3 March 2014

Thats pretty cool to hear about! Gilbert Temple being dedicated! I got some emails from Talley about the dedication and they said it was really cold and windy.  I was a little surprised, its Arizona!  Congrats for Stirling and Jake, thats awesome!  Enders Game,  need to put that on my list of movies to watch when I get back home. I don´t know if I already told you, but when I get back I´m having a 2 week long movie festival with all of my friends to watch all the films that I missed.   Got a call from the secretary of the mission that said that a package has arrived in Manaus, but hopefully I´ll be able to pick it up when somebody delivers them to Porto Velho. Should be only a month.

  My week has been a little bit more interesting. Monday, p day as normal.  Stayed at home and cleaned and cleaned some more. Houses here are hard to maintain clean b/c they are all open to the outside and we track in a lot dirt when we get home. Tuesday was an exchange.  We had elders who arrived here who didn´t know how to get to their new area so my companions and one of the APs went with them to show them around their new area. I stayed in my area with a member and got to be senior companion for a day.  Went really well, taught some pretty good lessons and found a whole bunch of new people to teach.  Wednesday, studied, and then after our normal study, the APs did exchanges in our area, so I stayed with one AP in one half of our area while the other went with Elder Housely to a neighborhood called Marcus Fieres with is clear across our area.   To give a little picture of how big our area here is, to travel across our area on foot from corner across to the opposite corner would probably take 4-5 hours. We use the bus a lot here.  We managed to baptize a lady that night.  She is 95 years old, and it took 2 of us to baptize her.  Elder Housley and I helped her down the stairs into the font and then helped get her under the water and then out.  Went pretty smoothly.  Thursday and Friday we stayed at home b/c Elder Housley was sick, and couldn´t leave the house. So I studied and studied, watched The District, Finding faith in Christ, and other church films that we have. Time passed fairly quickly so it was okay. Saturday, left and had a normal day.  Nothing extraordinary happened.   Sunday, church, after church had lunch, and then we left to do visits.  Did a lot of walking and not a lot of visits.  Right now in Brasil, Carnaval is starting, so if we want to have really good visits we try to get there before 6:30/7:00pm b/c then people start leaving for the parties and getting drunk.  They also play really loud music all the time. One night, our neighbors played music until 3am.  Was a little hard to sleep that night.   But everything here is going great. 

  This week has some potential to be really good, sou animado de mais!  P day has already been pretty good, so hopefully that rest of the week will be as well!  Have a great week! Miss all of you!

Love 

Elder Battraw