(Week 20) Chapter 20: The End of the War

A picture of this awesome companionship along with Sister Matos (the lovely woman who kindly prepares lunch for Elder A and his companion every Saturday.)

Elder Anderson (on the left) at the Christmas Conference his mission president held.

This week was so much better getting to go back to working, I feel like my Portuguese is improving so much, it's really encouraging. These are all the great things that happened this week:
12/3
Today was so great! Williams and I are back, we spent all day cramming a week's worth of lessons into the few hours that we had to work. We were victims of our own success as everyone wanted to know when we could return, so tomorrow's going to be even more hectic than today. We visited Mara today where I severely struggled to pronounce "coconut"; Guess what you say if you mispronounce that word? Feces. I said a lot about feces which both Mara and her daughter thought was pretty amazing. Everyone wants to know what it is that I'm doing for my birthday, I thought nothing was an acceptable response, but I guess it's not because now I'm going to have my biggest birthday party I've had in my life. Missionary problems. Everyone in Brazil will party for literally anything, and now knowing lots of people isn't doing me any favors since I'm pretty sure there's an unspoken rule that missionaries shouldn't throw parties, it's probably snuck into our handbook somewhere but I haven't been able to find it so now all of our investigators want to do something big. I'm pretty sure they're conspiring against me: "Let's keep it small!" to which they're certainly replying, "sure, Elder Anderson..." and then very confused me has to ask, "Why are you winking? I can see you winking. We are NOT having a giant party". Maybe I'll get emergency transferred and Presidente will save me. Tonight we visited Moises and his family who were so excited that we had come back to visit them, we explained that we had just been sick and would never forget about them, but they were still so excited we hadn't forgotten about them, it was a good feeling, I haven't done anything to deserve their love, but they're still so kind to us.
12/4
(The last wave of the war)
I'm scared, the ants in our house have called in their special op friends: there are new really fast all black ants that I'm sure are going to be my death. Besides the new ants, today was great! I got a lot of studying done and we had lunch today which I always love. At lunch I asked the Irma what the word "arrebentar" meant, she showed me by trying to throw a two liter at my head. She also said there are many different meanings for the word, I don't want to know what the other meanings are. The really cool lesson we did today was with Elioni, not "Alioni" like I've been saying for the last three months, but it's fine. We made the correction because we gave blessings to his entire family tonight, they all had the gripa, so they were needing them, even their small toddler which was heartbreaking. I don't think I've ever given that many blessings in one day before, so that was a really cool opportunity. We also saw the wife of our super contacter in our ward, I learned that she doesn't trust me to push her daughter across four lanes of traffic (good choice), so I spent a good amount of time being morbidly offended and acting like my heart was broken. All I wanted to do was help because her daughter was sitting in the coolest mini car stroller ever, but it's fine, everything is fine, and all because APPARENTLY I act erratically sometimes (I was confused she limited herself to only "sometimes"). She says that my Portuguese is a lot better though, so I guess I forgive her. I've been noticing a lot too that it's been improving lately, it's pretty awesome to be able to communicate!
12/5
Brasilians will cheat in literally any game, even duck-duck-goose, I know because I lost the most epic round of duck-duck-goose ever. I don't want to talk about it. Early today we had a reunion with Presidente and Sister Caetano, they're so great, they gave some great trainings and after we all got to bear our testimonies which was so cool to hear from so many missionaries. We had to skip the lunch afterwards because the mother who doesn't trust me to push her child across four lanes of traffic (I haven't clarified the problem is the number of lanes, I'll ask her this week if five would be better), signed up to have lunch with us today and last time she said she wanted to have lunch with the missionaries, we reminded her the night before, she still forgot, and then randomly prepared lunch on another day and blamed us for not knowing; So not wanting to make her more mad, we skipped the awesome lunch with the Caetanos and had lunch with her which was also incredibly good. We taught a really cool lesson today, it was "The Restoration" but because the Sister we were teaching was crying we changed it up a lot. Her country, Venezuela is having a lot of problems with inflation with inflation and it's making for a lot of refugees. She's one of the victims, and feeling incredibly alone, so I bore testimony a lot about the perfect love our Heavenly Father has for us and how we're here to be happy. She seemed a little better afterwards, but also left pretty quickly after we were done talking to her, so we'll have to check up on her tomorrow and see how she's doing.
12/6
(The End of The War)
Today was great! We beat the ants that were living in our house into submission, Elder Williams and I committed several genocides against the ants and now they won't leave their holes to forage for food in our house. Mission accomplished. We're awaiting their embassy to discuss terms of surrender, but they will gain no mercy in my eyes, they ate my cutting board and it's sawdust calls for justice. Williams and I also have some expert level teamwork: Tonight a giant cockroach (thankfully not the flying satanic kind) heard our house was the hottest place in town (100% accurate on multiple levels), but unfortunately we have a human only policy for our "lit" study sessions where we go "ham" on the Bible (those were both of the slang words I know so don't ask for any more). Anyways, our house owner had delivered us a curtain rod today-or as I like to call it, a spear-which made for a nice object to, throw at the cockroach. I nailed it, but because it's a cockroach, it just ran away, so Williams was like, "Not on my watch!" and frying panned it over to me where I threw my sandal at it which made it explode. Cleanup was cool, we synchronously turned away from the cockroach, I opened our door up and Williams grabbed our broom, I put my hands up in a Mike Wazowski, "and he's out of here!" fashion as Williams shot the mess out our door in one smooth motion, backboarding it off the door and back down to the hot world it had climbed up from. Then we went back to our dinner. Our lessons today were so great! We were really led by the Spirit and re established contact with one of our investigators that we hadn't seen for quite some time and she was so excited that we had come back. We also taught the Sister who had been crying and her husband the Plan of Salvation and got some great contacts from them. Then we found out they're not married which is a pretty big setback. Oh well.
12/7
Today was fun, our morning was pretty mundane; I made pancakes that were dense as bricks, I mastered the art of "flip a pancake by launching it skyward with a pan" flipping method and didn't even leave a pancake on our ceiling in the process, which is good, because like I said, those pancakes are dense, and they definitely would have left a hole in our ceiling. We called for our lunch today and they didn't respond, so I started making some rice and beans. Then we saw a shirtless dude on the roof outside our window, it turned out to be the shirtless owner of our house, he motioned to open the window, which we did and then were like, "hey Ari, how's it going?" he was like, "wow, whatever you're making smells really good". Brasilians have a sixth sense for rice and beans, it's honestly mind blowing. After a pretty good lunch we got a call from the lady we were supposed to have lunch with. Williams was like, "oh yeah, we'd love to lunch with you" and I swear, you could hear wind whistling off me from how fast I 180'd, like, "Williams, you know how many lunches I can eat. It may be a large lunch but it's still only one, which we have already had!". To which he responded on the phone, looking me in the eyes, "yes Irma, we would love to have lunch with you." I got a lot fatter that day. After we had a great lunch we taught Mara and her family, we got so many people to commit to church tomorrow, it should be an amazing experience, I really hope they all come.
12/8
None of them came. Today was still a great day though, we had a birthday party for the Irma who always gives us amazing lunches and is teaching me how to cook. It was pretty great although I am so tired because I talked to people for the entire 6 and a half hour party, which already is a feat in your first language, but doing it in another one is significantly more difficult. We had a great time though, now that I can understand everyone a little better, everyone wants to know what my thoughts on everything American is. We also met a returned missionary tonight, she was really nice, but it was more funny to here her mom's perspective on her mission, she seemed to remember a lot more embarrassing facts than her daughter did. The party was pretty awesome and there was a lot of food. I will probably never stop hearing "come mais, Elder!" (eat more, Elder!) for the rest of my life, because people can always see the apprehension I have to turn any regular social event into a feeding frenzy. I hope this next week we can get our marriage licenses going but money is incredibly tight for Brasilians, but having too much enthusiasm for the Gospel and not enough money is better than the other way around, so I still have a lot to be grateful for.
Thanks for everything,
Elder Anderson