October 8, 2012

                                                                  Christo Redentor
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During the general conference of the church in October an announcement was made that the missionary age was changed to 18 from 19 for boys and from 21 to 19 for girls.

WOW!!! What a wonderful conference!!! I loved it so much! I watched the first three in Portuguese and the last in English. But man! I learned so much and there is so much that I can definitely put into practice!! :) About that age change - boys in brazil could already serve at eighteen and I had already heard that they were thinking about changing it, so that wasn´t to much of a surprise, but.... I got SO EXCITED to find out that girls could start serving at nineteen! How exciting is that?!?!?! I am so excited how many more girls we be able to serve missions! I KNOW that this is the will of the Lord and am so excited about the difference it´ll make! And Laura!!! Parabéns!!!! I am so excited for you to serve a mission! Even though it means that I probably won´t get to see you for like three years   And man, Michelle - what are you thinking now? Are you gonna go for sure?!!?! Man. I bet a LOT will change up there at BYU!!! :) coolest thing ever!

And that was SO COOL to see the Walter´s family down here in Rio!!! I got SO excited! :) Never thought that would happen here in Brasil!! Ha. that was funny though - that was after the day we had spent at the federal police doing visa stuff and because our bus broke down, we stayed the night in Rio at the other sister´s house and early that morning we went over to the huge bus stop (yeah. in the same clothes as the day before - gross!) and met them there!!! it was pretty sweet :)

Oh - and the other coolest thing ever - I got a package of all the cards the young women wrote at their Kindergarten Night. I absolutely loved it!!! ha. When they handed it to me, I definitely had to make sure it was actually addressed to me :) Best surprise ever! I loved reading each one of the cards! You girls are wonderful!

I LOVE my new companion - Sister C from Natal, Brasil. Our area is good - since it was just conference this week, we haven´t met a ton of members yet, but I´m excited to work in this area!
And yes, there is definitely a stereotype that Americans are rich. My companions always make comments about it being more dangerous walking with an American. But if anyone ever tried to steal anything from me, they´d probably get about ten reias and a lot of scriptures. haha.

I just want to be able to speak Portuguese SO good! Ha. But even in my first transference, I kind of got like that cause I was so used to talking in portuguese all the time with my companion and stuff, when I talked to someone in english, I got all mixed up and half came out in jumbled portuguese. it was pretty funny. but good :) and yeah, I´m getting a lot better about understanding people now.

Each area I have been in had been different. Comari I liked because it had a lot of mountains in the distance and reminded me of Wyoming. Cabo Frio is a richer area and touristy place - but it is gorgeous! It was really clean too. Fonseca seems to be more big city -like. To me, at least. But yeah, it has a lot of hills that we get to walk up and down everyday. And by hills, I mean HILLS. Or mountains really. We climbed up one the other day to visit a couple of families and you could see Cristo Redentor(see photo above) from it - pretty sweet :) The church buildings here are gorgeous, I think.