Opa!
This week was pretty crazy. There was lot of stuff going on. I had my first baptism of the mission on Saturday so that was exciting. It's always awesome to watch people go into the waters of baptism. Her dad baptized her so that was special. There was tons of food there. I swear as missionaries we eat more food than anyone on the planet. I have definitely gained weight. According to the scale I used at a member's house (not sure if it was correct) I weigh about 165. I now have a thin layer of missionary fat glaze on me that I dont know what to do with. I promise I use the exercise time every day but it just isn't helping. Estou engordando!! My roommate said a really funny thing to me this week and I just had to write it down to send home...so I always sing in the shower because that's what I do. When I got out of the shower one of my Brazilian roommates said, "You sing like a black woman...of the gospel!" I just about died laughing because this elder knows barely any English but he figured out a way to say that. I was impressed, haha!
I guess the big news of this week is that I got a new companion today! The Mission President called last night at about 7 horas to tell my companion that he was going to be transferred. I knew it was coming because of my email I sent to the President. I went on a division with a zone leader this past week and while I was with him the president called him and wanted to speak to me. The Mission President doesn't just call you. He told me he got my email and that he was sorry for the way things have played with my fubeca companion and that there would be a change made. I was super happy to hear this. Little did I know that my companion also got a call from the President and he basically got burned. It made the rest of the week a little awkward but worth it since I have an awesome companion now. He's from Sao Paulo and ony has one month left but, is still super excited to work and to finish training me. He talks a lot and already is helping me bastante with Portuguese. I can't wait. This puts some new responsibility on me becuase I have to remember where all of our investigators live, all the road names, what everyone needs and stuff like that. It's really hard for me to remember names here because they're all so different and hard to say. This week is going to be hard cause of that but we'll get through it.
While I was on division and the other Zone Leader was with my companion they challenged 2 of our investigators to be baptized and the investigators said they wanted to. So exciting! They're the women we've been teaching for a while and have become pretty good friends with, Mariana and Luciana. Another thing I finally did while on division was to make contacts. It's still a new and exciting thing for me because my companion never wanted to do it but, I feel like I did pretty well with the whole thing and understood a lot of what people were saying. They seemed to understand me without problems either. I think my Portuguese is really improving. There's always that one conversation per day that just makes me frustrated because I can't understand squat, usually during the lunches with the members. People here just talk so dang fast! The Brazilians who are not from Recife even say this. You can't even see their mouths moving, it's kind of just a blur.
Missionary transfers today were weird because I was the newest missionary there. It's not normal to be transferred within your first 12 weeks because you're in training but my training didn't quite work out so I guess I'm the exception. All the elders I talked to were super surprised at my Portuguese for only being here for one month. I can't really tell if it's good or not because I still have to translate almost everything in my head before I say it instead of just thinking in Portuguese. I can't wait until I can do that.
I'm going to close this letter up. I'm really glad to be here. The members here are awesome and they're starting to like me more because I can talk more, haha. This work is awesome and I've come to realize that the world is bigger than we think and there's more going on in other places than we think. People on the street you pass by actually have lives and God cares about each and ever yone of them. Wow, there are so many people in the world and they don't even know what they're missing if they don't have the gospel. That's why this work is so important. Eternal families is what it's all about. I think the more time I spend here the more I realize that because I'm far away from my family. Well, Love ya'll and miss you. Hope everything is awesome in the U.S.
Elder Carroll
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