The Classiest Nut in Brazil

Woot woot, another week of living the missionary life here in Bento Gonçalves, Brazil (be sure to put brazil under the address mom :D thx)

I am going to attempt to drop pictures on here....i'm not quite sure how this will work, but I will try....

well, i'll start again in another email....

but for now, the carne...

we helped three families move here this past week, and when people here move, they move....everything...everything from all of their cabinets, the refrigerator, to even the kitchen sink, its theirs. also, nobody lives at ground level....they either live up a lot of stairs, or down a lot of stairs....so that makes the moving process really fun XD.... also, when we were moving one of the families, they were watching Cars 2...the secret agent one, but it was in portuguese...no big deal right? well...think Mater. in porguese... It was hillarious listening to a guy trying to immitate Larry the Cable guy in portugese.. hahahaha.... anyways, we were clapping doors this week...we did a bunch of that because a bunch of our investigators have been not reading, not praying, and not going to church...which means that they're ripe for not being investigators anymore....but we were clapping doors, and we were out in the boondocks, and elder bryant had to go to the bathroom really bad....and there are no public bathrooms here...just FYI...so what do we do? we go to a bar. those always have bathrooms right??? yup...we walked in...the bar got silent, and elder bryant asked...so, wheres the bathroom? and everybody just started laughing and laughing....the bartender pointed to a door, and said help yourself.....fun stuff :D

we have another baptism this week, we don't know who is going to baptize here, but it'll be one of us... her name is Enicir, and a wondeful lady whose daughters both joined the church, and decided that she needs to know what they now belive....she's super active and very fun and smart...

also, Maria and Adriano are probably going to get married this week hopefully!!!! miracles do happen, they thought that if they got married that they would lose a lot of money that they were getting from the government (notice that the lot of money is used loosely, and signifies just barely sixty bucks) but the bishop talked to them and told them how his mother-in-law was able to survive through the same situation.....so hopefully this week we'll go to the court :D

So...my companion is terribly mean, I mean that with the most loving respect of course, but he is malicious when it comes to jokes.... he got to do a baptizmal interview over in Farropila, the city next to ours...and so we did another division...aka we went on exchanges....except he left me this time...and another elder came with me.....but not the senior companion from there...no, that would be too nice....Elder Nelson, the same Elder Nelson who was in my district at the CTM, meaning he had less than two weeks experience out in the field also, was my new companion for the day....and I was in charge of meeting and planning which investigators to contact...where to tract...etc.... yeah, we enjoyed the bliss that we experienced when people talked to us, and we only comprehended I dont know, every other word if we were lucky? eh... oh well, we did well, taught 8 lessons, and asked a person to be baptized and she accepted...except she is moving next week, but her husband is an inactive member who got really excited when we clapped their door...he opened the door and grinned, and told us that he hadn't seen missionaries since 12 years ago when he was baptized...but now that he has a son, and a wife, he wants to start going again.... :/ yay, except they're moving to Santa Maria....the mission next to ours....BAH Humbug! oh well

we helped a guy build a house on saturday....layed bricks, made cement, learned how to make reinforced cement w/ rebar, yada yada yada..it was really fun though....

questions from mother....

1. yes, we have electricity...we live in the city, and our apparment has been slowly growing nicer over the last 12 years that the church has been renting it...we now have a stove, a fridge, a shower head that heats up water as it comes out....and safe water to drink...well, relatively...they stopped giving us waterbottles at the CTM b/c they were breaking out in the field....so the missionaries here have begun a new method of drinking water...when you move to a new area...you drink about a gallon of tap water your first day... you get sick to your stomach and feel terrible for about a day and a half....after that, youre in the clear to drink all the water you want from that area...now there's judgement calls, like when you ask an investigator for a glass of water, and he brings out a rusted tin cup and pours water out of a beer bottle..... but yeah, fun stuff....we get a card that gets a little bit of money put on it twice a month so we can buy food for breakfast or dinner if we so desire...but really, we only eat one meal a day....which makes it really easy to fast...which we do more than i've ever done before....

anyways, the church is true..pray about it if you haven't already. God never lies.

Boa Sorte,

Elder Tyler Eliason

the first photo is of us on our first week here in the CTM, my companion is the one on the right, and the elder in the middle is Elder Brito, the one with the "list" XD