying to do too many things at once to this computer, between uploading pictures, loading emails, and typing, i'm sort of killing it, mas tudo bem, vai viver.

This week was pretty much outstanding. If the pictures work, they show what we did last pday. We visited the Convent, which is center of mafra and perhaps the biggest palace in our part of portugal (i say perhaps, i have no idea, but it's the biggest elder Oram has seen. Inside is the largest visitable library in Europe (the largest being underground in rome and off limits) and has somewher aroune 40,000 books. It was one of the coolest rooms i've ever been in. Just to imagine how much human thought is in there is epic.

It's cool hearing about Cassie, it's still hard to believe you have a dog (i think when i get back from my mission i might start using y'all, because here we use vocês which means the same thing, and it is weird to say you. Also, while i'm on the subject, portuguese has gender neutral possessive pronouns, objects, and verbs, so you never have to say his/her or he/she it's everything i've ever hoped for! It does not, unfortunately, have any good way to say “I wonder if...” and there's no verb for 'to smite'). It's too bad Kudzu didn't stick, but i'm glad Isaac considered it, and now i can kep it until someday i get a dog. The pictures are great too, Cassie really does look like a tiger.

In relation to goals, i learned while at the mtc and continue to learn that the trick to goals is that you need specific and measurable plans towards the goal, so that at the end of the day you can definitely say if you did what you need to to be moving towards the goal and how well you did. Otherwise i've found my goals just don't happen.

So, i think that's all the business that i can think of, my week: This was the first week of my second transfer, and so far it's been really good. I realized this week that hapiness doesn't actually have that much to do with success. At least for me, it has a lot more to do with how close to all of my heart might mind and strenth i am giving. If i don't try hard, nothing happens and at the end of the day i feel crappy. If i work really hard, at the end of the day i'm exhausted, but it is a good day, and usually cool stuff happens.

On monday we had a divisão (literally a division, but i think they´re generally called splits in english missions) with the zone leaders, which was way cool. Technically, this was my second division, but last time we ended up doing service and eating all day, and i didn't really learn much, this time it was way cool. Something i had already been thinking about is how to be better at contacting, and i realized that if you just talk to people it works a lot better and is a lot more interesting. Because people are pretty interesting, i dunno if that's just portugal or if there are tons of crazy unique people in america to that i've never met on account of not walking around talking to people all day, but yeah, here's it's cool. But something the Elder C. (my zone leader from Sandy) did, which i think he learned from his companion, is just be absurdly friendly and excited about life. This isn't something you can just fake, you have to actually like life and care about people, but when you show that and work on that people respond really well. At first they're terrified at this crazy american who's talking to them, but then they are impressed that this person is so nice and is actually interested in what they have to say, and then sometimes they listen, and if not, at least they'll remember the nice american that was a member of the church of Jesus Christ.

So that's something i'm going to be working on, i'm bad at contacts, on account of being bad at talking to random people and starting conversations in general, so i've been trying to work on that. The goal is to be talking to 10 random people a day, which is both a mission goal and a personal goal. And i'm starting to get closer to that, which is fun.

Lets see, what else. Saturday we have a baptism, of R., which is exciting. Also exciting is the progress of M., who came to church last sunday pretty much without being invited. We invited him but he was thinking he would be in lisbon that day, so we weren't expecting him, but then he showed up anyway and stayed all three hours. Apparently he even did the closing prayer in priesthood meeting. We were teaching another investigator, D., whose wife has been giving him a bunch of anti mormon stuff and telling him we're the church of the devil and such (it's some poorly done stuff too, it's starts off by saying we reject the bible. That's just silly). So we'll see, it's tough, cus he doesn't feel like he can pray, because he's a really humble guy, a farmer, and doesn't feel like he has words good enough to pray, and until he prays and has that testimony he is very prone to every wind of doctrine.

Ok, 7 more minutes. The other cool thing that happened this week is during the division elder oram and elder marriot ran into this guy J. who is an inactive member on account of not really knowing where the church is and having work, but he came up and we taught him a little lesson with F. and then ate dinner at the chinese restaurant (where he somehow managed to pay, which is frustrating, but saved us 12€) and then came with us to teach an investigator, and then went to english class. He's a great kid, (i say kid, he's 20) and wants to serve a mission, and is going to start coming to church, and talk to his boss about changing his schedule a bit to make that easier. So that's awesome.

So that's about all the news from Mafra. I hope everything is going well out there. I'm going to try very hard to write a real letter this week, but that may or may not happen. We'll see. Either way, one more time (and because i think it got deleted last week) thanks so much for the money, the presents, the prayers, and the ongoing support. It's hard to imagine i will spend all of 2009 in portugal, but é verdade. Até proxima semana!

Tanto Amor,
Elder Ammon