Watch Out For The Amazon!

Feb 11, 2013
What up my family! So! This week was good. Went by really fast despite some difficulties haha. So in the beginning of the week I went on a division in our neighbor area called Mauazinho. It´s right in the middle of the jungle, after mauazinho its just Amazon as far as the eye can see! So I was with an Elder that didn´t speak any English at all so it was a really good time for me to practice my portugese! Even though he didn´t talk much I made him talk haha. It was cool to walk around there and teach people in little houses that were hanging over the river.  But in divisions normally you stay the night in that area so i slept in the Mauazinho house and the next morning I woke up with a rash over my entire body! That was a grand ol time having Brazilians touch my face and arms saying i had Dengue even though I didn´t have a fever or a headache. No worries it wasn´t Dengue, just a weird rash......haha. I came back to my area! So another wierd/sad thing happened with one of our investigators. So a few weeks ago Elder Básilio baptized a girl named. She was super awesome and attended church and everything. But she called Elder Basílio one day and said she had been talking to her parents (Jehovas witnesses.....they´re a lil difficult) and she wanted to talk. So we met her at the chapel and she gave back her Book of Mormon, all the pamphlets Basílio had given her and wanted to talk the Bishop to cancel her Baptism. We were like WHAT? WHY? She said shed had dreams that members of the church were chanting around a fire wearing hooded cloakes and sacrificing things, then tried to kill her. Sooooooooooo we talked to her a little but respected her decision. Then she told us its not to late to join the Jehovas Witnesses. We almost busted out laughing when she said that but oh well. I dont even know if you can negate your baptism haha. But later in the week we had a division with our zone leaders in our area. So we had 4 Elders working in out area. I went with Elder Robbey the american and Elder Basilio went with the Brazilian. We had a lot of sucsess. But later that day in an area called crespo we were walking down a street where an investigator´s house was. He ended up not being home but there were about 10 kids in the street playing a game in the road called taco ball. Its basically like Cricket! Elder robbey said lets go after the person wasnt home but i said wait! Look at all these little investigators running around! He laughed and said OK! So we watched them play for a sec then I said. Hey! We dont have this in the U.S! Can we play?? They said YEAH! Because kids here love americans. So we started playing.....IT WAS SO FUN!!! After we won ( >:) ) we asked if we could talk to them all for a second. So they all gathered around and we talked about Faith, Repentance, and Baptism for a little bit! Elder Robbey was SUPER good with the kids and we ended up getting all of their names and adresses! The spirit was just crazy strong teaching all those receptive little kids. It was just.....stupendous! We met a new investigator yesterday!  Shes 15 but really nice. Its kinda fun passing back and forth a notebook and it lets me practice my spelling in Portuguese! So also this week we had lunch at a members house, we had fish and maybe the best meat ive ever had in my life. Some kind of beef. Brazil definetly wins the planet on meats haha. But we were talking about fish and this member ended up telling us a pretty awesome story. So his cousin lived deeper in the amazon near the border of the amazon river. He was crossing a dangerous part of the river on his horse one day and was holding on to its neck. He ended up slipping off the horse and falling in the river! Guess what happened! He started to swim and a school of pirhanas started eating his legs, well you cant swim without legs very well so.....they found half of his body 2 days later down the river with some pirhanas that were inside him still...mmmmmmmmmmmmm. Then he showed us on his hand where he´d been bitten and 3 places on his legs where a sting ray had stung him! Moral of the story, dont mess with the amazon river! So all this week and last is carnival. It´s pretty crazy. It mostly just about 20 people piled in the back or riding on top of cars holding on to the sunroof blasting music. We had to veer around a huge party yesterday where the road was blocked off. We could have walked through but thought it was probly better to take the long way haha. Well thats all for now folks! Miss and love everyone. If anyone has money to spare.......send me a package :))

Tchau!!! --Elder Green

I Miss The Mountains!

February 4th, 2013
. SO! This week the weather was AWESOME. Theres two kinds of weather here, insanley hot and humid. Or just raining and super humid but kinda hot. Its been really really cloudy all week here so we´ve taught almost every lesson completley wet. But i dont mind being wet :) Its kind of nice getting out of the sun! We taught family this week and it was just a mom and 6 kids. It was cool. When we were leaving they had an old freezer sitting outside of their house and the kids opened it and jumped in! They had turned it into a tiny pool! It was one of those freezers that you just open and its like a big ol box. One old couple we taught on that same road had a HUGE turtle shell under their little overhang on their porch, it was as big as my chest haha! Sorry mom no pics of that, didnt have my camera :( I taught my english class and only a few people showed up, it was fun though! We were all laughing the whole time and I feel like they learned a lot. Did i ever tell you there are a ton of vultures here? They are sooooooo ugly but really cool looking when their flying. Theres always like a flock of them in the air. They get super super high in the sky though and its way cool to see 20 or 30 of them flying around in circles in the sky. Ok so we were in an area called crespo knocking on doors and we ended up almost knocking on a catholic meeting in a house. Probably 50 people there. The door was cracked open so we could see. After much debating i finally convinced Basílio to knock with me because it wasnt a church! So we did......we didn´t get in....but almost! It was worth a try haha. SO something happened this week it was SO SAD!! So like ive said before there are cats and dogs everywhere here. We found a kitten in the middle of a bunch of trash on the street. Probly a week old. It still had the umbilical chord attached. We looked everywhere for its mom but couldnt find her. We walked around and asked people if they wanted a kitten but no one would take her :((((( because theres so many around here if people want one they can just pick one up and train it. So we had to put it back where we found it and hoped it had a mom somewhere. SO sad. If it wasnt a rule to not have pets i would have kept it. Anyways that was sad. So speaking of the super bowl theres some members here including the bishop that want me to ´train´them about  ``futebal americano`` haha so im teaching them a lil about the rules and the teams. Also we went to Mauazinho for some baptismal interviews for guys in our district. Mauazinho is super jungly area right by the meeting of the waters. That area is really cool, ill bring my camera next time i go there. But we had to cross a really really realy sketchy brige that was just 2 or 3 planks like 15 feet in the air.......at the very end i ended up falling through the bridge but wasnt hurt haha. Still scared the crap out of me. The house we went to was right next to the river and the Elder that was there, Elder gray said he had eaten aligator and snake there last time and next time we came he´d ask the family he baptized that fed him that if hed kill an aligator and cook it for me :) so my hopes are up for that!!!!   So also in my area there are a bunch of small trucks, and medium ones. No big ones because the roads are so small. But most of the trucks have bed covers on them and in the bed of the truck tons of people have MASSIVE sound systems. Like on saturday the loudest one ive heard drove by Basílio and i and set off 3 car alarms. It was so loud haha. But theres music here called Brasilian Funke, apparently its super super bad music with a beat kind of like rap and dubstep but a different at the same time. I cant understand what their saying though but Basílio hates it.  Elder Basílio is a master teacher, im learning a lot from him. He´s also the only member in his family, so thats cool. Did I ever say we dont knock here just clap? Because poeple have gates with spikes around all their houses so we cant get to the door. So we clap! I clap usually cause I have big hands and it´s louder. Carnival also started this week so i think starting wednesday we have to go back to our houses a couple of hours early. Sunday we saw a lil big of it. Its basically just a bunch of beer Funke and other bad music and girls wearing less than they usually do here! Tons of cars lined up on the roads going for downtown Manaus with the trucks all blasting their sound systems trying to outdo eachother I think haha. Well thats all i got for this week! Tchau!
Elder Green