Last MTC Email!

Dear Family and Friends,

This week was packed full of stuff so I might have trouble getting it all into this email. Last Friday was Brazil's independance day so the food was really good here at the CTM and there was even an Ice Cream Buffet! It's the first time since I left that I've had ice cream and it was pretty good. The flavors of ice cream were really good but not nearly as strong as normal ice cream. I don't know if it is a Brazil thing or a CTM thing. Although I heard that ice cream isn't very big here in Brazil. Sunday was great, the Spirit was really strong all day long. It's kind of weird but with the exception of P-days Sundays are my favorite days of the week here at the CTM. Also another really cool thing about Sunday was that the evening devotional was given by President Ferrin who is the president of my mission. He spoke on the importance of hard work if you want to have success. His whole talk was in portuguese and he refused to let it be translated. Every other speaker that has come here has had their talks translated so that everyone can understand but he refused to have his translated. Fortunately I was able to understand pretty much everything he said so I didn't really care but I think some of the other Americans who haven't been here as long were a little upset. After his talk me and the rest of the Sao Paulo East guys went and met him and talked to him a little while. We didn't talk to him for too long though, I think he was glad to meet us but didn't really feel like talking for to long since we'll all be heading for the field in less than a week. Probably the coolest part of the week was on Monday when our district got to go outside the CTM and do street contacts. Every person in our district was given two Book of Mormons to try and place. It was really intimidating at first but Elder jensen and I prayed beforehand for the Spirit and the Gift of Tongues to help us. When we first got out of the CTM we started walking down the street and there were three Brazilian kids walking behind us who all were about 16 or 17 years old. We decided to talk to them and first we talked to thing about normal stuff like why we were here in Brazil, how long we've been here, and how long we are staying. Then we started talking about the Gospel and one of them seemed really interested and the other two were mildly interested. We taught them for almost 25 minutes about the Book of Mormon. We gave the Book of Mormon to the kid who seemed most interested and he said he would read the introduction and then call the missionaries after if he had more questions. The rest of the time we spent just walking around talking to random people. We placed all 4 Book of Mormons. i could feel the Spirit helping me understand what the people were saying and giving me questions to ask them. I was able to speak much faster and more fluently than ever before and could understand most of what people were saying to me. I don't know if anything will come out of the Book of Mormons that we placed but it was really encouraging to have this experience before leaving for the field. I can't wait to get out there and start teaching more real people. Next week we get to go do street contacts again but this time we get to go downtown instead of right next to the CTM.

Got to Go!

Love,

Elder Caleb Anderson