Bom dia!
First of all: happy birthday to Katie, and one more happy birthday to Amy (for reals this time). Sorry I forgot when your birthday is. And Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. Thanksgiving is a great holiday, last thanksgiving I ate rice left-overs with this weird tomato paste sauce. That was my very first day in Portugal, I didn’t even remember that it was thanksgiving.
This thanksgiving, I think we’re going to buy a chicken. I’ve been meaning to do it forever, but we’re going to do it for thanksgiving (that’s a grilled chicken, not a live one) Today’s a little too far away to make it make sense, and I think afterwards will be to far. Thanksgiving is a nice holiday, it doesn’t have much of the fluff that stores put on Christmas and Halloween. There’s only so much money that can be made off of turkey. I’m working hard to not get trunky this holiday season, so I’ll leave family holidays there and talk about mission stuff.
So this week was great. We taught our dona on Monday night, and it was really nice. It’s good practice for when I’m a normal person again and want to talk to people about the church. It’s hard. It’s fine talking to random people on the street, but when you talk to people your closer to, it gets scary, especially when those people are your landlords. What if she gets offended and turns our electricity off? But, as always, it went really well, they were curious and interested to know what all these crazy Americans have been teaching people all this time. We taught about our lives and what happens after death. A friend of hers died a little while ago, and she had a bunch of questions, and one of the things she said was, “If I knew this I wouldn’t be afraid of death at all!” So it was fun. We’re going to teach them again on Thursday. At some point I started liking our dona a lot. It still bugs me a bit when she blames us for flooding or says I didn’t speak Portuguese when I got here, but really genuinely like them. There such cool people. And, they’re going to make a mug with our picture on it. Is that not the coolest thing ever? I decided I need to buy her a Christmas present, I don’t know if I’m going to be here or not for Christmas, but I’m hoping so.
Other cool things, yesterday we had a lesson with Jorge. Jorge is this guy that lives close to some other investigators, and we’ve tried to set lessons up with him so many times. He’s not been there lots of times, and we’ve missed it lots of times, so yesterday I decided I wasn’t going to miss it again. I didn’t really know what to teach, so after the prayer I just asked him, “Do you have any questions or any doubts?” He said, yeah, “How can I know which church is true?” As we started to answer he interrupted and said, “or is other words, how can I know which church I should follow” It turned out to be a really really good lesson. It was even cooler because he asked with almost the exact wording in the Joseph Smith pamphlet thing. Anyway, fun times. Something I’ve learned, is that missionaries are really really bad at recognizing “the elect” which is ironic because we think we’re pretty good at it. Generally it’s the people you don’t expect, the underdogs, if you will, that turn out to be the best, and the people that start out Golden turn out to be all talk. I can’t say that’s always true, but it’s been very consistently true for me.
This weekend we’re having another baptism, Maria dos Anjos. We’re pretty excited. We need to do a better job of working with the members so that she has friends in the church and such. That’s one of the things we’re going to work on this week.
I rode my bike a lot when I was isaac’s age. I remember distintly riding around at our broad street house. I would generally follow the same basic path, and there was this one dog that would always chase me. I also remember one time a big grasshopper landed on the wheel. I would try to ride with out hands, and I managed more or less, this one time I tried to stand up and ride without hands, and I fell and hurt myself. I actually have vivid memories of several times I fell and hurt myself, in lots of places. After we moved to Jackson st I didn’t ride nearly as much, because it was busy, and such, plus we had a trampoline, but in Jackson I rode my bike quite a lot (I think I got a new bike when we went to Jackson, so I could ride my bike to school, like ryder taft, and later Wells and Chaz…good times). And yeah, my first bike didn’t have brakes, and so I would just stop with my feet, and one time it had rained and we were going to the wards house and I just flew through the intersection. I remember there being lots of cars coming and it being really dangerous, but that’s likely to be my memory exaggerating a bit. Not like that time dad drove through the crossing right before a train passed, dodging the train my mere inches. That definitely happened.
I said it last week, but I’m really enjoying my mission right now. I don’t really even know why, we’re not really having that much more success than we used to, I think I’m just managing to do my best, and so at the end of the day I can go to sleep happy, and then wake up again excited to do better. Also I started doing exercises again, they had sort of become pointless, and I managed to do all of them without leaving my bed, that might also have something to do with it. It’s a sad irony of life that the more you enjoy something the faster it goes by, while the things that are no fun take forever. It’d be nice if it went the other way around, but I’m thankful that I’m in Portugal, in pontinha this thanksgiving. It probably won’t be one of my most memorable thanksgiving, but in general my life right now is the best it has ever been. The mission is good times. So happy thanksgiving to everybody, watch out for crazy shoppers (I’ll keep my eyes open to see if they celebrate black Friday in Portugal) and don’t fill up on oyster crackers before thanksgiving dinner.
Abraços, e boas festas
Elder Ammon
