Time is flying by!

Hey everyone,

 Time is flying by so fast! Two weeks and then my journey starts!  The CTM is very cushy and our lives are spoiled. Don't get me wrong we work very hard here, but we have air conditioning and we have three meals a day, so we are quite spoiled!

Thank you everyone for all the Birthday wishes and the Pizza party! I'm having it this Tuesday with all of my buddies! Thanks to Emily for the Birthday card! Oh and by the way Kyle and Doug would you write to me? Brian I got your letter, thanks! I sent one to your email and also put one in the mail.  I'm sending it to your school address as well. Kyle check your email. Oh and Happy Birthday to Elder Wardle!

Slowly and surely I am beginning to love Brazil more and more.  The people are unbelievably kind here! Portuguese is such an awesome language.  I am definitely starting to forget some English though. I'm going to miss the guys that I've made friends with here. They are super awesome!

Last P-day was great. I didn't get to talk to much about if, but we got all of our candy and letters sent and then we had a District Volleyball game.  We split up 5 vs. 5 and it was Belem Vs. Brasilia, we lost by only a couple of points. It was hard caught though. That night we had a devotional and we watched a folk that Elder Bednar gave in the Provo MTC a few weeks ago. He spoke about the best way to study is to follow this pattern: 1. Find the Doctrine 2. Find the Invitation 3. Find the Promises. I've tried to apply that, but I have a lot to work on.

11-7

Not much happened today.  We did a lot of language study on the computers, they have an awesome program called Tall Lab. It is so great and you can learn a lot from it. I also started my personal study on the attributes of Christ. Hopefully, I can add some to myself so I can be a better person.

11-8

Halfway during my class my teacher started making impressions of Sponge bob that was hilarious! They have it in Brazil I guess. That was it for the excitement of that day.

11-9

I woke up early and worked out.  As much fun as volleyball and basketball is, I need to start lifting again. I miss it a ton! Later, after all of our studies one of the Elders in my group and I invented a game of ultimate golf. You take turns tossing an object to get to the final destination in the fewest amount of strokes. It's stupid games like these that are so much fun here! That night we had 3 more hours of study time on top of the long day of study that we had earlier, it was amazing how much we accomplished.

11-10

Another long day of study! Although I do love Saturdays, because we made it through the week. We had a workshop that night about better ways to teach our investigators. The day ended off well, we had tow hours of free time and I wrote my talk in Portuguese.  It has to be 5 minutes and I chose to talk about Christ's attributes.  I hope it goes well!

11-11

Well, I sure am glad that I prepared my talk! I had to give it in Church today and I was the first speaker.  Speaking and giving a talk in Portuguese is so TOUGH! WOW! I didn't get to finish all in 5 minutes but I talked about virtue, humility and obedience. Before I got started talking about obedience my 5 minutes was up, so I was obedient and closed. The President from another mission was there and he thanked me for being obedient and closing. He also expounded on how we all need to be obedient. It was a cool experience.

11-12

Nothing to much exciting happened.  It rained most of the day so gym was tough. We read and studied Mosiah 15 in class. I wish sometimes I was English speaking because they go into deep doctrine studies but, we only touch the surface because of the language.  I definitely learn a ton here though. The CTM is such a neat place to be.  I've been doing a lot of grammar study lately so that I can piece all my vocabulary together. A language is such a super difficult code, but once you figure it out it feels great. We learned the word to burp- Arrotar, so if you wanted to say "I burped", it would be Eu arrotei.  That's is it's not irregular, but that I'm not sure about.  Oh, before I end I find it very different in Brazil, when teaching an investigator in Brazil, you invite them to be baptized on the very first visit. the second visit you set a date.  I feel like that is so different from the USA. Oh one more thing, we started a new goal, to say something nice to a specific person everyday. So we all said something nice about one of the Elders and it was really cool and we ended on a good note!

Bye love you all!

--Emily check your email