feliz birthday

3-19-08

feliz birthday
sorry, i will write tomorrow, there is a problem with the email today. but happy b-day police!! 18, is still young!

love adam

3-20-08
every rose has its thorn...
and every cowboy sings a sad, sad song... (some song that popped into my head- i´m not really sure who sings it anymore...)

HOWDY- elder ronaldo thought that was a funny word, and i couldn’t really give him a fair translation. throw in that i told him that it is something cowboys say, and, well... i think he thinks that americans are genuine weirdo’s. :) (at least my family- he really only has me for an example of what you guys must be like... :))

so, happy birthday to you, huh! "... you look like a monkey and you smell like one too..." don’t worry, i have an awesome letter written for you alyce, just now the question is when i will pass a correios and mail it. (correio is a post office) so to celebrate your birthday yesterday, we had p-day. for p-day we went to this lame museum with our district. it was small, and i don’t understand all the scientific words in portuguese- so i was bored there were two highlights for me there: they had an exhibit on indians, and i asked the tour guide what she knew about lamanites- she said nothing. so i gave her a book of mormon and said that if she liked studying ancient indians, she´d LOVE the nephites and lamanites! i explained it all to her, but in the end she wasn’t all that interested, so we just left her with a card to call to receive a BOM. number two was the skull of a t-rex! man i love t-rex! we did a photo shoot by the skull with everyone. that was pretty much the only cool stuff. the rest was just dead animals- cool at first, but when they don’t do anything- lame.

this week we have been teaching two families a lot. they are SUPER interested and excited about the church- but like the title, this week the hammer fell. relax, they are still great and excited, just they have got some big problems to beat. real big obstacles. sirlene and her son love the BOM, but this week we found out that when she said "married" to her husband 12 years, what she meant is that they ALMOST got married 12 years ago. AHHH!! What’s the deal with people here that no one gets married?!?! so now we are going to try and set up an appointment to talk with her and her husband and tell them the deal is they need to get married for her to be baptized. then, our baptism this week will have to be pushed forward one week because of cigarettes. those dirty little things are hard for people to put down. THAT family consists of 4 brothers and sisters that all live together and are all working on stopping coffee and smoking right now. yesterday we taught them a lesson about following the prophet, and when we got to the end and taught about how we have a prophet on the earth TODAY, they went crazy. they wanted to know his name, what he looked like, where he lived, how old he is, what he does, when he is coming to brasil, and thousands of awesome questions. ALL of them were dying to know about a living prophet. when we told them about general conference they were ecstatic to go and see and hear him and the apostles. it was incredible!


So, the cool thing is that dirceu and jonathan (recent converts) are helping a BUNCH these days. Jonathan spent ALL Sunday with us, and dirceu Saturday. They LOVE to help others learn about the gospel of jesus christ. Their excitement is truly contagious. Jonathan loves helping because he wants to learn how to be a missionary so that he can be one after a year. Also, he wants to learn so he won’t get so sad when people don’t want to hear or are mean to him about the church. Most days we pass by his house and he tells us a story about how he tried to tell someone about the church or the BOM and how they were mean to him, and how he was sad afterward.

Also, we had a miracle this week. We were visited again by the missionary angel. I don’t know if i already told you about him, but he's this cool surgeon that hás a sweet car that somehow finds us every now and again and helps us in whatever it is that we need. His name is romero. He is really cool. I am out of time to tell all about this last visit, but i will tell the story next week along with more. Suffice it to say that everyday i can see more clearly than the last that GOD does his own work here and that he just wanted to give ME the opportunity to help.

well, i gotta scram. thx for the math problems. til next week. elder helland
ps alyce- dang you are old. love ya. feliz aniversario

Pic1 is dirceu´s baptism

Pic 2 is the dino- skull at the lame museum. That is me there doing my dino-face. I also do that when i am hungry. Hungry for triceratops. Pic 3 is elder ronaldo

Pic 4 is a sign at the museum that tells where the stuff is at.
Pic 5 is me visiting a house that had this HUGE, MEAN dog. That is me hiding. (personally, i think that i look scarier than the dog.)

Pic 6 this goat at the museum hás 2 heads. I guess that was cool tôo.