Um Missionário no Brasil: 15 de Novembro and Chicken Hearts!

Hello everybody!

Well, this week flew by again... we have been so busy. The first week with a new companion is always pretty crazy, because you have to get to know people, and introductions and whatnot.

So my companion, Elder Gonçalves, is from São Paulo, a city called Pirascaba... about midway from São Paulo and Santos. He is 20, and I am his second companion. He likes soccer a lot, and his team is São Paulo (boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo). But he is a load of fun! It´ll be a good transfer, even though it´ll only be 5 weeks.

So our day to day is pretty simple. I usually get up and go right to the shower... or else I don´t actually wake up (VERY cold shower in the morning). Afterwards, I usually eat cereal, or bread with nutella, and then study. Study study study. I normally study the Book of Mormon and Preach my Gospel pretty intensely. If we have stuff to do early in the morning, we normally head out after companion study at 10:30. Then we have lunch with members... which normally lasts until 1:30 and then we hit the ground running. Until about 4, it is very hard to get a lot done. It is culture here to eat and then sleep for a while, so you can imagine how excited some people are to talk with us. At night is when we have more success. Everyone sits in front of their house and they just chill there, and talk to whoever passes by. We get a bunch of contacts that way, on top of the friends that happen to be with our investigators when we go by. But what we normally do is just teach and talk to people on the street. Our district meetings we do mostly practices and see what we can improve on certain aspects of our work.

So this week we did a lot! On Tuesday, we had our meeting like normal, and then we headed out and visited Eliardo, someone totally prepared! He has worked with a lot of returned missionaries and he has read the Book of Mormon for about a month already. It is just hard to find him in his house, but he is super awesome!

Wednesday, we got the last details for the marriage of an older lady who has already been going to church for about 30 years. We talked with her and her husband a little bit about the importance of baptism, and then we got all the bureaucratic stuff out of the way. At night we had our meeting with our ward mission leader and he got to know Elder Gonçalves, and then we had a super good dinner.

Thursday was a holiday, and there was a barbecue at the church, so we had lunch there. I got my chicken heart on (in the pictures) which are super good. Afterwards, we contacted some contacts we had made in the street, and then at night we talked with Eliomar and Julianna again. At night, we got the stuff to do the wedding the next day.

Friday we headed to the center to mark a date for the wedding, and then we headed back home. We got back at about 4, and we headed out to Ala 3 (abbreviation for another area in the mission) to talk to Eliardo again. We also went to Irmã Bia´s house and there was a young man there that wasn´t a member, so we invited him to get to know church with the members there.

Saturday, we ran all over the place trying to talk to everybody, getting them to go to church, At night, we went to contact a street contact, but they weren´t home... but it turns out their cousins were, and they had a lot of questions about the church, so we spent about a half hour answering questions and telling them about the church.

Sunday, we had the normal church routine. We tried to bring like five or six people to church, but none of them were home/awake. I can´t really remember much of what happened at church in all reality. Afterwards, we talked with a member who just finished his time in the military, and has sent out his mission call. We marked a day to go do visits with him, and with Miller (who is going to São Paulo Sul December 13th).

So that was my week in a nutshell!

Love you all!

Elder Cornwell