Porto Alegre Visits and 1st Transfer Complete!

It was a busy week, being the last week of the transfer and 2 trips to Porto Alegre.  Both trips to Porto Alegre were very different. On Wednesday, for my training as a new missionary, we took an early bus to the train station, rode the train with another dupla training in my zone, took a bus and then ate at a buffet with them and other duplas arrived and ate with us too (apparently all the trainers had eaten there the day when we arrived). Then we walked to the mission office, had a little thing without our companions where we filled out some little paper about how well you and your companion do certain stuff, and then we talked about the joyful and difficult experiences we´ve had and stuff, had some training and talks all together and then a roleplay or two. The second trip was different because we took the train to Novo Hamburgo and met up with our zone and took a rented bus from there to Porto Alegre to the Porto Alegre Sul grounds and chapel where we heard from Sister Franco, 2nd Counselor in the Primary General Presidency and her husband. Her talk was better, but they were both really good. They talked in Spanish (from Argentina but lived in SLC for a long time and knew English) and we had a translator translating in Portuguese next to them. It was broadcasted to everyone in our mission, Porto Alegre Sul, and probably some ones in Spanish speaking countries too, I´d assume. 

Our week was a lot shorter with Wednesday the whole day in Porto Alegre and most of the day Saturday in Porto Alegre as well. Keila and Ednai were not baptized this weekend, but we have a for certain next weekend. Their Dad came back in town and they had to go visit his mother who they hadn´t visited in over a month and her birthday had passed in that time. Sunday was also elections again, so it was very difficult getting anyone to church.  The election stuff was less crazy this time around, and justifying for Elder Favoretti was even quicker. Got to see the cafeteria of a school in Brasil!

Our ward is good, this week we had 82 people in Sacrament meeting and Elder Favoretti gave a talk that encouraged more help from the members in missionary work (received a call from bishop to give this talk night before at 10).  After Sacrament meeting, we received our first member reference that I´ve gotten in this area, someone that an RM sister is dating who she has brought to institute, he has the Book of Mormon. We´ll visit him this week and see how that goes. Our church starts at 8:30. I´ve passed the sacrament, never blessed. We had 2 investigators attend church this week, only 1 that we have been teaching (Irasema/Ilasama, I´m not really sure...), the other was a 9 or 10 year old that was brought by a friend whose parents might be members.  Elder Favoretti always thought she was a member but she isn´t or something. Not really sure I understand the whole story, only that she is not a member. Roseli’s family is good, they like our company a lot.

Transfers were given last night and come into effect today (people move areas today). Apparently if you are transferred you don´t get P-Day. Lucky Elder Favoretti and I weren´t transfered. A decent amount of people in our zone got transfered, including our zone leader who was in my district, Elder Walters who is from Texas (I think Dallas) and he is now the new assistant which Favoretti is excited about.  They were trained and spent time in houses together and are pretty close. Also, apparently one of the Sisters from Brazil in my group and is my zone, is now training, after only 1 transfer in the field, not even finishing full training, which Elder Favoretti has never heard of. 

I´m doing great. Legs are getting stronger every day, either less pain or I´m used to it. Gotta build my leg muscles. It´s nothing with my shoes, although I think we forgot to factor in the Trevor factor when we decided how many shoes to bring. They aren´t near breaking, for certain, but they definitely look well used already, so we´ll see how things go. Things are hard, for certain, but teaching brings me joy every day.

One transfer complete!

Love,

Elder Trevor Mangum

Teaching and Churrasco

It was a good week.  Church was good. Roseli and her family didn´t make it, still working with them, but Elder Favoretti said missionaries have been working for a very long time to reactivate them and he´s fairly certain we´ll be able to do it. Sergio is doing great, perfect elect. Every time we visit him he says something like ‘I´m on the path of God, everything is perfect’. He was confirmed yesterday.

We had 4 investigators at church yesterday: Danielle (who I don´t remember if I´ve explained or not, but her "husband" is a member nonactive who is married to another woman who left him for a woman and the divorce is finally underway. She comes to church almost every week.), and then a family: Keila (12), Ednai (9), and the mom Cinthia. The dad and older son are out of town right now, I think he´s the equivalent of a trucker. Their life has been super hard, I´ve almost cried a couple times during lessons, but it has been great getting to know them. For instance, Keila has this disease that is essentially reverse anemia, too much iron forms in the blood and so she sometimes has super painful attacks and has to go to the hospital in Porto Alegre for I think transfusions. Medical/science terms are somewhat easy to understand because they´re the same with different pronunciations, I think.  They also had a son die at 3 years old many years ago from this same disease. However, the Plan of Salvation finally satisfied/filled Cinthia. She said she´s had dozens of Pastors teach them and preach about her son but none filled her or left her with a desire to go to church until us. We taught them once with the dad but the rest has been without. Keila and Ednai are set to be baptized after church on Sunday, but the parents, like just about everyone, are not married and need to be married before they can be baptized. We´re teaching a couple different couples that need to be married as well.

Things are good with Elder Favoretti, he is slowly easing more responsibility on to me, like now I start off our first lesson with people with the questions on finding out their needs and what not which is a bit hard at times, but like the small silences as I think and form questions and whatnot aren´t anywhere near as bad or awkward as I thought it would be. I think my communication skills are coming, slowly. My understanding is coming a lot faster than speaking. While I can´t understand a lot of words, in context I generally can understand the phrase, although there are also a good deal of times where I´ve thought I´ve understand on context clues and answered a question that wasn´t asked, so yeah.

This week I´ve had a good amount of churrasco, barbeque. It is so so good. Reminds me of the times in Will´s backyard, only they cook things differently, on like those smore sticks, can´t remember what they´re called in English, and pretty slowly. We eat a lot of meat here which is great cause I love it. I also had tererê this week which is like chimarrão/mate, only cold and with juice. It was with lemonade/lemon juice and tasted exactly like frozen lemonade and those drinks, it was so so good, especially since spring has started and things are definitely starting to heat up. 

This upcoming week I´ve got a training in Porto Alegre on Wednesday and on Saturday a member of the General Primary Presidency is speaking in Porto Alegre and we get to go.

Always good to hear how everyone is doing. Insane to think I´m starting my sixth week here in the field. Also, already developed an insane amount of gratitude for a loving family and parents. Elder Favoretti was raised by his grandparents and has had a lot of crazy experiences. He is amazing though, 21, has a fiancee in Minas, been a member for 3 years, super funny and has great stories.

Have a great week! 

Love y'all! 

Elder Trevor Mangum

1st Zone Conference Pictures

Conferencia da Zona Novo Hamburgo

Sergio's Baptism

Sergio was baptized yesterday after church, it went great. Alex and his family is the opposite, was very sad for me on Tuesday when we went to go visit them and were told that their mom doesn´t want us teaching Alex anymore because she doesn´t want him confused or something. It left me very sad, but Favoretti said it isn´t Alex´s fault, he´ll get another chance down the road. We´ve taught a couple of different families who all need to be married which is annoying because despite living together for years and years and having kids together and raising them, they still aren´t married and some of them don´t want to get married.

Thursday morning I had my interview with Presidente Jones which was awesome. Said he loves my letters to him because they´re always positive. I said yeah, that days are hard, but there is a bit of good in every one and he said keep up that thinking, that missionaries at the beginning don´t generally have that attitude (particularly Americans) and thus struggle. The main struggle is walking, Elder Favoretti walks so fast that I have to run a little bit every day to catch up with him, my legs are always dead at the end of the day. Also, Presidente told me straight up that I have one of the best trainers in the mission, so learn well and feel fortunate and grateful. He also said that we´ll have received 75 new missionaries from July 1 to the end of the year, nearly half the mission (which would be 88). Also, based off his interview with Elder Favoretti, there is a decent shot I´ll be training immediately after right here in Feitoria. Gotta learn it all well enough to teach it all. Got 8 more weeks to prep. I also finally had my little interview (or part of it at least) with Sister Jones that I didn´t get to do the first day with lack of time, and that was fun too.

Zone Conference on Friday was good, Presidente taught about the Atonement, Sister Jones about charity, the assistants about always teaching people, making conversations, and about improving our baptism invites. The zone leaders then had us do practices of baptism invitations where we roleplayed as a real person in our mission that a dupla is teaching right now. It was really good. I also had divisão again in Sao Leopaldo on Thursday after my interview until zone conference on Friday. We did service Saturday and my back is a little sore. Lots of buckets of dirt that I moved to fill in cracks and holes, I think we like filled in his foundation under his house and stairs with dirt. Fasting on the mission is only hard because of thirst and your desire to drink. We did have fast and testimony meeting yesterday.

Every Sunday night, we visit this less active/not active family and just talk and eat with them, Irmã Roseli, her husband, and their 14 year old daughter Ana. I kind of had been growing a bit impatient that we kept visiting them because it seemed like nothing was happening although I always enjoyed spending time with them, super fun and nice. Anyways, Roseli has been having serious problems with health recently, like possibly has cancer and shared with us last night that she knows the church is true, that the Book of Mormon is true, but just doesn´t know why she doesn´t come to church (they did have issues with a person) and I´m fairly certain that they´re going start coming to sacrament meeting again. It made me realize that what is meant by teaching people is talking with people, being their friends, sharing your experiences, like the assistants were talking about.

Before I forget, last week I forgot to write about the elections for President here in Brazil.  It was wild stuff leading up to it, people driving around honking so much with flags, they litter the streets so much with all these little papers of the candidates, we had to go on the Sunday morning of General Conference for Elder Favoretti to register as nonvoting, went to a school by us and I got to go inside, first school in Brazil. We´ll have to this same thing in a couple of weeks for the runoff election of something. Also, you should look up what I think in English is called The Fourth Missionary, By Lawrence E. Corbridge, June 22, 2002. Haven´t read all of it yet because it is in Portuguese for me, but what I´ve read is really good, I think you´d like it.

Good luck from Brazil, have a great week. Y’all are in my prayers,

Love,

Elder Mangum

District Meeting, Investigators and Dessert

It was a pretty good week. There were definitely some highs and some lows, but we´ll start at the beginning. On P-Day’s we don´t really do that much, not much to do in Feitoria. We may go to a park or something today which is like the one thing we can do. I just studied a lot last week, which made me remember how much I enjoy learning. Tuesday we had another district meeting where we ate breakfast as a zone, every companionship bringing a little something. Some of the sisters made some cake with frosting, it was a good little thing. We have the zone leaders in our district, Elder Walters from McKinney Texas and Elder Nobre from Mozambique. They seem really cool and gave a good training to our zone about being on the Lord's team bringing people to Christ. We made a goal as a companionship to have three baptisms this month. We have my first zone conference this upcoming week on Thursday I think.

I´m not sure if I´ve talked about them before, but we´ve got a couple good progressing investigators. One is Daniel, who is 25, who is so into what we´re teaching and to learning. His mom is Evangelist but is encouraging of us because he´s never been baptized and also is okay with us teaching her whole family. Another set is Alex, 10, and his sister, Angela, 15. We were knocking doors and trying to visit the houses of contacts but things weren’t working out, so we were a bit sad.  But then I saw this boy sitting on the sidewalk in front of a house and smiled and waved to him.  We made contact, taught a lesson to him, his sister, and his sister´s boyfriend. Gabriel, Alex, and his sister have baptismal dates for the 21 because conference was only broadcast at the stake center which is not our building, so we have to take a bus and therein much more difficult to bring people. But they´re all enthused for baptism, and it warmed my soul to hear 10 year old Alex say "I want to be baptized". In similar circumstances of knocking and contacting, we came across Sergio, a man of 72 years old who is fairly receptive and came to conference with us Sunday afternoon and has a baptismal date for this upcoming Sunday after church.

However, the bad news: we go to Gabriel Saturday in between sessions to bring him to conference to watch and then be baptized. He isn´t home, so his family calls him and he comes back home and we talk and he makes up the excuse that his mom doesn´t want him to be baptized again, that she doesn´t feel he is ready, etc. We tried to talk with him like you’re 19 and quell fears and whatnot but to no avail. His parents are also super tranquilo and we´ve even taught his dad the Restoration. Another low was that I was feeling under the weather Friday and Saturday and a little Thursday which made my first splits on Friday a bit difficult, but Elder Silva (Fortaleza) and I still worked hard and did well in their area with 4 lessons, 7 novos, and 5 datas. And I woke up Sunday sweaty but feeling perfectly normal, so I´m back to A-Okay.

General Conference in a different language is weird, especially when since during the gaps you can hear a bit of the English. I was surprised by how much I understood. I took notes Sunday during both sessions, writing in English, but I understand a good chunk of everything being said. I really enjoyed all the choir stuff in English, especially Saturday morning with some of those more Primary hymns, really good. I think people are pretty happy about 2 hour church. I´m glad I´ll be able to say to my children, back in my day, we had three hour church, we had Sunday school and Young Men´s/Young Women´s every week. I think it is good to have more family learning. 

You asked about buying food here. I usually just buy biscuits, cookies, and stick them in the freezer. They don´t really have much variety, decently similar to Oreos. The stores are a bit different and weird. Still weird with the prices. The weirdest thing I´ve been fed was yesterday for "dessert" and they called it dessert, we were fed by members straight up boiled sweet potatoes that they cut off a piece right there in front of us and gave it to us. This isn´t like a Brazilian thing, maybe a Rio Grande do Sul thing, because Elder Favoretti eats boiled sweet potatoes for breakfast all the time and we talked about it after. I have the equivalent of frosted flakes for breakfast every morning, so I buy that and milk too. Any of the desserts that are actually desserts are pretty good, especially when it has some sort of chocolate in it, like once we had this warm chocolate pudding, another this chocolate sorvete with, I don´t know how to describe it, like if you put crushed up animal crackers in ice cream, really good.  

Love,

Elder Trevor Mangum

Week 2, Teaching Adventures

Second week in Feitoria flew by so quickly. Bruna and her family are doing great, we visited them last Monday and taught the Restoration again. The parents had read and discussed the first 5 chapters in the Book of Mormon that day, taking an hour. It was fun talking with them and their kids. I actually got to be a part of it.  We even talked about Marvel which is somewhat difficult with the different names, but they also knew the names in English so it was fine. It's really fun to talk with people about their interests. 

We visit Roberto, the guy who was confirmed with them, generally every day. He used to be this hard drinker who kept trying to quit who met the missionaries, I think got a blessing, and hasn´t drunk since. Apparently, he´s also a lot mellower now than he was which is crazy to think about because he seems pretty much like a crazy old man to me. I´ve met some interesting characters who come by and visit him, some of his bad influence friends, but Elder Favoretti said I haven´t seen anything yet. One of them was shaking from the drugs they were on which freaked me out a lot. But I talked with Elder Favoretti right after and he brought it up with like everyone we had lunch with the rest of the week, and apparently I have got to get used to that because it´s normal in Brasil. Also another crazy experience that happened this week: two police on motos flew by us with sirens then a little bit later an ambulance. We keep walking and we walk up to a crime scene where a guy was shot in the head a couple times. Apparently had a problem with drugs. 

We teach a lot of different people. Gabriel is probably going to get baptized this Saturday after conference. He is 19 and we met him while knocking doors my first day. He came to church last week but not yesterday because he just started a job where he works every morning, but luckily General conference counts as a sacrament meeting and he can get baptized after that. We also met someone who we thought was elect, Sandoval, this 72 year old man, because our first lesson, the Restoration, was great, he brought up some points of error in the Catholic church which he had grown up in too. Then we get to the second lesson where we start off by teaching the BoM and he goes "Wait, y’all are those Mormons? I won´t go to that Mormon Church" He also has horrible memory, like he brings up faults in the Catholic church and then two minutes later ask a question where the answer is the fault that he brought up earlier. We´re still teaching him, he is somewhat mellowing, I don´t know to be honest. He didn´t come to church, his response was probably not. We are also teaching Daniela and her family (sister and nieces) and she wants to be baptized but her "husband" (father of her child who is like 4 and who lives with her) is married to another woman so he has to divorce this other person and then marry her before she can get baptized. Also, the rest of the family doesn´t want to come to church anymore because apparently a member of the bishopric asked for money from them at the cultural potluck whatever thing last week because they weren´t members and didn´t bring any food. Come on dude. We´ve taught a couple of other good families, but only the first lesson, so we´ll see how things go with them this week. 

The church did have power this week, although there isn´t AC, only fans, so we have all the windows open and since it´s day time, the lights being on doesn´t really change that much. Our congregation had about 60 people this week, so to me it feels tiny. It was not Fast Sunday, apparently they still do fast Sunday during general conference. Not sure how that works- if it´s just fasting, I assume. Singing in Portuguese is fun, I´m used to it by now cause the CTM with choir practice and district favorites there. We sing a lot of hymns I´m familiar with. Also, no one plays the piano during sacrament, the chorister (switches between YW) sings the prelude/first line alone and then we sing starting from the very beginning. Also during 5th Sunday here it is a bit different- sacrament all the members of the bishopric spoke. Second hour gospel principles which Elder Favoretti taught for some reason which it happened to be the week of the Restoration so no problem. Last week the Bishop´s wife taught but she wasn´t here this week. Then 3rd hour was all combined like normal, and it was all about fellowshipping and being welcoming and about this youth event coming up for 16-25, Meet Up, on October 12th, all of Brasil meets up in various cities and has like this one day EFY type big event. I wonder why we don´t have this in the US. Apparently, this is the second year doing it.  

Things with my companion are good. I don´t remember if I said this or not, but he´s only been a member since he was 17, and he´s 21 now, he played some pro soccer from 14-16 or 17, a bit shorter than me but more athletic so his walking speed tires me out. He is really funny and really good at teaching people and using stories/examples to help people understand. He also knows the Bible really well which helps at times. I´m not really sure how big my district/zone is because some of them got to visit the temple last week. Apparently, our area, Feitoria, is one of the only ones in our zone that doesn´t get to go to the temple cause we´re too far. That was annoying to find out, but we went to a buffet for lunch after our meeting using the money that the person who we helped move gave us to buy lunch so a great lunch for free. 

We get fed lunch every day except for P-Day apparently, and that´s the biggest meal of the day here, so I´m surviving. The people here look out for the missionaries too. We stopped by on Saturday night, the church, because it was Moças Standard´s/Values night. Moças is YW. We wanted to see if Daniela´s nieces (Camila and another girl) came because we invited them, but nope. However, they gave us the rest of the cake and make us some like hotdog sandwiches or something. I only ate the cake, not that hungry. The YW leader is funny, I think you´d like her. She reminds me of Sister Hunter. 

We´ve got a washing machine attached to our apartment that we can use throughout the week, but only one so we´ve got to use it throughout the week. It´s just for us two though so that´s good. We just hang stuff up to dry on something by our room, you can see it in the pictures.

Playing in the rain is a lot of fun. It isn´t flooding or anything. The blisters are healing, no longer a constant low pain while walking, only the pain in my legs now. The days where it rains is the best because clouds and the days are cooler. I can definitely tell that spring is starting, it is starting to warm up.

This past week flew by. I´m sure I´ll be skyping y’all in no time.  Have a fun week, love y’all!

Lots of love, 

Elder Trevor Mangum

Apartment Pictures

The Neighborhood View from our Balcony

Drying Clothes Rack