Another Email - 3/23/10

Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 8:48 AM

You can say that again. It seems like just yesterday I got here in Jundiai, and now it´s almost time for transfers again, haha. I´ve been here nearly two months, too! Where does the time go? When I arrived in Anapolis, I had less than a year on the mission, now I´ve got almost a year and 5 months! We had Stake Conference this week, and it was a blast. I truly felt that the speakers where speaking directly to me, and it helped me with a few answers to questions I´d been praying about the whole week.

Perhaps this year the labor in the garden will be hard, but at the least I´ll be home to help next year. It´ll be interesting for me. On the one hand, I miss a good number of the foods from back home, on the other, next year, I´ll surely be missing the food from here.

It´s not actually SUPER common that an average woman goes and hits on an Elder, unless she´s drunk, which isn´t too rare on the weekends, but well, here in Anapolis, things can get dangerous, haha. There are a lot of girls in the wards who are, as we term it, "sympathetic" towards Elders, especially to those Utah boys with their blonde hair and blue eyes. If Colin were here, he´d suffer, haha. As to skimpy swimwear, it´s not really that they wear swim clothes, so much as they well, as one Elder puts it "Some days you see girls who wear clothes that´d make a lingerie mannequin ashamed."

Or, as Sister Tobias so lovingly put it to the recent group of Elders who arrived.

"Elders, here in Goias, there are a lot of pretty girls, and as it gets hot really early in the day, many of them don´t dress in Church Standard. So when you go to shake a girl´s hand - - Stick your arm WAAAY out!"

But I suppose I ought to be ashamed, haha. Brasilian girls aren´t the devilish serpents that sometimes Elders can make them out to be. In fact, on the whole, there´re pretty much the same as American girls. When they´re rich and well dressed, they can be snobby little punks who you can´t wait to see condemned at the last day. When they´re nice people, they´re nice people. When they´re bad, they´re bad. For every girl on the street who hasn´t got a notion of black and white in her head, there´s always the Sisters on the mission who, more often than not, pull more weight than a good number of Elders.

Brasil in general is a lot like the US, yet in it´s own way, it´s also really different. It´s funny how, some days, I don´t ever want to leave. It´s like they say, where an Elder serves, he becomes eternally a defender of that place forever after in his life. Two years ago I didn´t even think about Brazil. Two years from now, I can´t imagine my life without this place. It´s strange how it works out.

I still have to hurry up here and send my report to Pres.

Love,

Bryan