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. 

8-24-15 Hey! Hello Peoples!

This week has been so long! We had a lot of changes this week, and on top of that, Sister Rubilar has been sick this week, so we were attending to that a lot this week. We went to the hospital here to get some relief for her sinus infection and I got to witness firsthand the Brazilian health care system. I think that will be incentive to not get sick here. :/ It sufficeth me to say that it was a lot of unnecessary waiting to get a shot and a breathing treatment.

At the hospital with Sis Rubilar getting her breathing treatment.

About my life here. It´s missionary life! 6:30 is the beginning and we get to work! This week was kind of strange though, because Pres Broadbent issued a new rule that we have to leave the house at 9AM and return by 7PM due to perigosos... Eeeep. But I kind of like it this way better. We have all evening to do studies and get ready for bed. The few downsides that I can see are that we have a few people that are nighttime only peeps, we have district meeting on p-day from 5:30 until 7:30. Oh well, we´ll make it work somehow. 

We have a member here who is kind of like a senior office missionary equivalent named Irmão Peixoto. He has  daughter on a mission and he just adores sister missionaries. When I went to the mission offices this week, he went to each sister missionary and asked what we need. Each one said, Nothing, I don´t need anything, I´m good. But I said, A new bed! He said he´d work on it. I don´t know who decided that it would be a good idea to give missionaries a bunk bed! The last thing I want to do in a day is hoist myself onto a bunk bed and the last thing I want to do in the morning is hoist myself out. ugh. but Irmão Peixoto is pretty awesome. I´ll have to get a picture with him someday.

I went to the police this week to take care of visa stuff. It was pretty fun (not really, it was quite boring, but that´s not the point) because I got fingerprinted but in a cool kind of way with an electronic reader that I can see my fingerprint on the computer screen and it was pretty cool. We travelled a bit by ônibus and train to get to central São Paulo, so it was kind of a two day ordeal.

I celebrated 6 months this week! Whoo! 1/3 finished!

6-month Pizza!

Hope you´re all doing well and that this week has been a good one!
Love you bunches!

8-17-15 Hello Beautiful People!

Grafiti aqui na São Paulo

It´s been another really long hot week na Missão São Paulo Sul (A Melhor Missão do Mundo!) (It really is the best mission in the world!) It´s been another week of walking an talking to people. I think the most interesting thing about this week is the sheer amount of Testemunhos de Jeová standing around. We always smile and wave as we walk by them, and they smile and wave back. Their chapel is just a couple doors down from ours, which I think is kind of funny because it was exactly that way in Mt Juliet! Anyways, that´s not really that important....

Side note: sorry if I have bad grammar or spelling, the keyboards here are different and I have a bit of difficulty with them. On top of that, it looks like pretty much every other word is misspelled when you´re typing English on a Portuguese computer.

This week, Sister Rubilar and I have been working to help the people we teach get baptized! For the most part, it´s been pretty progressive. We have a few problems with each person we teach. One woman we teach wants to get baptized, but since she lives with her boyfriend, she has to be married first. She was really surprised when we told her that. Apparently the previous missionaries didn´t let her know that. So she said that she´s going to get married! We´re waiting for them to set a date for the marriage, and until then, we just keep teaching her. We teach another woman with the same problem, but her boyfriend doesn´t want to get married and she doesn´t have the money to move out, so we´re kind of at a standstill at the moment and we don´t really know what to do. We´re also teaching a kid who wants to get baptized, but he has trouble waking up and getting to church in the morning, so we´ve got to help him get there. We also have to talk with his mom. Things are looking pretty positive with these three people, we´ve just got some little molehills to get over.

Anyways. I feel like I´m adjusting well to Brazil. The only thing I can´t really get used to is almoço. Instead of dinner, we have lunch with the members, which is alright. I enjoy food no matter what time of day it is. But they feed us SO MUCH. And the way Brazilians cook, it seems like they were not able to make up their mind about what to have for lunch. For example: Yesterday at lunch, we had ribs, lasagna, potatos, some sort of fried root that was similar to potatos, salad, rice, beans, veggies, strawberry cookie stuff, and chocolate cake. So after to have at least a bit of everything, and you finish your plate, Irmã says, Sister, come mas! (Sister, eat more!) And if you say that you don´t want more, they´ll start asking if the food is bad, and then you feel guilty and eat more. So by the time you leave, you´re just plain MISERABLE, but the food is so good, so it´s kind of worth it.

Well, that´s pretty much been my thoughts for the week! Hope you are all doing well! Love you all!

I held the cutest puppy this week!

8-10-15 Sister Denton´s thoughts about Brazil

Boa Tarde! 

How´s everyone doing? This week has been a pretty good one! There´s been a lot of walking, talking, and conferencing this week! Mostly just walking. Before I came, I knew that I would be walking a lot, but now this much! It´s crazy! If we´re not teaching, we´re walking. Oh well, it´s all good for me. It gives us a lot of opportunities to talk to people about Jesus Christ!

Not a lot of spectacular things happened this week that I can think of. So I guess I´ll just talk about Brazil a little bit.

Brazil is SO DIFFERENT from the United States in a few different ways. Firstly, the people here are so social. You can literally bring up a conversation out of nowhere with anyoe on the street. It´s very strange to me that anyone will just want to talk on the street. But it´s really good for contacting people. Another thing, people can sell anything here. You can have a store right out of your garage if you want to. Lots of people just make do with the resources that they have, so walking down a street in a neighborhood, you can see a hair salon, daycare service, bottled water shop, bakery, convenience store all within about 5 minutes. People also sell things on the busses. They´ll just come on up and start talking about what they´re selling. Chocolate, water, yogurt, peanuts, you name it, they´ve got it. Everybody was right, there´s lots of rice and beans here. Staple foods. We have them with literally EVERY SINGLE MEAL. I can´t wait for the day that I never have to eat beans again. Until then, feijoa it is! 

Eu gosto Guaraná

This week we had a conference with two other zones and President Broadbent. It was a really good conference for a while, but the thing lasted about 6 hours. The whole thing was of course, in Portuguese, and I just cannot concentrate for that long. It was really hard. However, President gave a couple of really good trainings about How to be a Representative of Christ and How to Work with Members. Both of them were great trainings. During the one about working wit members, we talked about how missionaries should not flirt with members, especially youth. President said that there were only two things that we could say to youth: ´´Bom dia!´´ and ´´Você tem uma referencia para nós?´´ (Good mornig, do you have a referral for us?) It was really funny. :) 

Today my zone went out to the park for a picnic and a bike ride. It was really fun. We rented the bikes for about an hour and just rode around the park.

Zone Activity - bike riding in the park

Sister Denton and Sister Vasquez

The Zone

Anyways, I hope you all have a great day! 

Love you all!

Street Feet

Bunkbeds

Our kitchen

Kitchen and Laundry

Laundry
The washer has to be set to start each cycle ... wash, rinse, spin. No dryer.

8-3-15 Plane rides, Hills, and a good night for a Casamento

Oy!

Nossa! This has been the longest week of my LIFE! I have finally arrived in Sao Paulo! It´s so cool here I can´t even believe that I´m here! This has been a pretty good week here. My companion, Sister Rubilar, and I are doing a lot of work here. Neither of us know the area really well, so we´re doing a lot trying to get to know the members and the area. There´s a lot of people here, and the houses are literally one on top of the other. The street names are really confusing and our map wasn´t really helping at all. However, we are still trying our hardest to try to figure all of this out. 

I got here after a full day of plane rides and layovers and bus rides and missionary travel. When I arrived at my mission here, we  went to a transfer meeting. There was probably the entire mission at this meeting (or at least the people being transferred. I haven´t figured it out yet.) It was so cool! All of the missionaries here are so excited about the work and they´re so spirited and it is so great! I love it. My new trainer, Sister Rubilar, and I left the meeting to go do work! I our area, we went with the elders to get to know our area a bit more. We met with the ward mission leader and checked out the chapel and talked to people. Our mission has so many hills! It´s crazy! My calves have been killing for the past few days, but I think it´ll get better over the next few months! Literally everywhere we walk is either uphill or downhill and there is no in between. I´ve got to admit though, I like walking a lot! It´s a lot easier to do the work waling than when we´re in cars. We´re able to make more contacts and talk to more people. In one night, we can contact up to 15-20 people and 140 people a week! 

Anyways, on Saturday night, I was able to go to a Casamento (wedding) for two of the elders´ investigators. It was really nice and almost the whole ward was there. Later that night, we were out tracting and we passed by the Igreja Verde (Green Church, it´s in our area. HUGE green church) and found another Casamento. /they had trumpets and stained glass and violins and TUDO. It was pretty cool. Sister Rubilar and I stopped for a second to watch the ceremony. Then later we were passing my the Igreja Universal (a big deal here in Brazil. not really sure if we have a similar church in the states) and we found another Casamento! So apparently, it was a good night for a casamento. 

Right now, Sister Rubilar and I are teaching a few people. Most notable are R, a long time investigator who wants to get baptized, but she´s not married, L, a catholic lady who has family who are members of the church, and L-E, the younger brother of a recent convert! L-E is on date to be baptized on August 16! 

So everything is going pretty well. I´m alright, but I don´t really understand ANYONE at all. There´s a lot of people from different places in Brazil, lots of different accents, and lots of people who talk really fat, BUT, I´m trying my hardest. Like Nephi, I know that the Lord will provide a way for me to understand and communicate with this people. I hope all of you have a great week and that you are all doing well!

Love you!