bom Dia familia y amigos!!!!!
Nossa senhora, I started writing this email, and first few sentenses were in portugues, so I erased it and am starting again.
How is everyone doing!!!!???? Life is super good here on the other side of the equator. It was a pretty normal week. Well, kind of pretty normal. As normal as normal gets here I guess you can say.
To start things off, I went on a division this week with my companion from the MTC, Sister Andersen! Crazy right, both of us got here 3 months ago, and we were in an area that neither of us were familiar with. It was really funny. When my district leader told me I was with her, I panicked, I was like.... I DON~T KNOW WHAT I WILL SAY, AND SHE DOESN~T EITHER!!! He was just like... Pay attention, and if you think you understood, you probably did, and tell peo0ple that you are really new here still, so if they don~t understand, they can ask questions. But it was so good to see her! We caught up with everything. Talked about everything that was happening, and so on. It was really funny, people would walk up and talk to us, because they~ve never seen americans. but of course everyone thinks i~m from here... or japan. same thing. but they would come up to us and just say random things that they know in english. it was really really easy to make contacts with people because everyone wanted to talk to us. Thats never happened to me, becuase everyone thinks i~m brazileira. But it was really good.
At one point in the day, we were teaching this family, and in the middle of the lesson, we hear clapping at the door. all of a sudden i hear in the low voice of elder shortland, ``you gotta be freaking kidding me.´´Elder Shortland found this family like a week before, and were planning on teaching them too. Someone on this particular day
So then later that day, we are walking and this lady is like.... enter enter! so us two confused americans enter, and all of a sudden, i realize she~s a prostitute. she was wearing tiny tiny tiny tiny clothes. and red lipstick that was all over her teeth, and dark eye liner smudged on her face. And she just starts confessing all of her sins to us. i was like.... oh my gosh.. what is happening. and then she tried to steal our cell phone, so we ended up just running. it was so funny.
oh culture shock of the week. the elders asked us if we could pass this one lady. so we~re like... sure! so we pass her house and ask to teach her a lesson. she~s 20 years old has a child who is like...6 and another child who is 1, and her husband!!! has another daughter who is 26. He~s like 1000. it was so weird. i was so hit with culture shock, that i forgot all of my portugues.
but something cool happened. we found this one lady. but she didn~t know her address so we told her we would call her to set up an appt. we ended up not being able to get ahold of her. but then, we were walking, helping the elders, and this lady was like.... enter enter! so we enter!! and realize it was her! We taught her the restauracao, invited her to be baptized and she said yes! WOOOOOOO!!!!!! We invited a lot of people to baptism this week, and we~re seeing the miracles!!! Happy day!
lets see.... i think thats about it.
love sister marshall