30 June 204

The house is looking pretty nice! When are you all officially going to move on in?   I can´t wait to see the house when its all done!  Phil is back now as well with Adrienne coming back this week!  Wow, it does feel like everyone is coming back!  Super cool.  I´ll still be waiting one more year, today was 11 month mark here in the mission field so that was super exciting.  Band looks like a lot of fun.  How did the parades go?   Those new clothes are pretty nice!

  This week was pretty normal here in Brasil.  Nothing extremely exciting happened this week.  Tuesday was District meeting with two districts which was cool.  Wednesday was pretty normal, just walking and talking.  Right now we are trying to find more people to teach along with reactivate a lot of the less actives here .  The branch here just needs a few more priesthood holders along with 30 more people to be able to turn into a ward so right now we are trying to do a lot of reactivation!   Its been going pretty well so far and hopefully we´ll continue to have success.   Thursday and the rest of the week were pretty normal. Not much happened out of the ordinary.  Saturday was Brasil playing against Chile which turned out to be really really intense.  To give you a good idea of how the World Cup games work,  There are two 45 minutes halfs, with a 20 minute break in between.  If you reach the end of the 90 total are the scored is still tied, there is 30 more minutes added on to the game to give the teams a little bit more time to rest and make a goal.  If by the time those 30 minutes are up and the score is still tied, they start doing penalty kicks to make goals which simply is one player and opposing teams goalie.  The player has one opportunity to kick the ball and make a goal and the goalie has to try and save it.  Each team has 5 penalty kicks and the team with the most goals at the end wins.  Brasil and Chile didn´t manage to break the tie of 1-1 until the very last penalty kick which Brasil managed to score and win.  We were with a bunch of other members and their families and when Brasil made the final goal, they all started jumping up and down screaming they were so happy.   Pretty darn funny to see.    This week here as well Saturday night I think it dropped down to 68 degrees and everyone the next day was all bundled up with long sleeves they were so cold.  Its kinda of weird of you get accustomed to the heat so much that when it drops it can feel a lot colder than it really is!   

  That was my week in short.  Hope that you all can have a great week this week! Miss all of you! 

Love

Elder Battraw

23 June 2014

That sounds like a pretty cool week! I remember that first trek four years ago with all the mud and everything.  I think I still have pictures of that trek in one of my boxes. That was a hard trek as well, but we learned a lot from that trek experience.New house, super cool!" I need pictures and an address and new phone number if its changing.  I have to  get it all in to the mission office here to be to get everything settled if they need to contact you! Repainting the whole house!  We are finishing up repainting the house here in Brasil trying to get it all ready to go.  Its been taking awhile but its getting close to being finished!

  So this week, Tuesday was Zone training which was pretty cool!  Learned a little pit about President Castro who will be getting here this Friday to do the official trade of mission presidents.  We´ve heard a little bit about him from the other members and missionaries but it will be nice to be able to finally get to meet him.  Tuesday was also Brasil vs Mexico which ended up in a tie!  It was a really good game with the final score ended up being 0-0  b/c neither team managed to get past the other and make a goal.  There were so close ones though and the goalie for Mexico is really really good. Wednesday was pretty normal, we were able to do some visits with a member from a different ward here in Porto Velho and she showed us and introduced us to all her family here in our area.  Its super awesome to be able to work with here and see her desire to be see her entire family in the church.  Thursday here was an activity for the branch and we were invited so we got to talk with some of the people and got into some pretty competitive competitions of ping pong.  You would be surprised how good Brasilians are at ping pong.  Super cool activity, lots of food!  Friday we had an activity with the ward to help with our investigators that ended up being canceled.   We were a little bit put down about that.  Saturday was nuts.  We had an English class that we´d been giving to people, but nobody had been showing up to the classes so we canceled, but Saturday we got a phone call saying that there was somebody waiting for us there at the chapel, waiting to be taught English so we hurriedly got ready and ran out the door to the chapel, and we were able to teach this older lady some English basics.  Turns out shes a preschool teacher here and she also knows how to play the organ.  First person here that I´ve meet that knows how to play the organ. Later that day we made a trip out to the South Zone of the city and did some interviews for some other missionaries. To get there you have to get 2 buses, and then 2 buses to get back, about 1 hour each way. Tiring, but good. Pretty cool day in all.  Germany tied with Ghana 2-2.  Sunday was pretty calm.  Talked to some investigators and we also found out that the United States almost beat Portugal (one of the best teams in the world) and managed to tie with them 2-2.  Super exciting!  

  Thanks for writing! Hope you all have a great week! Miss all of you!

Love Elder Battraw

9 June 2014

Thats super cool to have had graduation this week!  Wish I could´ve been there. Its a little weird to think that Tom graduated.  When I come back Sam will be a senior, thats a little weird for me to think about.  Everything will be a little bit different when I come back.  Spencer looks like hes a lot older now.  I honestly didn´t recongize him when I saw him in the photo the first time that I looked at it.  Brooke Sauder was the one that I used to hang out with.  She was a really cool friend.  Keep on going with those mission papers.  Hes not going to leave until November at this point.  The MTCs are gettting really full and backed up!
   So this week was super busy .  Tuesday was the normal district meeting but when we got to the chapel we found out that the lock was broken and our key wouldn´t work so we ended up having DM outside, which was cool.  Wednesday was just running around trying to talk to all of our investigators.  Thursday we got to go out to an interior and spend the night there with the elders.  Their area is super cool.  Pretty big, but it was pretty awesome to be able to spend the day with them.   Friday was back here in Tancredo Neves doing the normal stuff.  Saturday was did a division with the elders from the South Zone area do be able to do baptismal interviews in the two areas and we ended leaving the cell phone with the other companionship when we started the exchange, so we spent the exchange asking to use peoples phones to be able to communicate with the other companionship.  Fun stuff.  Our bapisms for this week all fell through, bummer. Hopefuly this next week will be better . Overall this week has been pretty good, just running around a lot!

Sorry I didn´t write more this week has been a bit of a lot of running around and its still going on! Hope you all have a great week! Miss all of you!

Love

Elder Battraw

2 June 2014

Schools out finally for them !! Graudation is this saturday? Super cool, I want photos!!! I got two packages this week .  One was with muffin mixes and the other was a box full of cookie and other.   I honestly have to say this was one of my favorite packages, the jelly beans and  chex mix are already gone. Thanks so much.   I remember the blood and TB testing, that was super fun.  He needs to get lots of vaccines for his mission as well,  all the fun ones like yellow fever:)

   This week was pretty normal, I wish i could say the something super exciting happened, but this week was just normal.  Monday, the pday, Tuesday was Zone Conference, the last one with President Klein:( Was super cool the conference.  Sister Klein was crying the whole time.   The whole mission is going to miss them.  They leave at the end of this month when President Castro will get here.  The World Cup is getting really close now and Brasil is turning into the colors green and yellow, colors of the brasilian team.  We found out this week that President Klein is letting us be able to watch Brasil play in the World Cup.  Here everybody will be watching when Brasil will play, the city has declared those day holidays and anybody who is attending school that day will watch those games in school.  Its pretty serious here the World Cup all the missionaries are very excited.   The rest  of the week went pretty normally. Lots of teaching. and walking. I have officially declared one pair of my shoes dead and that they cannot be used more.  I did manage to get a new pair of boots to wear.  All of the nice shoes that they sell here are not very durable so lots of the missionaries use boots b/c they are the only thing that hold up for more than 2 months.  I´ll send pictures next week.  We´ve found a  couple of new families to teach now and they´re super excited aobut here about the gospel.  They just need to get married though and they´re working toward it.  We´re super excited for them!!!!  

   Sorry I didn´t write too much this week.  Hopefully this next week I´ll have more to write about.   Hope that you all are doing great. Have fun at the graduation!!!   I miss and love all of you !

Love

Elder Battraw