Mamanguape

:) Mamanguape is a cool area :) I´m enjoying it. It´s pretty hot, but not unbearable. All of the roads are either dirt or paved with stone. My first few days here it rained quite a bit, but my companion, Elder Snow, said that it doesn´t rain here very often. I´ve seen tons of plant and animals here. Everything is green, and there are tons of stray cats and dogs. I´ve seen a lot of lizards, frogs, cows, horses, goats chickens, and birds. So far all of the people here have been really accepting of our message, but Elder Snow says its not always like that; we´ve just had a lucky streak lately I guess. We teach a few lessons everyday, and right now we have a lot of investigators, but it´s tough to get them to come to church. This week we tried getting all of our investigators to come, but we only got a handful of kids, which made us a half hour late. One of the kids brought a puppy with him, which was frustrating. We tried tying it up outside the church, but it just cried, so we sent him into primary and then gave his dog away to another family up the street that looked like they would really take care of it. I don´t think puppies are too hard to come by here, and the boy wasn´t sad that we gave his dog away.

The language here is a lot harder than I expected. People in the north talk especially fast, and have an accent that I don´t recognize. I´m practicing a lot, but it will be a while before I can communicate well. I just don´t talk very much right now. I have a little memorized part that I share in each lesson about the restoration, then I let my companion do the rest. Right now there are elections in Brazil, so there are huge trucks with tons of speakers blasting music about the candidates driving around all the time. They are super loud and super annoying, and they always drive by at the worst times, like when you´re trying to teach an investigator how to pray, and you´re trying to whisper in his ear what to say next...

I got kinda jealous when I heard that Ben got to baptize someone before I did, so I made up for it this week by baptizing two people :P They weren´t people that I taught. They were converted by two Brazilians in my district, but they wanted me to do the ordinance. It was difficult, because the two men had really difficult names for me to pronounce, and I had to hurry and memorize the prayer in Portuguese. I kept trying to ask one of the men to step forward in the font, but he didn´t understand what was happening, and he was trying to dive into the water before I could say the prayer. It made me smile :) It's tough to baptize grown men in shallow water, but everything went fine, and it was a good experience for me.

Here they don´t usually eat three meals a day. The people with money usually only eat two, so we end up having huge lunches everyday. Yesterday at lunch I probably ate twice as much as I should have. I was stuffed, but I kept craving more food, so I kept eating. I think that's the definition of binging, but it felt really good. We get 150 reais twice a month to buy what we need. I think that's probably more than Amber, and the food here is pretty cheap. A good meal is probably 5 reais, and you can get more bread than you can eat for one meal.

I´m going to try to send some pictures of the MTC, and my first week in Mamanguape. The cartoon is of my instructors, and the other is of my whole district.