20 Feb 2011 - Alvorada Area (Dad)

[I mentioned that my brother Mark texted me to say he had seen me on ksl.com in the crowd waiting for the Cougars to leave TCU. I do seem to be the one thing that isn't like the rest in the picture above.] That's odd that Mark was able to recognize you from the back of your head. He must have noticed an argyle sweater that he gave you that one Christmas :) [No chance for autographs for Jeffrey from the basketball team this TCU game; success limits access.] Well I guess it's ok, because I got their autograph from last year, I'll just tell people it is from this year. The BYU scrub fans will never notice and they will be amazed. I was surprised that Elder Cusick's brother played football since the Elder Cusick he is a goofball. He is tall skinny kid and he's like a little brother, he's fun. He's clumsy and goofy and President jokes with him a lot. He got burned pretty badly but he is all smiles and he has healed up nicely. Pres. Batt is a funny guy, he always has a joke. Everyone makes fun of him because he is from Idaho, but he is clever and sharp. I'll miss him, he goes home in August. The new president is from Brazil, from Curitiba (like you know where that is ;) )

["The only place in Central America that I served in that had any terrain that wasn't flat was Costa Rica. The first area I served in there was up in the hills. When it rained, which it did frequently, walking in some of the areas could get a little treacherous. That was the only place that wasn't blazing hot too. I don't remember having the exotic fruit selection you have. All I remember are mangoes, bananas, pineapple, coconuts, papaya, oranges (green ones), and tamarind. We pretty much only drank soda pop and sometimes a tamarind drink or avena (some oatmeal thing)."] It's just flat and hot here and the terrain is perfect for flooding, which happens every time it rains. Everything is built on sand here so they always have problems because lots of water and sand don't mix. In fact, they make big holes in the ground and highways. I have a good friend in the Salvador Sul mission, he is actually singing a solo for Russel M Nelson this weekend. Carnaval is coming up in 2 weeks and I hear it gets crazy down there in Salvador. They have a ton of fruit here, and I haven't tried a lot of them. They have tamarind here too, but it's gross. They eat them raw here, they crack open their shells and eat the "meat" off of the seeds, which is suuuuuuuuuper sour. I had some juice too, but it tasted like sour dirt :) Papaya is 100% nasty and it smells nasty too. ["Man, a Winnie the Pooh wallet. I never got anything that sweet. I'm sure she enjoys your inventive drawings. Kids can be fun, huh?"] I haven't received many things from investigators and members. They people are really nice here though, if you ask then they will give it to you. I just don't ask people because I think that is rude ;) It's fun to play with the kids. They give you hugs and stuff, and even if their parents hate you, they still love you. Plus you get new wallets from them too, maybe I could convince them to put some money in the wallets first......

On the mission you have plenty of time to reflect while you are walking and stuff. Sadly, it give me time to remember how old I am going to be when I get off my mission. I just want to stay here forever, I have no idea what I am going to do when I get off the mission. I need money, an education, a major,.....a wife? maybe I'll wait on that ;) It's so much easier here, I just wake up and work then I go to sleep. I can live my dreams here, back there I have to live reality. My dream is to be a coach, I would love that more than anything in the world but alas it is a dream. I will go back home to my glorious life of cleaning toilets in the middle of the night, dancing with mops...that kind of cool janitor stuff. It will be good I guess, but I still have plenty of time to dream here in Brazil....Terra do Sol. Good luck to all of you people in reality, working everyday. I'll enjoy the coconut water and flip flops. I'll give the drunks some high fives for ya'll this Carnaval!

 Winnie the Pooh wallet

20 Feb 2011 - Alvorada Area (Mom)

The time does seem to fly by. Here in a bit I will be an astoundingly ripe old age of 21. I will have a year on the mission in 4 months whew! Scott will be home then too. [Scott Ross, one of Jeffrey's friends from our ward who is now serving in the Philippines. Linda helps out Sister Ross as a volunteer at the elementary school library.] When Sister Ross writes me she talks about the library too. She is really grateful that you help her.

I already told you that you learn a lot of things when you are a teacher :) [Linda is now one of the Relief Society teachers.] It's good because you get to prepare so many things, but you don't teach all of it but you still learn. I don't remember who, but some apostle or somebody was talking about how much he learned from reading his mom's notebook about her lessons. She didn't teach anywhere near all of it, but she learned a ton. So maybe some day I will learn a ton from your untaught, but still insightful, material :) I think I might have that talk, or maybe it was from Elder Holland.

Things haven't gotten much better with me and my companion, but it's the last week of the transfers so oh well :) We had interviews with Pres. Batt so he probably knows. You have to remember that not all missionaries want to be here and not all of them are excited about the rules. [You should be a companionship of 4, so 2 can go out all the time as switch offs. Then there would be someone left with the sickie, taken in turns.] The ideal thing would be to work in 2 and work everyday like you are supposed to :) It's good here though, there are a lot of good missionaries, a lot more than there are bad ones. I have already made some plans for after the mission to do stuff with them ;) Just dreams really, I don't get my hopes up.

Photos from the archives

13 Feb 2011 - Alvorada Area (Dad)

My companion is feeling better, but not wholly better. We are working though, but not a complete work day. [Jesus the Christ is full of deep doctrine that helps you appreciate much more who Jesus Christ is. I'm sure it wasn't chosen arbitrarily as one of the approved missionary books.] Jesus the Christ is good. The Apostles tell us that we should read it a lot and study it. After all, we are representatives of Him so we should probably know about Him. They also say that we should know more about Him than the people we teach, pastors, etc. I like the way he uses pagan heathens a lot in Jesus the Christ, and he calls people pitiful and pathetic, its cool :) Maybe I will read it in Portuguese one day.

[You are crazy for liking the heat so much, but I guess it is a good crazy for someone in Ceará. The heat didn't bother me most of the time in Central America, but there were some midday times in Nicaragua that sapped the energy out of you and some sweating that was done when going into a house and sitting down after hard walking in the blazing sun. But we just didn't pay much attention to it. It's not like we were the only ones living in it, nor was there anything we could change about it, so why even think about it?] Heat is soooo much better. We can never get away from the cold, you put more clothes on but you are still cold. Air conditioning always works if you can't handle the heat. Just think....Light of Christ, He is the Light of the world------heat. Heat is to good, happiness; cold is to suffering and misery! You probably had rough terrain to walk, here it's flatter than a pancake :)

[Sauce of the chili, huh.] I couldn't remembered what it was called. It's hot sauce! They don't have much here though, and it's weak. Down in Bahia is famous for spicy. Grandma said somebody served/visited there in Salvador (capital of Bahia)

[You mentioned the rough time old geezers like me must have had back in the day in the mission field. Maybe it was occasionally a little rougher, but nothing like Parley P. Pratt, or Ammon, or Paul.] But wait didn't you serve before Paul, Ammon and Parley P Pratt? You couldn't talk about the Restoration in your lessons because it hadn't happened yet ;) I remember the Bishop talked to me about lesson certificates, you get them when you memorize the lessons. Was the MTC in Provo much different?

Did you eat a lot of kinds of fruit on the mission? They have mangos, maracajú (passion fruit; one of the best fruits) bananas, apples, starfruit, sapoti (smells like rotten apples but it's super sweet), açaí, acerola (they are small and red and look like cherries), caju, caja, siriguela (caja and siriguela are the same I'm pretty sure, but they claim they are different; they are small and orange/yellow with a big seed), graviola (big, green with spikes, white inside with big black seeds), pineapples, watermelons.... lots of stuff that you probably don't know. They are all good, well almost all of them. I'm sure they have most of the same fruits there, just with different names. They also have sugar cane juice here too, virtually sugar water but it tastes good :) Did you ever drink coconut water? They sell it everywhere here. The first time I drank it it tasted like grass water :( But I got use to it, and I like it now.

I wrote Mom about the laborious baptism I had Sunday, you can ask her about it because I am lazy.

13 Feb 2011 - Alvorada Area (Mom)

Is today Valentine's Day? I was thinking that was next week. Valentine's Day in Brazil is sometime in June or July. [Mom taught a lesson in church about work and learning responsibility.] I learned that hard work never pays off :) We had some baptisms this past Sunday. The water was nasty dirty in the font, which it usually is. So we decided to drain it and fill it up again. We flipped the switch for the pump and nothing happened. The circuit was 'broken' on the circuit breaker so we flipped the switch up. Every time I flipped the pump switch the circuit 'broke'....therefore the pump didn't work. So we had 3 hours until the baptism and we had to take all the water out and let it fill up again, which takes awhile. So we got buckets and started taking out the water and throwing it into the toilets. 2 kids helped us but it was hot and wet and my gimp finger that I broke and cut and hyperextended was hurting. I knew my past follies would come back to haunt me! It took forever....then the bishop came and flipped the circuit and the pump worked...So all the hard work for nothing :) I guess the Bishop had more faith and the church must use Liahona circuit breakers that work by faith. So I was pouring sweat and I was soaking wet, and President Batt was supposed to come to our church etc etc The baptisms went well though. That's what was exciting this week. My companion has been sick so we haven't been doing too much work. So I don't have many exciting things to tell this week. Wednesday I did Part 1 of 2 for a wedding we are going to have this week. It was just signing papers as a testimony etc. They are getting married on the 18th and hopefully the baptism will be the 20th :) I got a vinyl Winnie the Pooh wallet from a 7 year old girl in the ward, that was pretty cool. She always draws us pictures when we come over for lunch, and I end up drawing and coloring with her as I wait for lunch :)

I'm sure the lesson was a lot better than you thought it was. Sometimes we don't have to announce every detail of the lesson. People are smart and I am sure that they realized which were the key points. I think they like the grizzled, experience-filled stories of Sister Hawkes. They are all from Utah, so they are bored of the normal Mormon childhood :)

7 Feb 2011 - Alvorada Area (Mom)

[Mom explained that temps in the teens and sleet and snow put Texas out of commission for three days, although it didn't stop Mom from making her hair appointment.] Well you always wanted to live in a cold place, so you got your wish. I don't miss the cold and snow one bit. I always wanted to live in Texas but maybe I'm going to have to change that because it's getting cold there. Yep can't miss those hair cuts :) Dad said it was like 80 last week before all of this happened...crazy Texas. [Grocery store parking lot was a zoo with the weather, so Mom gave up on going in.] You could have had Sean go and get some groceries for you so you didn't have to park :) What do you expect from Texans? They don't like the snow and ice. Up in Idaho, and probably New Jersey, they don't close school until the diesel in the school buses freezes, which is rare. How is life as a mom without anyone at home? Everyone else was complaining that the kids were home, but it was just normal for you. Dad was home too, so you could play scrabble or something. Here it is the middle of the summer and hotter than ever. The rain stopped this week so just blasting sun, it's great. My companions all sweat like crazy, it's kind of funny, but I don't really sweat that much here. They all have rags to wipe away the sweat. Our washing machine broke this week so one of these days I'm going to have to wash my clothes...by hand :) I don't have any food or detergent so I will have to wait until the next allowance. This week was boring for me because my companion was sick this whole week so I just left to go eat lunch and teach 1 or 2 lessons. I managed to read 300 pages of Jesus the Christ though :) I'm reading it again, but this time I am marking more stuff in my scriptures. I am learning more too.

7 Feb 2011 - Alvorada Area (Dad)

[I told him about BYU playing at Wyoming where it was -38 degress outside, and Fredette having a slim chance of passing Danny Ainge for the all-time BYU scoring title.] -38 feels the same as the 13 degree weather in Texas, trust me :) Ainge was also before they had any rules too, he probably just sat under the hoops the whole game making lay ups :) There was no goal tending too, so he just tipped the balls in to get more points.

[Thank you for sharing your testimony in Portuguese. I understood almost every word. I wish I could actually hear it spoken too.] You could just read it out loud and then you would hear it spoken....duh :)

[I mentioned some articles in the February New Era, one of which is also in the Liahona (one by Elder Godoy).] I actually don't get the New Era here. The Liahona is shipped on the back of a 2 legged donkey from the jungles of China because we still haven't gotten the Liahona from December. We still are using the General Conference issue. So maybe sometime in July I will get to read that article in the Liahona, but that's if the donkey makes it.

[Regarding article in New Era: "while they were eating in a community setting a kid nearby had taken the Lord's name in vain and been disrespectful and the grandfather as a young missionary finally had enough and came over and hit him in the shoulder and told him he wouldn't amount to anything in life if he didn't start doing things differently--probably not the normal contact approach."] I'm going to have to start using that contact technique, it's new and it might work. I don't have much this week since my companion was bed-ridden. We only left to go eat and teach one or  two people. I did manage to get through half of Jesus the Christ though. I'm reading it for the second time to actually write more stuff in my scriptures etc. The rain has stopped for now and the glorious sun has returned to shine once again upon the hallowed, warm lands of Ceará. Everyone thinks I am crazy because I like the heat because all the missionaries are sweating their brains out but I'm doing fine...The members give me...spicy sauce?....I forgot what you call it in english...sauce of the chili? anyways they give it to me because I love it. Ceará is not known for spicy food so everybody has a fear of this sauce of the chili. They think I'm crazy when I put a ton of the weak sauce (haha) on the food. I blame you Dad. My Bishop told me the horror stories of serving a mission back in the day, sleeping on the ground, no fridges, no food etc. He only served in the 90s so I can only imagine how bad it was for you in the 80s....1780s that is! [Hm, was actually in the 70s, but the 1970s. AD, not BC.] But for real, missions are a piece of cake now, you just have to leave and teach people then come back home :)

Even though we didn't have much success this week we still had a wonderful miracle. I have been teaching this one family for the 4 months I have been here and the mom and the 2 daughters got baptized then one son....then the other son. We have been teaching the father the whole time but he never ever went to church. However, he started going to church these past few weeks. This is the first time in like 6 months that he has gone to church. He always promised me and the other missionaries that he would go every Sunday. We were excited and we started teaching him with new vigor but he didn't really want to be baptized and just wanted to chill. His wife had already switched all of the coffee with cevada so he had already stopped drinking without knowing. He smoked a few cigarettes but that's it. We stopped teaching him for awhile because he didn't want anything. This last Sunday, the 6th, he came to church again. I talked to his wife and she said he had stopped smoking. Then during the middle of sacrament, he turned back to me and yelled for me to come talk to him. He asked how many people are going to be baptized next week, I told him. He then told me that he wanted to be baptized too. What a miracle! It may seem to be just a story to ya'll at home but I love this family with all my heart and I have spent weeks, months trying to help complete their family. I have spent hours wondering what else I could do to help this man. I prayed a lot to stay in this area if it was the will of the Lord so that I could find people that maybe I had missed. I'm grateful that the Lord has helped this family and I will never forget them. Sadly, the kids don't like to get their pictures taken, but I have one of the parents :) Never give up, never say that it can't be done. Never stop doing what is right, because in due time, the time of the Lord, it will all be worth it. It will all work out. I know that it is the Lord's will to help His children. We just have to take the challenge and do our part. We all know a family or friend that seems "hard" or seems "hopeless" but they aren't. They need you! Maybe the Lord has sent YOU to help them, to be their angel to help them. I know the Lord is our Savior and that He loves us, everyone in the world. His purpose is to help us find the gospel and have everlasting life.