Arcadia!

The stories are true. There are palm trees. There's also like palm bushes which are thick, small palm trees and I kinda love them. It's a beautiful spot and the plants and animals are all different  than VA and I love seeing them.

 Once I got off the plane everything moved way quick. We went to "Ellis Island" and had a picture taken, a quick interview with the President, and our companions. Then we were off. Turns out I was supposed to grab a bag of sheets and blankets and the such... but it's alright because we went back for training the next day.


I immediately noticed that everyone speaks Spanish. Although I am in an English speaking ward, I'm in a apartment with 4 Spanish speaking missionaries. My companion is Elder Ramirez, he is from Puerto Rico, via Texas. We are in the Whittier Zone, Santa Gertudes Area. So I want to study Spanish but I also want to study Portuguese and it's hard to do both. So we will see how that goes.

On the second day we were going to get some tacos but I didn't have my debit card yet. I was planning on just buying a little bit because I didn't want to use my emergency cash or ask the Elders for money. Then a couple ahead of us bought us 10 tacos! They are heroes. So then they talked with the others in Spanish for a while :P and I was able to understand a bit of it.

I was able to go over with the people that I live with to do some yard work service and it was a ton of fun. The family has a tortoise. While we were there the tortoise ran away, we had to go get him. So yeah, it was a run away tortoise. He didn't get very far.We don't have wifi, but luckily we recently got permission to use the church buildings, so I spend a lot of time in there calling families and talking with them. My companion and I are opening a new area, so we've tried to get to know people. I want to be able to talk to more people and meet new people, but it's hard to do that during covid. 

So yeah, I have been having a ton of fun and learning a lot. Both from the other missionaries and from scripture. 

Elder Smith

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Itagauí

Image
We got transferred over to a new area but with the same 4 missionaries together this week. It was kinda cool. Itaguaí is a ward with a lot of youth that are preparing to serve a mission and lot of part-member families which makes it a really great ward for missionary work. It also covers a huge area, including a few beach towns where "groups" existed before the pandemic started. It has been an exciting first week already meeting everyone here. It was especially cool to meet Karan, someone who was baptized just a couple weeks ago. He gave up everything to move to Brasil 3 months ago, not knowing any Portuguese, because he couldn't be Christain in his home country. After just a couple of weeks, one of the missionaries sent him a message on Facebook. It's a fun game talking to him because neither of us know how to speak in Portuguese 😆
Read more

Elder Pinho Returns!!

Image
Kaick is the son of a woman who was baptized a few weeks ago. When we first met him, he had no desire to be baptized, but we noticed that he is a good kid and he always stayed within hearing distance of the lessons. Over time, the desire grew within him, until the day of his baptism he was super excited!! We found Ricardo when visiting a couple that we had been teaching. We invited him to participate in the lesson and he said that he couldn't but that we could visit him afterwards. When we visited him, we taught the about the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and he immediately decided to be baptized.  Luciana e Junior is a family that I had started teaching with Elder Pinho a couple of months ago. At the time, they were not able to be baptized, and we ended up losing contact with them. Then Junior found us on the street and invited us to visit their house. We brought them to church and afterwards we invited them to be baptized. Luciana said that she'd be baptized only ...
Read more

Madureira

Image
I was transferred to Madureira with Elder Pinho and it's been an absolute blast here. There's a side if a mountain with a million houses and we work there all day every day. So basically we are walking up and down the mountain (they have stairs) visiting people all day and it's the best. Elder Pinho is also the perfect companion. My English has been getting worst... And I am having trouble talking to the new Americans in English these days. This week we had 3 or 4 people stop us on the street and ask us to visit their homes. These people are in complicated situations. And the gospel of Jesus Christ is simple. But it helps. It's hard to understand how something so simple can help in such complicated situations but it really works miracles in the lives of everyone. Elder Smith
Read more