Uma Semana Boa!

Here is Elder Olivier's latest email!  A little information about his mission first.....  He is not supposed to drink the tap water or it can lead to water borne diseases like dysentery and/or  parasites, such as tapeworms, etc.  Anyway, as you will read in his letter, they ran out of clean water this week and the temperatures are pretty hot and humid...in the 90's, so I'm glad they were finally blessed to get water!

Hi everybody!

I don´t know how much I have to talk about this week. We´ll see once I get to the end of this email.

Baptism

This week was pretty awesome, as usual. It definitely had its ups and downs, like always, but overall it was a good week. We had the chance to baptize the mother of two of the youth in the ward this week. It was pretty cool. Lately we have been only working with part-member families, and it has been going pretty well.

I have an interesting story about water. This week we had some difficulties with buying water. Everyone here drinks water from those big water container things. They have a couple of companies that deliver water and gas via motorcycle to your house. Well, apparently our house is hard to find or something because we called and asked for water 3 or 4 times and no one came! adfljkdasfjkldfasjkldfa!  We had been only drinking water during the day in members´ houses and at lunch. But, finally, the water came! We were happy!

So here in the north of brazil they have this fruit called açaí that everybody always drinks/eats (it´s kind of an in betweener). It is super good, and my companion wants to drink a ton of it before he leaves for home this transfer. They also have this stuff called farinha. It is hard to describe. It is kind of like little potato pellet-looking things (except it´s not potato, it´s a vegetable that looks like a potato that also happens to not be a vegetable in north america). Anyway, farinha is stuff that people mix with rice and beans. To me, it honestly doesn´t make it taste any different. I eat it anyway, to be cool like all the brazilians. Anyway, long story short, the other day we were eating lunch at the bishop´s house and we ate/drank açaí with farinha. It was the most Manaus-ish thing I have seen so far! It totally blew my mind!

Scripture of the week! Alma 26:12: "Yea, I know that I am nothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things; yea, behold, many mighty miracles we have wrought in this land, for which we will praise his name forever."

This is an awesome scripture. The prophet Ammon in the Book of Mormon says this, and it really shows how humble he is. Ammon, a nephite, was a missionary to the lamanites, a people who hated the nephites. But he still ended up bring tons of people to a knowledge of Christ and to the gospel, including kings of the land. He did a bunch of crazy stuff and performed crazy miracles. But I love this scripture because he shows that he doesn´t boast of his own strength, but he boasts of the strength of his God, because God is the reason he was able to be such a powerful missionary. I´ve been thinking a lot about how I am like the worst missionary. Haha. I´m soooooo inadequate for this calling. I think of how Peter, James and John and all of the apostles of Jesus Christ had the same calling that I have, which is kind of like super intimidating. But, at the same time, it isn´t just the missionaries that are doing the work. God is truly helping us along. Everything just seems to kind of work out all the time, and I know that it is because Jesus Christ is truly leading this church and the missionary work throughout the entire world. The Church is true!

Until next week! Tchau! 

Elder Olivier
(written 11/23/2015)