[Did you know that sugar cane is actually the biggest world crop by
weight (according to Guns, Germs, and Steel). So Brazil still has hope
as long as they focus on gasohol and sugar instead of drinking alcohol.] They do have a lot of gasohol here. It is weird because the car
exhaust smells like the drunk people. Before the mission I was oblivious
to drunk people/booze smell. Now I can smell it a mile away. It is
like a red flag when some guy comes up and talks to you.
[Thanks for the photos. Well, maybe not the one of the bathroom. That one was from an old abandoned shack, right?] That bathroom was our nice outside, poolside bathroom. We probably
shouldn't have used it because when you flushed the toilet all of the
stuff just went down a 'canal' and stayed under the concrete floor. It
didn't really go anywhere. The worst part is the concrete floor had a
hole in it so you could see/smell it all. Yay!
Carnaval is Friday to Tuesday so our work has slowed down
considerably. Nobody wants to talk to us, everyone is drunk, everyone is
travelling, scantily clad women are everywhere, kids are throwing eggs
and flour at each other. The other day we were talking down the street
and two gangs of punks with eggs started charging and screaming and I
thought they were going to pummel us but they just threw eggs at each
other. We were just chilling walking by on the curb. Luckily, there were
no casualties from the cross fire. The place just seems to go into
party/club mode. Last year my area was just dead, everybody just
travelled and it was all calm and pleasant. Fortaleza is one of
the boring places to do Carnaval too. I can only imagine what it is
like in Salvador, Recife or Rio de Janeiro. We had about 30 people at
church, but we had 2 investigators!
[I related a story from a book I'm reading that told of a woman changing from being an extremely rough and abrasive individual at the time of her conversion to a quite different character years later when she went to the temple.] That is a good story. You see that a lot here. "Crazy" people that
have a hard time leaving
[specific denomination] blasphemies behind etc. They slowly
change and stuff like that but in the mean time you see some crazy
stuff. They have a lot of good, faithful people here though. It always
amazes me and it probably always will. Converts just change so much
faster than us people born in the church. Most youth don't do anything
until some trial at 16 or 17 and then they receive an answer. These
converts hit the ground running and are firm from day one. They don't
have all the things we have in the US and still keep trucking. The
Gospel really does change people and changes them fast depending on
their desire. It is a perfect Gospel that is meant for billions of
different people; Only God could make an eternal plan that can meet the
ever-changing world and it inhabitants!
No comments:
Post a Comment