9-14-15 Transfers, New Investigators, and Rainy Cloudy Weather

Hello Everybody! I don´t have much time, so this will be a cut/paste email! If you already got some, you can skip over to the next part!

Transfers were pretty cool. It was refreshing to not be the freshest freshie, so that´s something. I liked knowing what would happen and knowing a little more Portuguese. We sat around for a good long time before the greenies came. We had a visit from an area 70 who serves in the Portugal region but he´s been doing a mission tour here. They speak Portuguese SO WEIRD there! It´s pretty funny. So transfers then. My new companion is Sister Alencar from northern Brazil, close to Fortaleza, but I can´t remember the name of the city. She´s pretty cool. She has 10 months on the mission and she´s 24 years old. She´s a really good missionary. Together we found 17 new investigators this week, which was pretty darn good. We´re going to hit the standards of excellence sometime this transfer and have pizza and ice cream with President Broadbent. My housemates are Sister Lima (brand new STL) from Brazil somewhere and Sister Tyckson from UT. Sister Lima has 7 months on the mission and Sister Tyckson has 4-5 months on the mission. She served in Montana before coming here. They´re opening a closed area so they've been a bit stressed out this week, but I think they´ll be just fine. We've been working a lot with the old investigators in our area and we've been having pretty good success in our area. We´re targeting the favela (ghetto) and finding lots of really prepared people there! Yesterday we taught two 12 year old boys named Daniel and Ryan and we´ll try to be teaching them a bit more this coming week! It´ll be pretty great! Woo!

This week has been a rainy cloudy one. We had a couple of days when we were caught off guard and without umbrellas, so we got pretty soaked (not pretty, we got completely soaked) The first day we were together, Sister Alencar and I were waiting to cross the street in front of a HUGE puddle when a bus passed by, drenching us right before lunch at a member´s house, so that was pretty fun. (Not.) Ahha. But we have a new elder in our ward, Elder Alvim from here in Brazil, along with me, Elder Melo, and Sister Alencar. We´re going to hit standards of GOLD this transfer and do GREAT things! 

Hope you all have a GREAT week!

Sister Denton

9-7-15 Sick Companions, 60 Contatos, and Transferencias

Hello Everybody!

Sorry about not sending an email last week! It´s a little difficult at times when you have limited time on email, but I will try harder in the future! 

This week has been a little bit strange for me because each day either I or Sister Rubilar were sick, so we didn´t get a lot of work done, sadly. It´s a little frustrating to just stay in the house and not do anything, so I tried to make the best out of the time we spent there and I organized our area book (a binder with information about the area and people we teach here) into semi perfection. Before papers and folders were spilling out of the book, but now, everything is beautiful and secure. I´m pretty happy about it because I HATE having a bad area book. It´s pretty frustrating, but all is well now!

This week, we had a training with president and the assistants for just the new missionaries in the mission. It was a pretty good training. President Broadbent spoke a lot about following the example that Christ has set for us and about following His path. He also talked a bit about another mission president who requires his missionaries to make a minimum of 60 contacts per day (our minimum per day is 10) in order to find people to teach. Our zone leader, who was also at the training, bet me and Sister Rubilar that we couldn´t do that, but that if we did, he would buy us pizza. Needless to say, we were more than inspired to make those contacts. We spent the first hour when we were back in our area making contacts until we had 60 each. Then on Saturday, we had the pleasure of eating pizza paid for by our zone leader.

Transfer call came yesterday! It´s so stressful here in Brazil with the transfers! In Cali, we had all the information we wanted the Saturday before transfers. Here, we get the call Sunday at night saying just if we´ll stay or if we´ll go! Ah! Anyways, I´m staying here in the Jardim Consórcio ward, but Sister Rubilar is getting transferred. So tomorrow I´ll be getting a new companion! 

All is well for the most part here! Last week, our ward split, and we lost an investigator because of it. Now she´ll be taught b our district leader, but all is well because she is awesome and she wants to follow Christ and do the right things, so I´m happy about it.

I forgot my umbrella yesterday and this was the result!

As always, I hope everybody is doing well and that your week will be AWESOME!

ps. today is Brazilian Independence Day! Whoo! 

8-31-15 No letter this week?

A note from Amy:

Dear Family,

We don't know why, but Holly didn't write a group letter this week. She and I emailed back and forth a bit, so I'll share some of that with you. She also emailed Grant, so I'll share that bit too. She's doing well. I asked her how she's doing on a scale of 1 to 10 and she told me she felt about 7 or 8. I'd consider that pretty good. I can't say I'm much better than a 7 on most normal work days, can you? I save the 9's and 10's for banner days, like vacations, homecomings, and cash bonus days!  

She said, "Things are pretty good for me, but  now Sis Rubilar is kind of down. I feel like I´m on a seesaw with her. When I´m up, she´s down, and vice versa. Nossa!...Yep, still sick. Dunno what we´ll do. She´s also pretty down because the ward split yesterday and Rosangela (our investigator who has a baptismal date) is now the investigator of our district leaders. She´s pretty sad because we´ve been working hard [with her], but I´m just glad that she´ll get baptized. Dunno. Eer since Velia´s baptism, I´ve been less and less concerned about numbers. I´m trying to recognize success in different ways...  heey check  out what I did this week while Sis Rubilar was sick! The scriptures that I got at the MTC are really heavy, and while I use them to study, I hate lugging them around everywhere, plus, I don´t really need D&C and PoGP, so I´ll just be using this. When we visit the temple, I´m going to buy a smaller bible (super cheap, R$10-15)"

She decorated the book with pictures from old church magazines. 

I had told Holly about our dinner last night, which consisted of smoked pork shoulder, baked beans, cotton candy grapes, and corn on the cob. She's always hated corn. This was her reply:
Cotton candy grapes sound awesome! I want to try some! Before I left there were some awesome cherries in Cali called Washington cherries. Keep your eyes open for them! You´ll be shocked, but I actually like corn. One night in California, we had dinner with members, and I decided to try corn on the cob. There´s this one streetfood stand here in my area that there´s a guy ALWAYS steaming corn on the cob, but I haven´t gotten to try it yet.

This is what she sent Grant: "So yesterday we had dinner with a member who´s half Japanese. She lived there for 4 years. She told me that in Okinawa they speak a completely different dialect than the rest of the Japan! You never told me that! Did you know, or did you feel like Japanese was just extra hard in Okinawa than in Kobe? Anyways, she had a Book of Mormon and a Japanese book. I learned how to write "to fly" in Japanese. Does this scripture look familiar, or have you forgotten completely any Japanese characters?"

Sister Denton with Japanese Book of Mormon

Pages from a Japanese book

We think her hair looks a lot lighter. We don't know if it's because she colored it, or if it's from being in the sun. She's definitely more tan too. 

That's all for this week.