First Missionary P-Day! (Preparation Day)

Nine days after his first short little arrival email, we finally received a longer email from Elder Olivier!.....

HELLO EVERYBODY!!!!

So last wednesday I landed in Brazil. I met up with a ton of other missionaries in Atlanta and we all went on a ten hour flight to São Paulo. It was soooo boring. I only got around 30 minutes of sleep on the plane so when we landed I felt like a zombie. Not to mention that when they bussed us over to the CTM we had to get started right away. I ended up staying awake for like 36 hours.

The CTM (Missionary training center) is awesome! The food is so good! We have meat, beans, rice, and fruit for lunch and dinner everyday. Everything has been super good so far, even the tongue. We drink soooooo much juice and it´s amazing (that´s right, I can finally drink juice at every meal, Mom >:( It´s good for you, I swear, haha). My favorite so far is the goiaba juice.  Lunch is bigger than their dinner here, so it was kind of weird at first. The dinner is super big too though, so I just feel full all the time. Whoever said I would lose weight in Brazil lied, big time.

So on day two of being here, our teacher told us to prepare to teach our first lesson the next day. All in portuguese.  They kind of just throw you into the portuguese thing. They call it baptism by fire.  They expect us to do almost everything the brasilian elders and sisters do so we just kind of learn portuguese by speaking it all the time. I have a constant headache, but at this rate I´ll be fluent really quick. Our teacher only speaks portuguese to us and when we speak english he either acts like he doesn´t understand or he shoots us with the portuguese gun (bangue bangue portugues). The CTM is crazy. We are always doing something. We either have class or we´re doing personal gospel study or language study or companion study or teaching lessons or planning to teach or eating or playing basquetebol or sleeping.

My companion´s name is Elder Wong, and he is from Washington state. His dad his from Hong Kong (but no Dad, he wasn´t there when you were there). He is going to João Pessoa. He is probably the best at portuguese in my district, and he bails me out all the time when I can´t figure out how to say something. Everyone in my district is super funny and by now it seems like we´ve known each other for a really long time. We have 5 sets of missionaries, and three of us are going to Manaus. Two of them are sister missionaries.

Anyway, I have one week down in the CTM, so I´m one week closer to killing spiders with a machete on a canoe in the amazon river. The other Manaus missionaries in my district and I always talk about the crazy stuff we´re going to do with machetes. It´s going to be so sweet, haha. The CTM is so awesome, even though it can feel like a prison sometimes. The CTM president asked us what the difference between the CTM and prison is, and he said the difference is that you can get visitors in prison. Haha. But anyway, I´m super stoked to be able to serve a mission and I can´t wait to actually get out into the field. I know this is where I need to be at this time in my life, 100%. 

Today we went to the Campinas temple and did a session and it was so awesome with all of the missionaries there. The spirit was so strong. This whole first week has been so awesome and so crazy and so fun and so spiritual. I can´t wait for the rest of it.

Love,

Elder Olivier

P.S. I love you all!!!!!!

P.P.S. Feel free to write me emails guys! I would love to hear from all of you!!!

(written 8/21/2015)