Elder Anderson and his companion had a hankering for Mexican food and decided to make themselves a Mexican meal. Elder A took a picture of a make-shift griddle that he created so that he could cook the flour tortillas he made. (By the way, he used a Pringles can as a rolling pin.)
The Mexican meal that he created with rice, guacamole, tomatoes, homemade tortillas, tortilla chips, cheese, beans, and ground beef.
Mini bananas growing on a banana tree.
A green parrot that almost completely blends in with the leaves near him.
A drawing Elder A made last week as listened to General Conference talks in the mornings.
We won't have much time today so I'm just going to try to type this as fast as I can:
10/29
Today
was the best day ever! We had a district reunion today, and I even got
to participate in giving a message out of the missionary manual, so I
chose to talk about the section: mission vehicles, and how we could
qualify to be drivers. Lunch today was with Joyce who is basically a
missionary's best friend, I've drawn a helpful diagram here to
illustrate our relationship:
_--> o o o
o o ____----> o _-- |_||_||_|
|_||_| <--- |_|<---------> o o o
(two clueless (Joyce) |_||_||_| (The collective desires
missionaries) --_ o o o of literally every person
--> |_||_||_| in our ward)
That
was so hard to make. Lunch was really fun though because it was the
first time I really had fun messing around with a member, I told her all
about my personal experiences as a Chick-Fil-A [CFA] cow and she asked me if I
used to be a "prankster" before the mission. Well, I don't want to brag
too much, but I was North Creek's first Art Prankster, so I guess I'm
what you would call a pro. Somehow Brasil doesn't have great milk, but
has some amazing ice cream, and a GIANT ice cream cone cost me a total
of 75 U.S. cents, which was also pretty cheap by Brasilian standards.
I'm not sure how these people are making money off these things. We also
taught Moises and Elingi tonight, at the end I got corny and told them
how proud of them I was and how great that they were honestly seeking
for answers to questions, and after Williams was like, "Wow. I can't
talk that beautifully." I talked really, really well today which was
really, really nice.
10/30
Today was the best day
ever! Woah, déjà vu. We found out everything was confirmed for our move
so sometime next week we're getting a new house! Today was really good
though because we "coincidently" found lots of people which made
contacts really easy. Williams and I gave Mara a blessing and today was a
lot better than the previous times that I've gotten to give blessings
in Portuguese because I actually knew some of the important words. The
really fun part was her name though, foreign names are the actual worst
thing ever. I called her "Mara of the people" at one point because of a
slip of the tongue, but she was really nice, she said, "God will
understand". That lady has a lot of faith. We also spent a long time
today talking to people that we found on the road, which was fine
because one of our lessons fell through. When we were talking to one of
these people on the road we got to bear some real testimony, which was
awesome. The person we were talking to had a lot of questions like, "Is
the world going to be destroyed when Jesus comes again?" so we got to
help out, I mean, first of all, she believes in the second coming, which
was really cool, but we got to help assuage her worries, which was
good, I felt like I was really doing the work I came here to do. Then,
to seal the deal on what a great day it was, we ordered a pizza. Worst
pizza ever, but if compared to hamburgers, I would say it was pretty
good for a hamburger, because we got four hamburgers instead of our
pizza. Oh well, it's a good thing that I'll eat anything and everything.
We were like, "whatever, it's food, it's bad for us, it's close
enough." So yeah, that was a pretty awesome day
10/31
Happy
Halloween! Except Brazil doesn't really celebrate Halloween, which
disappointed me a little, but my companion and I did get a nice treat
when we were walking down the road and saw a guy selling pineapples for 1
real each, about 25 cents in the U.S. Now, I'm not usually much of an
impulse buyer, but it took me .001 seconds to switch from jolking
(jog/walking, I had to come up with a term because we do it a lot) down
the road to buying pineapple, because there's no way I'm passing up an
opportunity like that. I think I freaked out the guy who was selling
them a little because I suddenly veered at him and I am a pretty
intimidating American. Apparently. So he was a little relieved that I
just wanted some pineapple. After a successful encounter where I tricked
that guy into thinking that I spoke Portuguese and getting some
pineapple, The Two Legendary Missionaries walked down the road,
triumphantly into the sunset, each with a pineapple in hand. I freaking
love Brazil. We went to visit Joyce so Williams could call his family
because someone in his family had a birthday. That would have been cool
to know one week earlier because I didn't get to call my dad on his
birthday. There was a guy at Joyce's house who was very animatedly
talking about Jesus Christ, and asked if we had ever heard of him;
Williams just pointed to his name tag, and the big letters that read
"JESUS CRISTO" the guy thought that was pretty neat. Later he started
preaching so I passed him a Book of Mormon and showed him a verse I
thought he might like. He read it out loud to everyone and then was
like, "this is the truth" and started preaching about it. It took me
like, 30 seconds to realize that he wasn't of our faith and I had just
gotten him to read out of a book that he probably doesn't believe in, so
I guess that's one way to be a missionary. Tonight Williams payed me a
nice compliment (at least, I hope it was a compliment, I guess it
totally could have been in the negative), he said that he often forgets
that I'm training and have been here for a few months. Probably because I
keep usurping his authority whenever we go anywhere. It's so natural to
try to share everything I have, but I should do a better job of
following his lead.
11/1
Today was so great! Of
course, any day that starts off with pineapple pancakes is pretty
awesome. Here's how I made it for anybody who wants to eat the thing
that made my companion say to me, "Oh my gosh. Thank you so much":
Flour:
just drop the entire kilogram bag that you got from your local
SUPERMERCADO in (you have to scream "SUPERMERCADO" or no one will know
what you're talking about). Water: don't use a lot, just enough to go,
"crud! I meant to use milk!" Milk: there you go. Eggs: one egg per
person, and don't use bad eggs, those are for scaring away the diseased
dogs; You fight fire with fire and disease with... more disease...
Cinnamon: Use as much as you want, the limiting factor shouldn't be how
much you can "handle" it should be how much you have; Go out today and
spend $1000 on cinnamon, live life to the fullest. Sugar: use some
sugar. Woah! Not that much, are you trying to kill us all? Salt: add
some, I don't really care, I can never taste it. NOW, I'm going to do
you a teaching, the flavor of pineapple, like water, is actually
determined by its temperature; So stuff your freezer full of pineapple
gelado because it's the best thing in this world. Cut up your pineapple
rock with the sharpest knife in the world and throw it (the pineapple,
please don't throw your sharpest knife in the world) on top of the
pancake and freaking enjoy. If the pancake is on top of the pineapple,
you've done it wrong. You're welcome.
Today we found a lot of
investigators which was amazing! It was because of the pineapple
pancakes. I know it. One dude gave me a bracelet because he really liked
me, it's kind of weird, but I'm also attached to it because the dude's
awesome. I used my CFA experience to make milkshakes for my companion
and wow I have learned so much because they were even better than CFA's
shakes (sorry for the apostasy, Heather). That earned me a second "Oh my
gosh, thank you so much" from my companion, and the title of favorite
companion for food from Williams. Personally I thought that should earn
me the title of favorite companion, but I understand. It's not like it
was a competition or anything, because I'm going to win. We also got to
drink cupuaçu which was so good but it's also really acidic so Williams
and I were hurting a lot afterwards. I regret nothing.
11/2
Today
was a Saturday so we ran to as many investigators houses as we could. I
say "ran" because we had to book it to fit in as many people as we
could. Our main goal was to invite as many people as we could to church.
I have high hopes for them, some of them were really interested in our
invitation. Today was the birthday of one of our investigators. I said
to her, "Williams doesn't know about this-" which prompted Williams to
cut in with an "oh no" and then I continued, "but we got you a present!
It's the Book of Mormon, you won't get a better present than this." She
replied in confusion, "but you guys already gave me one?" and then I was
like, "but this one's special, it's signed. Here you go Williams, we're
going to sign it." She thought it was really cool that we're Americans
so she asked us to sign it in English. Her daughter reads a little bit
of English and tried to read my signature for her mom: "What does 'spunky'
mean?" I replied to her, "it's a special word for fun". Williams is
jealous that I don't need an alarm clock to wake up. Even if I wanted to
sleep in, there's no way that I could. My body is my alarm clack and
it's trying to die of sleep deprivation.
11/3
13
people invited to church, and none of them came ): but we did have
another dude who's not baptized but supporting his baptized wife there,
so that was cool. In other news, I feel like a highly functioning adult
because I remembered that today was a fast Sunday. I shared my testimony
again which went as well as it could for someone who has 15 weeks, and
Williams gave the second hour lesson, so that was fun; Especially the
part about William's lesson, because we had prepared to talk about
Filipenses, and instead found out that we would be teaching about
Timothy as Williams began to teach, so that was a nice little bit of
rearranging. Then Presidente gave us a ride in his Dethicle
(death-vehicle) at mach 2 over speed bumps and maybe small animals. I
thought maybe it was just me that was screaming on the inside, but his
wife was gripping the "oh, shoot!" handle on the ceiling with all the
force her little body could manage, so I think we were all a little
terrorized. We had lunch with the guy who asked me all my views on Trump
my first time eating with him; When he saw Williams, American, he was
like, "ooh, another victim!" and went through all the same interrogation
questions with Williams that he did with me before. Poor guy. Tonight
the Brazilians added to my list of things they wanted me to do for them
"teaching dancing". They heard that stake dances were pretty big in the
U.S. and Williams was like, "no, just outside of Utah" and with that one
casual line, excused himself from that duty and left me the duty to
teach them "cotton-eye-joe" and the "pb&j" dance.
Muito amor,
Elder Anderson
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