HEEELLLLLLOOOOOOOOO!

sorry, you guys are so far away that i had to shout. anyway, i would love to send you guys cool pictures of all the cool things that i get to see, BUT i can only take pictures INSIDE the ctm. SO, you will mostly just get pictures of my roommates, and the view outside of my room. i'll try to label the pictures better, mom, so you can know what they’re all about. oh, by the way, i won the letter contest most of the weekend, thanks to the ones from jen and jocy. and everyone loved the superman card that came on Friday (postmarked from the 3 of july?! :). it hangs in the room now.

WELL, let me tell you the highlight of my week WAS proselytizing, and i wrote a more detailed account of some of my experiences in the snail mail that i am going to mail today. for an overview, ahem, we talked with and taught about thirty people in the two hours that we had. we gave away 2 Book of Mormons (BOMs), and about thirty pass-a-long cards. we committed everyone we talked with to call the number on the card to either learn more or to receive a BOM (here it abbreviates to: OLDeM). it really was awesome!

to set the stage a little, let me tell you where we went. we went downtown to a street called 'avenua paulista', or something like that. we were told that it is sort of like wall street, only it is super long and has over two million people traffic the street DAILY! that is a lot of people, and we resolved that we would teach all of them. the sidewalks that we preached from were about 20+ feet wide and absolutely FILLED with people. at first it was a little overwhelming, but soon we were running around talking to anyone and everyone that would listen to two americans choke out some broken Portuguese. interestingly enough, we talked to a few people who understood or spoke english. and as cool as that was, the cool part was that it didn’t matter, because we were able to connect with people that we couldn’t really understand. oh yeah, i forgot to mention, it was SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND WHAT PEOPLE WERE SAYING! it was like they would ask a question, and all we could usually do is have them repeat it a couple of times, then tell them that we had no idea what they said, and continue saying what we had to say. it was just incredible. once, we were talking to this lady, and we had introduced ourselves, and began teaching, when she stopped us and asked us what language were we speaking, and could we please speak portuguese. we said okay, and started again slowly and asked her at the end of each sentence if she understood, and she did. it was pretty funny.

when it was time to get on the bus again, we were all exhausted, and yet thrilled. the power of the work had consumed us, and the testifying had zapped us of energy, but we felt awesome. the language has never come to me so fluidly or clearly. well, i am nearly out of time, but i want you guys to know that i love you and your support! i didn’t get to write any other letters this week, but i promise to reply to peoples letters next week.
eu voces amo,
Elder helland
ps: 'eu te amo' is like 'i love thee', i think. at least we always just use 'voce' instead of 'te'. i guess i am not really sure....[we wrote him “Eu Te Amo” – Elle taught us so I’m sure SHE’S correct…]
pss: sorry no pictures this week. the computers are all screwy.