Christmas

Greetings from Osasco, SP!  We had a really good week down here!  Elder Guamangallo and I opened the area and it´s been a lot of building, but this week we´ve seen the Lord bless us and our hard work pay off.  Here´s some of the cool stuff that happened this week:

First off, we had an AWESOME mission Christmas party!  It was at the church owned camp in Caucaia, sort of the country of São Paulo, and it was beautiful.  At the party I got to see my original MTC district again, this time a year and a half later.  The ban on soccer was also lifted for a couple hours which made a lot of elders really happy.  We also presented our skit as a zone and it went great!  That was a lot of fun, although acting is a lot harder in Portuguese, haha.

Elder Guamangallo and I found a family this week!  They live on a street close to our house and as we were walking to begin our work for the day we struck up a conversation with the mom who invited us in to teach her, her husband, and her two teenage children.  They´ve all agreed to be baptized, which is awesome!  We have another appointment with them tomorrow and we´re hoping everything works out great.

We also taught a man named Marco, a referral from the orchestra concert at the church.  He´s in his fifties and has a young family and is totally open to anything about Christ.  We taught him about the Restoration and left a Book of Mormon, which he agreed to read with care.  We invited him to church and he said he would definitely come, as long as nothing came up at the last minute.  We agreed to call him an hour before church but when we tried to we found out that we had the wrong number!  We were a little worried so we said a prayer as a companionship and asked God that he would remind Marco of the commitment he made to go to church.  When we got to church he wasn´t there, which was disappointing.  I went to use the bathroom and when I came back guess who my companion was talking with in the chapel?  That´s right, Marco!  It was awesome!  The sacrament meeting was absolutely great, all about the Atonement, and Marco really enjoyed it.  He even read the Book of Mormon passage we left with him!  We´re excited for him!

That´s about it for this week.  Keep the faith!

Your friend,

Elder Carter David Morgan

Chicken Hearts and Testimony

Greetings from Osasco, SP!  Things are going well down here in the beautiful land of jungles and smog and we had a lot of fun this week in the Novo Osasco B area.  Here´s the down low:

After district meeting while we were waiting to do follow-up with our district leader, we started a foosball competition with the zone using the table that the church has.  Elder Lopes, a missionary from Cape Verde, and I totally DOMINATED.  Six games in a row, baby!  I give him the credit, as I think foosball may be the national sport of Cape Verde.  I have no information to base this claim off of, but I´m going to go with it.

I definitely ate a chicken heart this week.  Wait, scratch that.  I ate FOUR chicken hearts this week!  I guess it´s kind of a delicacy here in Brazil.  Why they eat chicken hearts, I do not know.  It´s cheaper to buy lunch meat down here than chicken hearts, haha.

Had a great experience this week where we were working in one of the poorer parts of our area.  An appointment had fallen through so we stopped to say a prayer and ask for direction on what we should do.  We felt prompted to continue a bit further into the neighborhood and walked until we hit a dead end.  There we met a family, introduced ourselves as servants of Jesus Christ, and were able to pick up a lot of investigators because of it!  You never know how the Lord is preparing his children to hear the Gospel.

We had Elder W. Rodriguez´s birthday party this week at a member´s home.  It was pretty awesome, mostly because I got to drink Guarana and eat cake with Kit Kat bars.

That´s about it for this week.  Keep the faith!

Your friend,

Elder Carter David Morgan

Merry December, from Elder Morgan!  I´ll admit, I´m a little homesick for the cold December weather of home, seeing as we´re about to head into summer down here.  But that doesn´t change the fact that the work is good and we´re having lots of fun!

To start off, it rained A TON this past week.  Like, a ton.  The first time we camped out under a gas station for an hour or so just waiting for it to pass because it was coming down in sheets.  Elder Guamangallo and I have a knack for carrying around our umbrellas all day on the days it DOESN´T rain, and then not bringing them the days it does.  We´re not very good at predicting the weather apparently, haha.

(Me waiting in the rain)

(This shows you how crazy the rain is here)

We also had our zone conference this week, which was fun.  It´s always great to hear from the Mission President.  President Del Guerso is a great guy and his words were very inspiring.  He talked about how we shouldn´t judge others becaue everyone is at a different moment of spirituality in their lives, and even though we may be at a high point there might be others that are at a low.  It definitely made me think.  We also got to watch the Pixar short, "One Man Band," which is hilarious.

Also at zone conference I got to see some of my old friends.  I´ve included pictures of Sister Culp and I, both trying to do sporty things.  As you can see, we don´t know a lot about sports.

The Portuguese is coming along well and I rarely feel totally lost anymore, but by some weird stroke of luck all of my church leaders have the WEIRDEST accents.  My bishop, ward mission leader, and mission president all sound like they came from Mars, not Brazil.  It´s always fun in coordination meetings, especially because our ward mission leader likes to speak English with me, but quite frankly I can´t tell what language he´s speaking at all.  "What, Irmão Adão?  Are you speaking English or Portuguese?"  Good times, good times.

During lunches with our ward members, Elder W. Rodriguez constantly introduces my companion as a Peruvian, even though he´s from Ecuador.  Not sure what that´s about, but I think it´s pretty dang funny.

My nickname of "Captain" from California has continued in Brazil, only this time I´m "Cápitan America."  It´s pretty sick.  I got this nickname mostly because I like to give the other elders a hard time by pointing at random objects such as cups, floors, pencils, or the sky, and saying, "You know who invented that?  An American."

Okay, weird story of the week.  While contacting a potential investigator a woman that we didn´t recognize came out of the neighboring house.  We asked her about her neighbor and she gave us some information.  She then saw our nametags and asked if we were men of God.  When we told her that we most certainly were she hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, and then did the same to my companion, all while we stood as stiff as a board.  She then began weeping, put a cross keychain in my shirt pocket, and went back inside, praising God.  Not sure what that was about, but hopefully it helped her.

Things about Brazil:

- Stroganaff is, like, the king of all meals here in Brazil.  Everyone loves it, and I must admit that it´s pretty dang good.

- Brazilians think that McDonald´s is LEGIT.  Like, straight up fancy.  It´s considered high class.

- Snow is fascinating to Brazilians.  My roommates were legitimately shocked when I told them that, yes, I had indeed seen snow in my life.

That´s about it for me.  Thanks!

Your friend,

Elder Carter David Morgan

- Beijo e braco