Eu amo o Brasil!

Here´s the Haps for the last week:

Oh, so much to say, and these Brasilian keyboards are funky.

The plane ride was boring: no music, no movies, and I got approximately.00847363 hours of sleep. On the bright side, I did give a Livro de Mormon to the Brasilian guy sitting next to me. We had a great conversation actually, even in my broken Portuguese, about the gospel and stuff. I pointed out 3 Ne 11 and the introduction and Moroni 10:4-5 to him, and he asked if it was the word of God. I told him that yes, it is the word of God, and that he can pray to God to know like I did. He read through a bit of it and told me he felt like it made sense in his head and in his heart. It was just an all around good experience.

We landed in São Paulo and I sheperded 17 Elders through customs and then there was some confusion as to who was picking us up, and then a couple of us apperantly had our passports stamped wrong, but all was figured out and we were off!All I have to say is Eu amo o Brasil! (and yes, you need to spell it with an S) That means "I love brasil!" From the moment I stepped out of the airport, i fell in love. As we drove from the airport to the CTM, various elements of São paulo reminded me of other places i´ve been, like Amman and Mexico and a little bit of India (open sewer lines, anyone?), but cleaner, and smells better. And Brasil just has... it~s own rhythm, it´s own... sabor (flavor). I can´t quite describe. But I love it.

The CTM is much smaller than the Provo one (duh). It´s more like a family than a facility. It also has a super high tech security system invented by Israelis. Combine that with the Lord´s power and no one is going to hurt us! There are only 46 sisters here, and only half are American. It´s so much fun to sit with the brasileiros at mealtimes and practice speaking with them. They´re supposed to try and learn English on their missions, and it´s just way fun teaching them cool words and learning them. Some favorites:

brincaderia--just kidding
smagar--to smash
namorado--boyfriend (you hear that one a LOT around here, or namorada, which is girfriend)

My companion is Sis Campbell. We´re getting along pretty well =] Our roommates are two brasileiras. We´ve had a lot of fun adventures with communicating with them. One of the funniest is when Sis de Jesus was showing us a picture of her boyfriend and said (in portugues) "This is my boyfriend" and then something else we didnt catch, so she repeated it and pointed to her hand. we were like "is he married? has a ring? huh?" and finally I was like "He doesnt have a hand?" and we were like nooo, that can´t be it, that´s way too random... but that´s EXACTLY what she was trying to say! It took us 10 minutes to figure it out, hahaha. But how random is that? "this is my boyfriend and he only has one hand"... yeah. But they´re fun and I can tell already my portuguese is going to improve so much from it. My acting ability even moreso; I´m going to be a master Charades player when i get back!

We made friends with two brasilian elders that we sit with a lot at meal times; elders vargas and lima. Elder Lima knows quite a bit of english, Elder Vargas just nods and smiles and gives us the thumbs up. But with the portuguese I know and, again, lots of hand gestures, i can usually get the point across. They´re way fun and we´ve learned some fun words from them. They also enjoy getting me to try and pronounce "-ão" correctly, because apperantly I can´t get it to sound like QUITE like a native, though I´m ALMOST there. Bah. Oh well, that will come in time, não?

This week has mostly been spent in the class room. We live there. We only take breaks for meals and for an hour of gym. Our teachers are great. They´re all native brasilians, and they´re hilarious. Our teacher in the morning just teaches us funny things, but they´re only funny in portuguese... I would try to explain, but you have to hear it. So maybe in a year and a half. My Portuguese is improving rapidly. Even with my spanish background and knack for languages, I´m picking it up waaaay faster than I should. I can tell the Lord is blessing me. And I love learning all the doctrine. The gospel of JEsus Christ is so beautiful because it´s so deep but so simple. Go read Preach My Gospel chapter 3: Lessons.

This friday we´re going prostelying out on a street in São Paulo. Yes, they take us out for 4 hours and we have to talk to people and give out pass-along cards and everything. Crazy, não? I´ll let you know how that goes.Today we went to the Campinas temple--gorgeous! It was mostly in English. Way cool. It was nice to get out, though I got a little sick on the bus.

I wish I could send you pictures, but we´re not allowed to take our cameras outside the CTM. Safety issues. Smart, but inconvenient. I will eventually, I promise =] Write to me! Pray for me!

Até logo, com muito muito amor!

~sister Wilkinson