New Missionaries in Manaus

We finally heard from Elder Olivier on Wednesday because they had a holiday in Brazil on Monday.  The holiday is kind of like our memorial day, but it's called 'All Souls Day.'  It's a commemoration of the faithful departed.   

Elder Olivier sent us more pictures this week too!  Here is his email that we got today:

Hi everyone!

This week we had a holiday on Monday so I´m emailing today! Elder Figueiredo and I had an awesome week this week! We worked a ton! We´ve been a lot on finding families to teach and working with all of the members to get our investigators to progress. Missionary work is so awesome. It´s awesome to see how much influence the members of our two wards can have on others. A little really goes a long way. Elder Figueiredo is awesome because he´s not afraid to ask every single member for references, and a lot of the time members have references to give right away and they´re just waiting for us to ask. We´ve been trying to get a lot of the members excited about doing member missionary work. It´s so sweet, because most of the time members are a lot better at being missionaries than the actual missionaries. We started teaching a bunch of awesome new families this week, just from asking members for a couple of references.

This week was also really hot. And plus, we got lost for a couple of hours a few times because of me. Haha. I´m learning the area the hard way right now.

Elder Olivier's Zone

So our new zone has 6 americans now instead of 2. It´s funny to talk to americans. It´s kind of weird though, because I never know whether to speak portuguese or english. I think I´m at the point where I sound like an idiot whether I speak portuguese or whether I speak english. Haha. Mas tranquilo.

Today was sweet. We woke up super early to ride the bus to the temple. The missionaries in the city get to go to the temple once per transfer. After that we went to the "Shopping" to eat lunch. The "Shopping" means "the mall." Haha. Sometimes there will be a random word for something that is straight up english. I think they use some english words for things here to be fancy. Anyway, we went to the shopping, where we ate Subway. Subway here is freaking expensive. Tu é doido. But it was still good. We had milkshakes too. For 45 minutes it felt like I was in America again.  

The temple here is at a place called "Ponta Negra," which is like the nicest, touristiest part of Manaus. They have a little beach on the bank of the Rio Negro. People have to swim in the roped off area or else they will probably get eaten by the alligators. The "shopping" here is super nice and they even had a giant christmas tree with a place to take pictures with Santa (Papai Noel). He wasn´t there.... :(

Anyway, this week has been super awesome. We have a bunch of people set for baptismal dates and we found some awesome new families. It is crazy how much I have learned in just the past couple of months. Brazil is awesome. I have been thinking and studying a lot lately about charity, and how to genuinely love others. Something that is really hard as a missionary is to genuinely love people that you barely know. A scripture I like is Alma 7:24: 

"And see that ye have faith, hope, and charity, and then ye will always abound in good works"

As we strive to have faith and hope in the gospel and as we strive to have charity, or to truly love other people, we will be able to do good things and to help those that truly need our help. I really like the promise of this scripture. It´s so simple, that if we try to love people, we will do good things.

Anyway, until next week! I love you all! Abraço!

Elder Olivier

(written 11/04/2015)

Eating fish...with the head still on:)

A spider after Elder Olivier stepped on it.