I HAD MY FIRST
DREAM IN PORTUGUESE THIS WEEK.
Ok I am sorry
for not being able to respond to everyone´s emails last week, there is hardly
any time!!! But I promise to do better this week:)
Wow I seriously
love this place.
So this week we
had to hop in the van again to drive through San Paulo to the Policía Federalía
for stuff with our visa which was SO NICE because we essentially spend every
minute in the same room for 8+ hours a day, the only break being our actividade
física at night time where they have a volleyball/basketball court, a
mini gym with ping pong tables and weights, and the most hilarious little tiny
track to run on! Imagine an alley between two buildings and then pave a
little circle with some pull-up bars in the middle. We tracked it and its like
20 laps to get to a mile and a half so it feels like I´m a little hamster in a
spinning wheel that doesn´t go anywhere haha :) But it is my saving grace I
LIVE FOR THAT HAMSTER BALL. Also another thing about this place is that all of
their toilet paper is already torn into little 2 square pieces, and everytime I
go to grab some it feels like a legit napkin dispenser!! (which as weird as it
sounds is actually so nice haha).
On our P-day we
got to walk around the city of Sáo Paulo and explore a little bit which was the
most amazing thing because it was exactly the perspective that you start to
miss when learning the lessons and teaching and trying to absorb Portugues as
quickly as you can. My companion and I really struggled this week because
initially, we would just sit and plan our lessons so painstakingly deliberate
and exact - trying to copy down and translate all these sentences because we
wanted our phrases to be exact and correct but we would spend like 2 hours
preparing a 20 minute lesson.. TO OUR INSTRUCTOR who was just pretending
to be an investigator. And the thing was, even with all of that planning, I
would still go into the lessons and just feel SO STRESSED and it was the most
frustrating thing. There was one lesson that we were about to go into and I
just kind of broke and started crying RIGHT before we walked in and poor Sister
Barlow was just like ahhh.. I have no idea how to handle this kind of thing
?!?! And then while she was praying, SHE started crying and it was one of the
most humbling moments of these past two weeks, especially because the two of us
have really been able to pick up the language a little easier than the other
missionaries in our district. But the amazing thing about that lesson was that we
stopped trying to just do it all ourselves. I realized that by being so
meticulous and exact about everything, we really were not leaving much room for
relying on the spirit and the REAL converting power right, we just wanted to
try to handle it all ourselves. When we stopped being that block, the spirit
was able to be there and the amazing thing is that we went into our lessons
with almost NO stress at all (which is pretty incredible considering up to this
point) because we knew that we were standing in place of our Savior, letting
our love for them replace any fear of not being able to teach whatever lesson
about the Book of Mormon wrong or with the wrong grammar. It was so
powerful.
The language is
actually starting to click though it´s amazing how much I feel the prayers on
our behalf working and Heavenly Father giving us the extra boost to do His
work. I essentially say every prayer I can in Portugues and my companion and I
had an jejum de ingles (literally sounds like je-jum je - ingles with all
french ´j´s) and I seriously love how fluid the language is! Trying to
translate things is actually hilarious though because we are looking up so many
words in the dicionario and asking people without any real context so I feel
like Chandler from Friends who just used a Thesaurus to replace words and it
actually just creates a lot of sentences that make zero sense hahaha.
But this place
is amazing because you just feel so much support and strength, from a outros
missionarios, from your irmáos, but most powerfully and most importantly from
Christ. Man being able to think about Him and teach others to come unto Him is
seriously the coolest thing.
Love you all and
hope things are good!!
Eu amo vocés!!!
Sister Staheli
