I haven´t died, I just had internet problems!

Elder Olivier's latest email that we got today!!!

Hi everyone!!!

So the past few weeks have been pretty crazy, full of hard work, heavy rain, thick mud, gostoso açaí, banana juice, indian bracelets, and pure alegria. And everyone making fun of my gringo accent. What do they expect? I´m a gringo!

For those of you who haven´t heard of açaí in your lives, imagine literally the best thing you could ever eat. There. Know you all know what it tastes like.

So here in Sena Madureira, there are tons of native indians. We´ve been teaching some of them, and a lot of them come to church every once in a while. We baptized João recently, who is from their tribe. He doesn´t always come to church though because he spends a lot of time at the tribe down the river. They are awesome. They always talk to us for a really long time when we visit them, and they always give us food. They also sell these bracelets, which are awesome. One of them is making bracelets for Elder Castelli and me.

Banana juice. Yes, it´s a thing. It tastes kind of like drinking a banana.

Speaking of juice, Elder Castelli and I started buying fruit pulp and making our own juice. Yeah, we make pretty good juice, no big deal. The best juice is graviola and cupuaçu, two of the many fruits that no one has ever heard of. Imagine the best juice you have ever had. There. Now you all know what they taste like. 

Yesterday we had the baptism of a girl named Rute. The baptismal service only had a couple of people but it was super spiritual. For the closing hymn we sang How Great Thou Art, because it is one of the few hymns that she already knew, and it sounded more like 20 people were singing as opposed to 7 or 8. 

  

Scripture of the week! I got called yesterday in church, literally at the last possible second to give a talk about Jesus Christ. This was the scripture that came to my mind:

2 Nephi 25:23, 26 

23 For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.

 26 And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins. 

Right now my testimony is stronger than ever that Jesus Christ is the redeemer of the world. The church is true!

     

I hope everyone has an awesome week!

Élder Olivier!

Third week in Sena Madureira

We received a shorter email today from Elder Olivier just to us, but we'll take it!  We were hoping for pictures, but maybe next week!! 

Happy birthday Mom!

To answer your questions, yes, I teach gospel essentials and play the piano every sunday. Actually, my companion and I do almost everything for the branch. It´s kind of super hard that way, because everyone wants to help but no one really knows what to do. Haha. Yes, we are still teaching the man with the poison arrows and his wife and we are trying (struggling) to teach their 19 kids. Yes, 19. They are super hard to keep track of because they are always going to their tribe way down the river and coming back. The man and his wife want to get baptized really bad but they need to get married and are waiting for some of their documents to come in the mail. 

Our zone conference was awesome. The president and the APs flew to Rio Branco. We had to stay there for 3 days because on Tuesday we had regular zone conference and Thursday we had it with President Castro. It was super good. 

That´s awesome about Mom´s birthday and going skiing! And about church basketball! I miss basketball! 

Maddie, great work on the mini golf course. And I think that snake was venomous too. It had a triangle head.

Mackenzie: I love you too!

I love all of you guys so much and I miss you all!

Love,

Josh!

Still Brazillin in Brazil

Elder Olivier had his 2nd full week in his new area!  He sent us the following email on February 8th!

Hey everyone!

This week has been really awesome! Elder Castelli and I worked really really hard this week and it all paid off! We had two baptisms yesterday, a man named Antonio and his daughter. It was really awesome! Our little branch really came together and did a great baptismal service, complete with cake and amazonian soda. And our branch president entrou nas aguas! Antonio chose his to baptize, which was also sweet. The only thing was that someone somehow lost all of the baptismal clothing, so we had to improvise a little. Haha.

Anyway, this week has been adventurous. We crossed the river for the first time since I´ve been here. The boats are super cool. Also, we´ve been teaching a native family that speaks a language that I think is called "jaminaweh" or something like that. They speak portuguese as a second language, mais ou menos. Also, this guy has a legit bow and arrow (more like bow and spear) that is legit poisoned on the end. He shoots monkeys with it. He let us hold one of the spears, and then he said to be careful, because the end is poisoned and the poison has no cure. So my companion asked him if he would die if he would cut himself on it. And the guy basically said, yeah, you´ll die.  I´ll take a picture of it next time.

We also found a sweet looking dead snake, took a trip to that one statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro, and drank a lot of tereré.  Tereré is like a south american herbal drink thing. I had already tried it in Manaus, but there is way more in Acre.

So, yep. That was our week. Até a próxima semana! Falow, tchau!

Elder Olivier!

Interiorzinha da Alegria!

We received the following email on February 1st from Elder Olivier.  He has been transferred to the Interior or in other words....the middle of the jungle!  He is really enjoying it there and here is his first email from his new area:

Hello everyone!

So this week has been super different and super awesome for me! First off, for the transfer last week I had to go with some other missionaries to the airport to catch a plane to Rio Branco in Acre. There I met my new companion, stayed the night at the zone leaders´ apartment, and the next day took a taxi for almost two hours to get to Sena Madureira. 

Sena is an awesome place. It´s pretty much (well, actually it is) a small town in the middle of nowhere, and by "nowhere" I mean the jungle. So I´m super pumped to be in the middle of the jungle. 

The church here is super small. And by super small, I mean that there are only about 20 people that come to church regularly and about 750 people who are baptized members of the church in the area. That´s a big difference. It´s a branch, so as the missionaries we have to do almost everything. That´s a lot of stuff to do. I had to give the gospel principles class, play the piano in sacrament meeting, and give a talk yesterday in church. 

My companion´s name is Elder Castelli, and he is from São Paulo, around Campinas. He is awesome. He´s a super focused missionary, and we´ve been working super hard this week. This transfer is going to be awesome!

So this week we have been teaching a ton of new investigators. So we´re been teaching the Restoration a ton. A question that my companion always asks is really good. He says, is it just for God to have called prophets to guide the people in the past, but to leave us today without a prophet? People always think about it for a little and say, no, that´s not just. Exodus 33:11 is a scripture that talks about how Moses actually spoke with Heavenly Father:

11 And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.

We truly have a prophet in our day, just like Moses, who actually speaks with God face to face, just like prophets in old times. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and he truly has a prophet today. I know that now more than I have ever known in my life. I don´t know why I had to come to the middle of the jungle to learn that, haha, but hey, there´s a purpose for everything.

I hope everyone has a great week! I love you all!

Love,

Elder Olivier!!

P.S. I´ll probably have more sweet pictures next week! I think!

Elder Olivier and his new companion, Elder Castelli.

Goodbye Manaus...Hello Acre!

Elder Olivier has been transferred to Acre!  It's a state in Brazil that is very isolated and borders Peru and Bolivia.  He will be training another missionary there again.  He is taking a small airplane to get there since the area is so far away and remote!  We are excited to hear about his new adventures!!  Here is is letter below....a bit shorter this week, because he was so busy getting ready to leave.



Hi everyone!

So I don´t have much time to write today, because today I´m being transferred out of Manaus into the state of Acre! I´ve heard a bunch of crazy stuff about Acre. The joke here is that Acre doesn´t exist, or that no one lives there. It is like super super super super back country Brazil. I guess that makes it like the Wyoming of Brazil. So it must be super awesome there.  Apparently, it is "cold" in Acre (which means, it sometimes gets down to 15 degrees celcius). Most of the people here have never seen snow.

Here are some pictures!

Here is a picture of me with a chicken on my head.

Here is a picture of Elder De Castro and I doing a service project this week! We put a ceiling in this guy´s house. It turned out pretty awesome, no big deal.

I love you all! 

Love,

Elder Olivier!

Another week só filé

Elder Olivier had another baptism!  It sounds like the youth there are just really awesome!

Here is his letter:

Hey everyone!

So this week for sure had a lot of ups and downs, like always. We were teaching this guy that pretty much acted like a golden investigator until a couple of days before his baptism, when he tried to unleash his bible-bash fury on us (his bible-bash game was weak though). He brought out five different versions of the bible from different churches and said that our "bible" (the Book of Mormon) was wrong because it wasn´t even a bible. We tried to explain to him that we believe in the bible too, but for some reason he wouldn´t have any of it. Like, dude, we know it´s not a bible, we you didn´t need to collect as many bibles as you could find to show us that. Haha. 

The best part was that last sunday we got a call from our district leader and he said that he had a sweet referral for us. His name is Nal, and he had gone to church in our DL´s ward with some of his friends. So we went there to his house right after our church ended and got to know him. As it turns out, we had already met him once before at the church building during church ball (soccer). He was pretty much friends with all of the young men in the ward already, and he had already gone to church and had been taught by missionaries before. We went there and talked to him, and Elder De Castro felt he should invite him to be baptized the next week. Nal accepted, and we baptized him yesterday! The baptismal meeting was probably the most spiritual baptismal meeting that I have been to on my mission. It was so good, and we didn´t even get someone to make cake. Nal´s mom and grandma both went (they are both non members) and they were both super happy and excited. His mom took a bunch of pictures and kept saying "just one more" (@Mom). Plus, there were tons of young men from the stake there. Plus, we got one of Nal´s best friends, Caio, to baptize him. They youth in this stake continue to amaze me because they are all so involved in the missionary effort. It is the coolest thing.

So anyway, transfers are next week, and I´m just sort of waiting here wondering if I´m going to stay in the area or if I´m going to go. I will for sure be sad to leave the area but at the same time I feel that if I get transferred I´ll be ready to go. But wherever I go, I know that´s where the Lord needs me to be. Missionary work is for sure the hardest thing that I have ever done. Sometimes it gets frustrating. Sometimes we wonder why we are getting so little results. But, looking back on these past five months, I realize how much I have done and how far I have come since I first left home. Being a missionary is so hard, but it is so rewarding.

Have an awesome week!

Elder Olivier!

Baptism!

Still Chillin in Brazil

Elder Olivier's email that he sent on January 11th!  He is speaking Portuguese really well now!!


Hi everyone! 

So we have a new mission rule where we only have one hour of computer time per week instead of two soooooo....... I have to type faster! But anyway this week was an awesome week. We just worked super hard, as usual. Also, it´s been raining almost every day here, which is super nice because when it´s raining it´s not usually really hot! Also, we´ve been teaching some awesome people lately! Investigators have just been coming up through the woodwork. We´ve been focusing on getting referrals from members. This week we got a referral every single day at lunch with the members, which was awesome. 

Other than that, this week was a pretty normal week, I think. We killed a couple of huge spiders in our house. Also last week I managed to make cookies, and they actually turned out ok! Except brown sugar in brazil has a pretty weird smell. At least I think what I used was brown sugar. They tasted good though. 

The other day one of the sisters from church called about lunch the next day, and I couldn´t remember where her house was and she started to explain it to me through the phone, but then she said, "Oh, just give the phone to the american elder, he knows where we live." Dang. I have never felt more brazilian in my life than I did at that moment. It´s super weird still being in my first area because I pretty much learned all of what I know in portuguese here. I remember when I would think that most of the people were super hard to understand. It´s weird to look back and think, wow, I´m speaking a new language. The lady on the phone thought I was the brazilian companion, haha. 

So one of the people we are teaching is a woman named Adelia. We first met her when she went to church all by herself. We have been teaching her and she has committed to a baptismal date. But she has always been super different than most of our investigators, because she pretty much told us at the very beginning that she knew that the church was true because of how she felt when she went there the first time. She always tells us the long list of churches that she has visited (there are so many churches in Manaus that it is beyond comprehension), but she says that in this church she feels a peace that she has felt in no other church. I have been thinking recently about how I got my testimony of the church. I don´t really know how I got it. I just kind of came to know the church was true very very gradually. I thought once this week that I just feel super peaceful in church, that I feel the same feeling that I felt when I was in primary singing primary songs. And I even feel the same peaceful feeling in church here deep inside the city inside the jungle of brazil, in a place that I have never been, with people I have never met and with a language that I have never spoken.  That continues to amaze me, how the church is the same no matter where you go. 

I hope you all have a great week! 

Love,

Elder Olivier

Elder Olivier's Cookies:)