Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Oi Familia!
Thank you for all of the packages and letters! Aunt Cherie we ate your package in like two days, when Sister Hayes and I opened the box, she took one piece of popcorn, ate it, and then threw it back in the box, closed the box, and hid it... she didn't want to share;). Mom, Irmao Porter loved your banana bread so much I let him take one of the loaves home, he was super excited. Also, I absolutely love the water bottle, Sister Hayes, not so much though since it means she has to accompany me more often to the bathroom;). The cookies were perfect also! The day before they came, Sister Hayes and I were talking and I was like I want no-bake cookies and she was like, that sounds really good, and then tada! Some came from you! You were probably making them while we were talking about them:) Revelation;) Your package is gone also, for our district complaining about being full, they sure didn't care when it came to your packages;).
So not as many interesting things happened this week as in previous weeks, but as of tomorrow we're halfway done! On Tuesday after I last emailed, we had a Tuesday night devotional, and those tend to be more important people than on the other devotional days, and guess who it was! Elder Scott! He gave a really good talk on recognizing the spirit and then he stopped reading his teleprompter and started talking about missionaries, it was pretty cool. He even gave us an apostolic blessing that included we would all master our languages! I'm definitely gonna master mine I guess since I got told that in a blessing this week that I got from the elders because it wasn't Sister Hayes who got sick, it was me! Well after Elder Scott finished, we sang, and then as the sister was getting up to give the closing prayer, Elder Scott jumped up (literally! that is one fast old man!) and ran back up to the pulpit to tell us again that we were called of God and not to get discouraged and that we would get our language. It was pretty awesome!
Sister Hayes and I have grown quite tired of our district. They're great people, but even the teacher told Sister Hayes and I that we were the only mature ones who he knew wanted to be there. So Sister Hayes and I have decided to rededicate ourselves to studying elsewhere. We did it for the first time yesterday, and it went really well. I just can't stand the sisters talking about how cute the elders are and how they want to know if they can get their addresses to write them, and about how they just had "a moment" with a elder (funny story, the sister who said that is super gorgeous, so when she showed him to us, we were expecting someone like SUPER hot, and nope, he was a poor awkward gangly looking creature, though I'm sure he probably is a great guy!). Sister Hayes and I think they are all very ridiculous when they talk about things like that. We're missionaires, we're supposed to give that up, we said that we would!
Oh, we had a pretty awesome miracle in our district. We're always being told that our families are being protected, and one of the elders, his family is having some really big financial problems (they had to move out of their house and etc), and they had a $1,000 bill due in a few days, and they weren't sure what they were gonna do. Then, in the mail came a $1,000 check from a job the father had done five years before! Pretty awesome. That elder is pretty awesome, and a stinker also, he's like one of my brothers, I love him, but I wanna wring his neck...;) The other day, because our computer in our classroom is broken, we have had to keep going to other classrooms, and we have to reserve them, well we went to this one classroom and we had about 10 minutes left in it, when this elder from the building we were in (it's the English classroom building and it's SUPER SUPER nice) came in, slammed his bag on a table, and said in a very rude tone, that they had this room reserved and that their teacher had told them to kick out anyone who was in there. So we got up and Irmao Porter said "Com Respectio" (spelling error, as I have no idea how to spell that) which made the elder mad because he had no idea what Irmao Porter was saying, and then we left and the elder in our district walked up to him and said "Say it with respect next time. Next time knock. Missionaries don't do that." and then he walked away and we just all burst out laughing! Our current catchphrases are "Com Respectio" and "Missionaries don't do that." Haha
With our lessons that we teach, our teachers decided that we can't bring in papers with written lessons starting on Monday, and Sister Hayes and I who really struggle with this, decided to start Saturday. Let's just say, who knew we would actually kind of speak Portuguese?!? We were able to teach a really great lesson on prayer and the restoration without having anything written down! We felt really good about it. Our lessons to our fake investigators are going well. Tomorrow we're teaching about the Plan of Salvation, though we still haven't found what the investigator "needs to hear" and so we need to figure that out. We haven't asked the right questions yet. On Friday we taught TRC, and Sister Hayes and I were so so nervous. We got there though, and we ended up teaching a very lovely lady named Anne who had served in Portugal. She was great. We gave a quick message on enduring to the end, and then she told us about Portugal and she bore her testimony about how we could serve missions, and that we would love it, and that the language would come if we learned the language of the Spirit. We absolutely loved it, and all three of us bawled super hard because the spirit was so strong! Then when we got back to class, the teacher asked someone to tell a cool experience that they'd had and of course my class through me under the bus and picked me! Well I suddenly start speaking in Portuguese, and I guess they were all super shocked! I haven't been doing very well with actually speaking Portuguese, and I'm still not, but having given up our papers for the lessons made it as though something clicked. I'm now trying to say more things in Portuguese in my everyday life.
On Sunday we had another great relief society, this time by Sister Cheryl Esplin, the second counselor in the general primary presidency. She talked about keeping our testimonies strong. Then she had us do something really awesome. She said to us that she was going to start humming a song and we were going to stand up and sing it as soon as we recognized it. We all stood up at the same time and sang "I belong to the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints..." etc. It was just really awesome and powerful and I just started sobbing!
Oh and I saw Aaron! I don't know if he told you, but the BYU Men's Chorus came and sang and I saw Aaron and so I made poor Sister Hayes run in a HUGE circle to catch him so we could say hi!
Sorry, no pictures again, one of the sisters in our district has a card reader and she said I could use it, but I haven't seen her today, so I can't send any. I really haven't taken any anyways:).
Talk to you next Tuesday! Love always,
Sister Wach
 
Side note written by Ricki:  Aaron is Megans cousin (Chris' sisters son).

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