14 July 2014

Thanks for the pictures! Super cool that Jake is leaving for a mission as well right now! Hope that he has a great time on the mission!  Saturday is the big day huh?  Have a great day!  I´ll be cheering you on from here in Brasil.  I´ll get to the dealings of the World Cup a little big later into the letter.  Thats no fun about the bike tires, we had the happen a lot in Boise.  Lots of stickers there as well, so it wasn´t unusual for every week to have at least one flat tire.  You get pretty fast at changing a flat tire.  I did know one of Roses companions here in brasil.  His companion is a member of the branch here in Porto Velho, Tancredo Neves.  He came home briefly b/c of medical problems and i got the chance to meet. They even had a picture of him and ross up on the wall of the chapel.  It was super cool b/c one day i was talking with him after sacrament meeting and he mentioned that one of his companions was from IN as well and after a few questions we figured out it was Ross.  Super cool.  Shout out to Ross, Elder Cruz (jackson) is back in the mission field in São Paulo!

   So this week was an interesting week here.  i´ll get the final report of the world cup out.  So this Tuesday was the Brasil vs Germany game.  This game entered the record books to say the least.  Within the first 29 minutes of the game, Germany had made 5 goals, 4 within 6 minutes.  It was fast enough that people here were still thinking that they were replaying the last goal when Germany had already made the next.  To say that day was a day of sadness and mourning and understatment.  In the house where I was watching we had people crying and others sitting in stunned silence as they watched Brasil team get destroyed.   The game ended with Brasil making a goal in the last 2 minutes of the game to bring the final score to 7-1.  It was a very sad day here in Brasil.  The game was basically repeated as Brasil competed for 3rd place against Holand and the game ended with the score being 3-0 to Holland. This was not a very good time to be Brasilian.  Sunday, the World Cup was brought to an end with Germany vs Argentina, which ended with the German victory of 1-0 making this the 4th time that germany has won the World Cup.  

  So I´ll tell my viewpoint. Monday night we had 4 other elders from other areas staying with us to be able to participate in the get to know your president conference with President Castro.  Super cool to have 4 more elders in the house. Tuesday we all got to know President Castro.  Hes about 55 and hes super cool. He speaks both Portugese and Spanish.  Super cool.  I think that it ´ll be super fun to have him as mission president!  Tuesday we also got to watch the brasil vs germany game.  All of the elders (2 bolivians and 4 americans) were rooting for germany and it was interesting to watch the reactions as the game progressed.  The first goal everyone went crazy, 2nd goal was still really animated, 3rd, what, another goal?, 4th theres no way this is happening, 5th i can´t belive this is happening, 6th again!?! 7th where is brasil!?!.   By the end of the game everyone is the house was rooting for brasil to make at least one goal which they did do in the last 2 minutes.  It was really sad to watch Brasil lose this way b/c they were a very strong team.  Wednesday after all the elders had returned back to their own areas were able to get back to work.  We´ve been talking a lot with less actives here helping them return back to church.  Its been really cool, we´ve been meeting a lot of new people.  Its always interesting to talk with these people.  Never has one ever told me that they do not believe that the church is not true, many of them still have very strong testimonies that the church is true, but haven´t a chance to come back yet.  Its been really awesome.  We met a new young man named Fabío who is super cool as well.  He is pretty awesome and has a strong desire to learn about the gospel which is super cool.  Hes getting ready to be baptized this coming Sunday and we are super excited for him!  We have a couple other investigators who are really excited to learn about the gospel and watching their testimonies grow every day makes everyday here in Brasil worth it! 

  Hope that you all are having a great week this week! Have a fun time with everybody there in house! have an awesome time at the wedding! Miss all of you!

Love 

Elder Battraw

7 July 2014

Tom won a 32 inch TV! Wow thats super cool! Is it his own personal tv or what?  Super cool and super lucky.  Thats sounds like there is going to be a lot of people out there in IN!   Thats great that the house is all finished up now except for the bathrooms!   hopefully everything will be moved over there quickly.  Sounds like a good week anyway! 
  So this week here in Brasil.  Tuesday was pretty normal.  District Meeting as usual all the way out in the downtown of the city.   Good Meeting.  When we were coming back on the bus, we almost got pulled over by an ambulance b/c right in front of us an accident had happened  with someone on a motorcycle and a car.  Yikes.  Accidents are always happening here with motos (theres some portugûes for you!)  b/c everyone here has a moto.  Pretty sad to see.   Wednesday was pretty normal along with Thursday.  Friday was pretty cool b/c that night the branch here had what is called an Arreal.  Basically its a Brazilian country dance night.  Everybody was dressed up as cowboys and cowgirls (which is suprisingly popular here) and there was music. Pretty fun night, but we only got to stay until 9:30, which is no fun at all.  I have a few pictures that I will have to see as well.  Friday was also BRASIL VS COLÔMBIA.  Its was a pretty intense game, but Brasil won out in the end.  The only problem was that their star player Neymar, got a vertabrae broken during the game and is imoblized for the next 6 weeks and the captain of the team is now banned from playing in the next game against Germany b/c he got two yellows card in this World Cup.  This Tuesday against Germany will be interesting to say the least.  The World Cup is pretty crazy here.  Missionaries are not allowed to wear any kind of sports jerseys out in the streets b/c it can get pretty crazy.  To say that Brasilians are supportative of their team is an understatement. Brasilians are crazy about football/futebol/fussball.    As investigators goes, its been okay this week.  This week has been a lot of knocking on doors trying to find people to teach and hasn´t lead to a lot of sucess.  This week we had ward counsel and we reiceved a list of less active families to work with for this week!  This will be an awesome week!  Tomorrow our new mission President is coming out here to Rondônia so we´ll be able to meet him! I ´m super excited!

  Hope that you all have a great week!  Have an awesome time with the wedding and moving everything from house to house!    I miss all of you! Have a great week!

Love

Elder Battraw

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

26 May 2014

Its already the last week of school! Super cool! When will be graduation? Will it be in a week or two?  Back when I was in Boise, we were on bikes for a month so during that time we got into several bike problems so I was able to pick up a few things on how to do maintenance on a bike.  We had several members of the ward who were avid bike riders as well who helped us out whenever we had a problem with one of the bikes or all three of them at times.  Wow, already out swimming, I agree right now its a little cold, here as well, I´ll explain later.  Super cool that Grandma Young and Spencer are coming on out for graduation.  When is the wedding going to be?

  This week was running back and forth again.  Monday was the normal p day, hanging out relaxing.  Tuesday was Zone Conference which was cool.  Got  to see the whole Zone.  We all had to introduce ourselves to everyone in the front singing everything that we said.  We had someone do their introduction to funky (Brazilian version of rap and pop mixed together), had someone do it to les miserables, primary music, and I did it to singing in the rain. Pretty fun to do one of the sisters was videotaping the whole thing as well:) Wednesday till Friday was running around visiting people.  We´ve  been using the bus a lot these past few weeks to make visits out on the far end of our area.   Its been pretty fun. Saturday the weather did something very weird, it hit 68 degrees, and with wind chill (yes there was wind chill!!!!) it was maybe 64.  It was exactly like Indiana.  I could not believe it.   Cloudy and overcast both Saturday and Sunday and I think the city almost called a state of emergency:).  Lets just say people here are not prepared for temperture below 70 degrees.   Almost everybody we talked to talked about how they didn´t like the cold, and usually they turned to me after saying that and say,  but this is normal for you right?  Definetely interesting.  Saturday we had the baptism of an 18 year old whose family almost entirely are members of the church.  He finally made the choice to be baptized as well and it was super cool to  see.

  Well that was my week in a quick summary.  Hope that you all are doing okay! I miss you all! Have an awesome week!

Love

Elder Battraw