Tudo Bem minha familia!!
So I've been here almost a week now and it's been pretty good so far. The food isn't all that bad although apparently biscuits and gravy is an American thing down here because they served that one day for supper. I get unlimited chocolate milk and bananas for every meal and the rest of the meals have been pretty good. We are always kept super busy and don't really get a lot of time to ourselves other than p-day. My p-day is Tuesdays so that is when I'll be able to email home. The MTC president asked us all to write home on the first day so I did... but I'm gonna bet that you won't get that letter for another month. They don't waste any time here. The very first day, we started language class. I think our teacher maybe spoke two minutes of English to us the entire three hours of class. The rest was in Portuguese. I can almost understand everything my teacher says to us already however I'm still not very good at answering back. However it gets easier every day and the language is super cool. My district is all super cool and we all get along very well. We have a lot of fun together but we are also able to learn a lot together. My companion is Elder T. and he is SOOO loud!!! But he's super fun and we get along very well. Nobody told us about daylight savings on Sunday so we all woke up at 5:30. We decided to just have a shower and then went back to bed for half an hour till 6:30. Sacrament meeting was really cool though. Our branch is all Portuguese speaking missionaries so other than announcements the whole meeting is in Portuguese. The Spirit is still very strong even when you can't understand what is being said... although I was able to understand most of what was said. We also had MTC conference since it was fast Sunday and got to hear from some of the members of the MTC Presidency and their wives. It was a really good meeting and it was neat to see all the missionaries together in one room. We also had an evening fireside after dinner and got to hear from someone who works at Church Headquarters. I can't remember his name but he talked about all the different ways the Church has been able to get missionaries into some of the countries that didn't use to let us in. Tonight we also have a fireside and apparently we Tuesday nights are when General Authorities come so it should be really good.
Most days are pretty much the same here. We started teaching an investigator last Friday already... in Portuguese! We teach him every day and our lessons usually involve a lot of reading because our vocabulary isn't good enough to answer his questions. We are getting better though. We have 6 hours of classroom study each day where we learn the language and teach our investigator. We also get lots of personal study time to read our scriptures and Preach My Gospel as well as time to study the language by ourselves. We get gym time every day although volleyball is rather boring. We've had two power outages so far. One was Friday night so we had nice cold showers on Saturday and cereal for breakfast. Yesterday some of the power went out as well and we thing there was some sort of fire because we could see smoke coming from one of the buildings and a firetruck drove past us into the entrance when we were walking to class. It's also starting to get colder here and everyone is complaining. It's not even below zero! Ha ha it feels nice outside. On the Wednesday when I got here I was put in with the other Canadian and American missionaries who arrived early. I met a guy from Raymond and a guy from Calgary who are both going to the Winnipeg mission. I also met a guy who is going to Montreal. Canadians are pretty much considered foreigners here and everyone always thinks it's so cool that I come from Canada. I haven't really had any weird questions yet though. I met an Elder from Lethbridge who I apparently went to school with. I think his name was Brody O. or something? He remembered me and said we played basketball against him in high school.
Anyways, my time is almost up. Thanks for the letters so far! It's always nice to hear from home. I'm learning so much here and having a lot of fun. The language is difficult but I know it will come and my testimony of the Gospel is strengthening every day. I miss you guys although I don't really have a lot of time to think about home so maybe thats a good thing. I love you all and hope to hear from you soon!
Love, Elder Dola
Boa Noite!!!
