Portingles

Dear Family,

This week was good. I thought last week was nerve wracking with my first baptism and all but it was nothing compared to this week. Last week I baptized Larissa and I was expecting Elder Bangerter to do the confirmation but then he told me on Saturday that I was going to be doing it! I was so nervous to confirm someone in Portuguese in front of the whole ward but it turned out great and I know Larissa was happy about it. She is doing really well and is already trying to share the gospel with all of her friends and family. We are teaching her grandpa right now and also are working with her aunt. Their family invited us to a churrasco that they had on Saturday and we met a lot more of her family and the food was REALLY good. This week was exciting because we are teaching three families right now. All of which I could see getting baptized sometime in the near future. This week showed me how the Lord works in mysterious ways and we find people to teach in really weird ways too. We found one family really good family at McDonalds (McDonalds here are a lot different from in the States!). I was trying to order some french fries but the lady didn´t understand me so two people next to me in line, who were about my age and spoke some english, helped me out. Their whole family was there so after we ate we went and talked to them and the Mom said she had been wanting to come to our church for a while and invited us over to talk to them about our church. We taught them (the Machado´s) on Saturday about the plan of salvation and it went really well. They seemed really interested about eternal families and the daughter even started crying during the lesson. There was a really good spirit there and they invited us back for another appointment this week. They are a really great family and all of the kids speak english so that is cool. My portuguese is improving but it is still really awesome to meet people who speak english. In fact, this week we were eating lunch with a 91 year old lady in our ward. She´s 91 but she´s still really active and her mind is still pretty sharp, she is even trying to learn english and is taking english classes at a popular english school here called Wizard. The school is really close to our chapel and sometimes we do contacts near it because the people like to practice their english with us. Anyways this 91 year old lady said that she had given a Livro de Mormon to her instructor and wanted us to come talk to him about the book and to see how fluent he was in english hahaha. We went to her class with her and the professor was friendly and pretty good at english but he didn´t seem to interested in our message. He introduced us to his director (who also spoke english) because he thought that his director would be interested. However he didn´t seem very interested either and introduced us to another professor there! It kind of seemed like they were all just trying to hand us off to other people but the third professor the we talked to was very interested and lives in our area so we will be teaching her this week! Both of these stories are kind of uncommon ways to find an investigator but it showed us how the Lord puts people in our paths to teach that we never expect. I am excited about how things are going here in Vila Galvão. The ward is really excited about missionary work and we are getting alot of references. We are also working with three families which is really excited. I think it would be really awesome to baptize a complete family and I think we have a chance with all three of these families. That´s about it for this week. Thanks again for all your letters and emails, I really enjoy them.

Love,

Elder Caleb Anderson

First Baptism

Dear Family and Friends,

Wow the weeks are passing really fast since I got to the field. This week I want to write about my first time ever baptizing someone. Yesterday after the first session of conference I baptized Larissa. Elder Bangerter and I met here because she was a reference from one of the ward missionaries. She was good friends with this ward missionary and told the ward missionary that she would like to be baptized! So Elder Bangerter and I started teaching her and she was really receptive to the gospel. She accepted all of the doctrines and commandments very quickly. Even after the first lesson she was always trying to bring her friends with her to be taught as well. This last week leading up to the baptism she was really excited and talked about it to all of her friends. She lives with her Grandma but her Dad lives pretty close by and was not very fond of the idea of her being baptized into our church. However he permitted her to be baptized (although we didn´t really need his permission because she lives with her grandma and her grandma already authorized it). Because yesterday was conference weekend we had to go all the way to the stake center to see the conference and everyone in the zone was supposed to have their baptisms there. We were a little worried about this because it was so far and Larissa had never been there before. Elder Bangerter and I were planning on riding with Larissa and her family to the stake center for conference/baptism but we word that morning that someone in her family had been injured and that she and all her family were in the hospital however they were still plannning on coming to the baptism. We got a ride to conference from someone else and then waited for them there. We were really worried that they weren´t going to show up (we had been concerned that the Dad would try and do something to stop it). But Larissa, her parents, grandparent, aunt, cousin, and friend from school all showed up just in time for the baptism. The service went fairly smoothly all though I think it was clear that it was my first time baptizing someone. In fact looking back on it there were a lot of signs that I am a greenie hahaha. For one that morning I was in a nervous rush to get out the door and I accidently grabbed the suitcoat that didn´t match my pants. Also I was so nervous during the baptismal prayer that my voice was shaking like crazy. And I almost slipped in the water and just about baptized myself as well hahaha. But all in all the baptism went really well and was a great first baptism to have. She was strongly supported by the members in the ward and by her family so I think she has a good chance of staying firm in the church. I don´t have too much to time to write more but the baptism was a really spirtitual experience and I really hope that all the rest of my baptisms can be as good as that one was. I will send pictures soon.

The announcement about the new age for missionaries was crazy!! I think a lot of the missionaries out here right now with younger girlfriends are kind of upset about it hahaha. In fact like half an hour ago my zone leader Elder Cleveland was on the computer watching the announcement made by President Monson about the new age for sister missionaries. After President Monson made the announcement the camera turned to look at the crowd´s reaction. They zoomed in on two girls who were crying and hugging each other because they were so happy and one of them was his girlfriend!!!! hahahahahaha. Man it was funny. I don´t know how much hope he had of seeing her still there when he gets back but I think right now he has a lot less hahaha. Things are going pretty good here in Vila Galvão, we are working a lot with the members and receiving good references. My portuguese is improving every day.

Are the Brazilians pretty friendly to Americans? Tough question. From what I´ve noticed there seems to be two attitudes concerning americans. The brazilians either hate us and are really rude to us or they are think we are the coolest people they´ve ever met. Although sometimes I can´t tell if the bad treatment we get is because we are american or just because we are missionaries, or probably its a combination of the two. However for the most part the people who don´t like are just jealous but most of them warm up to us once we tell them that we live here and are going to stay here for two years and are just trying to teach the gospel. In that way it´s really similar to the story of Ammon and King Lamoni (but don´t worry mom we haven´t been tied up or thrown in prison). However the vast majority of the people are really friendly to us and are curious as to why we are here. The members love us and are really great. So I guess the answer to the question is that it depends on which one.

 

Got to go. Thanks a lot for your emails and letters.

Love,

Elder Caleb Anderson

Week 2 in the Field

Dear Family and Friends,

Thank you all for your letters and emails!  I love hearing the news from home.

This week has been a lot of work but pretty rewarding as well.  We did a lot of street contacts this week and found a lot of people who seemed sincerely interested in the gospel only to find out later that they gave us a wrong address or phone number.  We even contacted 2 girls at the lake who seemed really interested and then when we tried to call the number they gave us they always hung up.  Finally we tried to go by their house only to find out that they had given us the address of their uncle who is a Jehovah´s Witness hahaha.  It was kind of annoying at first but pretty funny afterwards.  However we did have some success because we are teaching a girl named Larissa who is a friend of a member in our ward.  She is really excited to learn about the gospel.  We have her baptism marked this Sunday right after general conference.  I don´t think general conference will make too much of a difference for my schedule.  It will be a little difficult though because any baptisms that are going to be done need to be done at the stake center which is a lot farther than our chapel.  However I think we will only have Larissa so it shouldn´t be too difficult to figure out the tranportation.  

All the missionaries are supposed to watch the Sunday morning session of general conference but to watch the other sessions we are supposed to have an investigator with us.  On Sunday morning we will go to the stake center and watch conference.  I heard they have a seperate room with a TV for anyone who wants to watch it in English.  

On Tuesday we did a split and I worked with one of our Zone Leaders here in Vila Galvao.  His name is Elder Cleveland and he was Elder Bangerter´s trainer.  I like him a lot and learned a lot from doing the exchange.  My area is a pretty nice neighborhood compared to most of the areas in this mission.  There are some really nice parts in it with some big houses however we also have a couple favelas.  However we don´t really work in the favelas because they are one the very edge of our area which requires a 30-45 minute to get to the chapel.  The past missionaries have found that their time doing street contacts was better served if they did contacts near the church because the people in the favela often don´t have cars and the chances of one of them walking 30 minutes to church is slim.  Our apartment is in a pretty good place.  We don´t use the bus too much in our area because we can walk just about anywhere that we want to go.  I am pretty much used to all the walking that we do.  The chapel is only a 10-15 minute walk from our apartment.  So far we´ve been getting fed really well.  Beans and rice have been a part of every meal but they haven´t been the main course.  So far in the field I´ve only eaten brown beans no black beans.  The weather here is good.  It gets pretty cool at night but it feels really nice in the day.  That´s about all I have to report for this week.  I know that Elder Bangerter and I will be blessed with more success soon if we keep working hard.

Pai- Obrigado por sua email.  It sure sounds like you are staying busy with you church callings and volunteering for the community.  Did you get the link I sent you? I really liked that video.  I hope Mitt Romney does well.  Everyone down here knows who Obama is and most know about Romney.  They are all Obama supporters just because he´s not white hahaha.  Also I was thinking about you the other day because our ward had cleaned the church and it was quite a bit different than the Saturday morning ones we did back home.  There was a really big turnout and they were VERY thorough.  The members down here are really happy to serve.  People viewed cleaning the church as more of a fun activity than an assignment.  There was food and everyone brought their families.  Then afterwards the bishop did a big bar-b-que in the parking lot!  It was pretty cool to see. Elder Bangerter and I cleaned for about an hour or so to do our service. My mission has a list of approved movies that we can watch and the Best Two Years is on there.  So Me, Elder Bangerter, and Elder Cleveland watched part of the Best Two Years last night and the movie has a completely different meaning now haha.  I feel exactly like the greenie in that movie.  It´s really funny. 

Right before the baptism of Maria Lucia by her son Lindo Mar.

 

This is a picture of our mission ``family line`` for Elder Schenk. On the mission they call the missionary who trained you your Dad, and therefore whoever trained him is your Grandpa. It gets kind of complicated and a lot of missionaries are really into it. But anyways here is a picture of my missionary ``family line``. I am on the left, my trainer Elder Bangerter is on the right, and then our zone leader Elder Cleveland who is Elder Bangeter´s trainer is on the left. Elder Cleveland´s trainer was Elder Schenk who is the missionary who got hit by a bus. I don´t know if you heard about it. He served in my mission but the accident happened before I came to the field. He went home in a comma and was unable to talk or move for a while but he is recovering now. Anyways we took this picture the night of the transfer when Elder Cleveland was staying with us. We drew Elder Schenk in at the end and labeled him the Great-Grandpa haha. He is recovering but is still in pretty bad shape so we sent him this picture. We thought he would enjoy this picture of his missionary descendants.

 

 

A picture of me schooling Elder Bangerter in a Brazilian card game. 

 

Me and Elder Bangerter

 

This is us putting the peanut to work in our apartment.

 

First Week in the Field!!!

Dear Family and Friends,

Thanks again for all you emails and letters! I am still working on writing some of you back. The first week in the field has been awesome!!! My Trainer is Elder Bangerter as I already said. He is from California/St. George Utah and is from a family of 5 boys. He played football and basketball in high school and played football at Dixie St. College before coming on the mission. He has been out for 6 months and his portuguese is really good. He´s a good missionary, we get along really well, and is willing to work so I´m glad he´s my trainer. I was really worried that I´d get a bad one. He looks exactly like Tom Cruise! Even more than Zach Leininger!!! It´s crazy that I´ve known two people who look exactly like Tom Cruise. He says he´s already had brazilians here come ask him for his autograph they can´t tell any difference. Also I´m really glad I got a companion who speaks english. I might not learn the language as fast with him as I would with a brazilian but it´s really nice to be able to just talk normally when we´re in the apartment. Also, Elder Bangerter and I baptized someone yesterday!!! Her name is Maria Lucia and is 73 years old. I will type up the story at the end of the email because it´s awesome. I have learned a lot of Portuguese in the last week. Hopefully I can keep learning at this pace. Whenever we teach I can understand almost everything but whenever we are just having normal conversations it´s really hard. Church on Sunday was difficult because we had a couple investigators there and I was trying to stay with them and show them where to go and stuff but I could barely talk to them.

The ward that I´m in is awesome. We have a lunch appointment every day this month (here they do lunch appointments every day instead of dinner). Usually we don´t eat dinner until we get back to the apartment around 9:30. Mostly because we want to be able to teach people during that time. The youth in our ward have helped us out a lot with finding people to teach. I feel like a lot of the adults don´t have a whole lot of trust in us. A lot of them really like us but I think they a cautious to give us references because this area has had kind of a rough past as far as missionaries go. But we do a lot of activities with the members and try to serve them to gain their trust. This past week the ward had ward activities every night of the week because this week was their ward conference. We went to all the activities to get to know the members. I was really grateful for that too because my feet were killing me the first couple days haha. We walked so much. A lot of our appointments fall through so the result is a lot of walking around and not a lot of teaching. It´s kind of annoying. In the States if you contact someone on the street and they aren´t interested I think they would normally just say no or slam a door in your face. Here they always say yes but will most of the time just give you a fake address or phone number. Or just not keep their appointments. So that is a little frustrating but we still had some really good lessons this week and some great experiences. Here are three miracles (not the only miracles but my favorite ones) that happened this week. This is copied from my letter to President Ferrin (who is really cool by the way).

Miracle number 1. When Elder Bangerter and I were on the bus coming back from the mission home on Tuesday we were sitting on the bus speaking in English to each other. A random guy came and asked us where we are from. He was Brazilian but spoke english well enough that we could communicate with him. We started asking him what he knew about our church and he said that he had been given a Book of Mormon by the missionaries once before and had already read it all the way through and was about halfway through reading it again when he lost it. We didn´t have one to give him with us but we did visit him once this week and gave him another one and have another appointment set this week to talk about the Plan of Salvation. To me this was a miracle that the first person I met in the field was someone who was so prepared and even spoke Enlish. 2. There is a woman in our area who has two daughters who are both members and ever since her daughters joined the church the missionaries have been trying to give her the lessons but she has always refused. This week Elder Bangerter and I were walking to an appointment when Elder Bangerter stopped and said he felt like we should go try and give her a lesson. We went to her house and she accepted to her the Gospel of Jesus Christ and then afterwards we gave her a summary of all the other lessons we have to teach her. She said she was interested in the Plan of Salvation so we taught her that lesson to. We are going back this week to teach her more. I know Elder Bangerter´s decision was inspired and it was a small miracle that she finally accepted to here the lessons. 3. My first day in the mission field we went to visit a member family so that I could introduce myself to them. When we got there the father of the family asked us if we would baptize his mother who lives with them. She is 73 years old, has cancer, and is in very bad health. I think she weighs 70 lbs at most. She had already been to church 3 times with her son and so we taught her all the lessons this week and baptized her on Sunday. She was baptized by her son Lindo Mar (I was really glad he accepted to do it because honestly I didnt want to baptize someone that frale who is in such bad health). At the baptism her son said that even though his mother had been living with them for several weeks and the missionaries had passed through their house many times he never asked them to teach her. But when he saw us on Tuesday (my very first day in the field) he felt inspired to ask us to teach his mother. It was a sign to me that Vila Galvao is the area I am supposed to be in.

That´s about all I have for this week. I will probably send pictures of the baptism and me and my trainer tomorrow because we have to drop the pictures off to the famliy of Maria Lucia so I will probably send them here. Also whoever made ``The Best Two Years`` totally nailed it.

Love you all and hope you are all well,

Caleb Anderson

First Day in the Field

Dear Family,

I made it to the field!!! This morning I left the CTM at 530 am at went to the mission home with 10 other elders. 5 were american. Right now I am in a members home sending a quick email just to say that I made it alright and everything is going well. My trainers name is Elder Bangerter. he is an American from California/St. George Utah. Before the mission he played football at Dixie State College. He is a great guy and I think we will have a lot of success. Out area seems great. Everyone that Ive met so far has been really nice. I got my stuff dropped off at the apartment and we already taught our first lesson. The members whose home we are at right now have a mother/grandmother living in the house and they want her to be baptized so today we taught the restoration. We are about to eat dinner soon. Sorry for the punctuation but I am using a brazilian keyboard and its a little bit different. I am really excited to finally be in the field and have the opportunity to teach people. I^ve got to go now.

Love,

Elder Caleb Anderson

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      

Yes, I'm still in the MTC...

Dear all,

Thanks again for you emails and letters. This will probably be a short letter since the past week has been somewhat uneventful. This week we got a new teacher for our morning classes instead of Irmao Viana and this new guy is really, really strict. I think he's supposed to whip us in to shape for the field. He is a really big guy and doesn't put up with anything. At first it was a little bit annoying but I actually kind of like him now because we learn a lot more with him teaching us and I think he will prepare us for the field a lot better. I did like Irmao viana a lot though so it's too bad that he's gone. Also another set of Brazilian roommates has been sent to the field so right now it's just the four Americans in my room until tomorrrow when new Brazilians arrive. I don't think I'm going to miss this set of roommates a whole lot. They both had really weird sleeping schedules and would usually wake the rest of us up really early in the morning. Anyhow I think they will both do well in the field and wished them the best before they left. This morning we went to the Sao Paulo Temple again except this morning we had so many Elders going that we weren't all going to fit in one session. They asked if there was anyone who would volunteer to do sealings so me and a couple other Elders in my district volunteered. It was a good experience and my portuguese is good enough to understand pretty much everything that was going on. Not a whole lot else happened this week so I think I'll just use the rest of the email time to answer some questions that have been asked.

How is my Portuguese coming? I'm pleased with my progress with portuguese. I'm definitely nowhere near fluent yet but I've come a long way since I arrived. I remember when I was on the flight over here and I couldn't understand a word anyone was saying. Now I feel like I can say a few things and could at least communicate with people. The main problem is that the vocabulary we learn here at the CTM has a lot to do with church stuff so when I try to talk to the Brazilians about non-church stuff it is really difficult. Also I think it's frustrating for the Brazilians because they have to speak really slowly and explain a lot of words. But every week we have teaching workshops where 2 or 3 Americans team up with 2 or 3 Brazilians and we all teach a fake investigator. My first week I couldn't understand a single word but this last week I was contributing quite a bit to the lessons and even talked more than some of the Brazilians. I still don't understand every word but I understand to piece together what they're trying to say.

Am I still playing basketball? Lately I've started playing a lot more volleyball and I like it a lot. I'm getting a lot better and it's really fun when you actually play volleyball with/against people who know how to play. It would be fun to take a class at BYU and learn how to play really well. But yes I still play basketball every once in a while. Most of the Brazilians are awful and basketball but there was a new one that came in this week who is pretty good. It was pretty funny because the hoops here at the CTM aren't too great and the other day this Brazilian dunked the ball and brought the rim down! Hahaha it was great.

Have I had any spiritual experiences yet? Yes I feel ver close to the spirit and have had some spiritual experiences. One memorable one was when we watched Elder Holland speaking at the Provo MTC and he talked about missionary work and how this mission is more for us than anything else. One quote that I really liked was he said "in order for your mission to be a success you need to have a least one convert, and that convert had better be you". It was a really powerful talk and I felt the Spirit very strongly. Also fast Sundays here are really awesome. We fast from Lunch on Saturday to Lunch on Sunday and the Spirit in the CTM is really strong, especially during the fast and testimony meetings. My testimony has really grown since I got here and I attribute a lot of that to fast Sundays. Another cool spiritual experience was when Elder Jensen sprained his ankle and it got really black and blue and swollen. That night me and my other american roommates gave him a priesthood blessing, I don't remember a lot about the blessing but I remember blessing him that the injury would not slow him down at all and that he would be able to continue his studies as normal. Throughout the rest of the week his ankle and the rest of his foot was huge and was one of the worst sprains I've seen but he was able to walk on it just fine. In fact during gym time he was still able to play volleyball and spike the ball on people! He said it hurt him during lunch and free time but when he started studying the pain would always go away. Maybe it was a miracle maybe not but I believe that the Priesthood blessing definitely helped.

Well that's all I have time for.

Love you all and thanks again for you letters,

Elder Caleb Anderson