9 Dec. 2013

Thanks for the email!  Thats exciting for Zach to be able to have his first concert! I remember my first concert still! That was a long time ago back in 6th grade!  Do you know why Matt wants me to be a firefighter?  I guess I will have to change careers just to suit Matt.  Thanks for all the messages from everybody.  Its always cool to hear my different people whats going on at home. Ugh, these keyboards are not easy to type with. The keyboards here have to have all the accents for Portuguese so its a bit difficult to type on.  But it works.  We don´t have any snow here. None at all. We actually haven´t been getting too much rain either. Its a bit weird b/c usually we get rain at least every day or every other day.  Buts its been really dry and hot.  Lots of humidity though too.

  This week has been interesting. Tuesday, first district meeting of the transfer. It was awesome as usual.  My district didn´t change much with the transfers. Only one person left and one person came in. They´re all awesome missionaries though.  Wednesday was a baptism.  His name is Saimon, which is Simon in English only with portuguese spelling. That was a lot of fun. We don´t have cars or bikes here so we have to walk our investigators down to the chapel when we want to get them to church. Its about 1-1 1/2 miles down to the chapel from where he was living so a bit of  a walk. Thursday was normal, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Went and visited with our investigators and found a new family for us to be able to teach. They seem to be pretty excited about the gospel! Friday we had a service project which we gathering up old roof tiles and washing and painting them and getting them ready to be used. Everything here is reused if possible. If its broken, its thrown away usually, but otherwise its cleaned up, new coat of paint and reused. There is not a lot of new things here. Its kinda of funny b/c lots of people here have American brand clothing with messages in english and don´t understand what its saying.  Saturday, we had a baptism scheduled so we did exchanges with the zone leaders to be able to get interviews done in both of our areas.  Elder Lima is a new ZL here in our zone and he was pretty cool. We only had two people to do interviews with, two sisters. We got one done and she was set to go so I made all the apropiate calls to set up the baptism. We came back later that day to do the other and the other sister was actually hiding from us when we got there so you can imagine how that interview went. We called my companion afterwards b/c they wanted to talk with him and him talked with them and they both came back saying they wanted to be baptized Sunday after church. We said okay.  Traded back companions later that night. Sunday we showed up at their house to pick them up for church b/c their baptism was right after church and they  didn´t want to go. Eventually got them to go to church but we had to call a taxi to get there in time. After church we got all the preparations and ward ready for their baptism but when they got their baptismal clothing they talked to the YW President and we found out that we couldn´t baptize them b/c of .......a monthly problem and we needed to wait till Wednesday. So hopefully Wednesday we´ll be able to baptize them.  Other than that, our week has been pretty normal. I found out that I am playing Joy to the World for the Christmas conference for the mission this next Tuesday so I need to practice a lot this week!

  This week looks like it will be pretty normal, but knowing Brasil it will always throw a surprise at you! Today for p day we met up as a zone and played basketball. That was fun being able to be with all the other elders!  I haven´t recieved any of the packages yet, but hopefully I´ll get one before Christmas or right after Christmas before New Years. My companion got a package from his home in João Pessoa in Brasil and so I have been trying a whole bunch of different sweet from there! Some of it like doritos is the same or only a tiny bit different and some of it is very different. One thing he has is candy made from milk that looks like carmels. Pretty good. Anyway. Thanks for the email and all the messages from everybody! I miss all of you!

Love

Ben/Elder Battraw

P.S Can you send the recipes for chocolate chip cookies or anything else that we normally have at home. My companion and I want to give it a try cooking them here!