Muddy Christmas

letter from 12-15-08

MUD

When it rains here the dirt roads turn to mud roads and that makes me dirty.

I don’t have time to write much, hope next week is better.

ALYCE- elder cangelosi´s sister talked to you huh? Cool. That is kind of weird. I guess there is kind of a story here that I think is pretty dang funny, but is really weird. You want to here it? Then hang on tight. It all started in the MTC…
More than a year ago I was in a place kind of like the celestial kingdom- only we spent most of our time learning a language that didn’t make any sense. In our room there lived elder cangelosi. Elder cangelosi is a GOOF. I like him, we …goof around together. Anyway, he has this crazy idea that his 17 year old sister would like to get letters from complete stranger missionaries, so he brought along a bunch of pictures of her inside of pre stamped envelopes. Then near the end of our stay in that heaven-like habitat he gave one to me along with several other missionaries in our group. Anxious to not make him mad at me, on p-day I sat down to write a little note to his sister. Another elder, elder evans, helped me do it so that it would be funny. That was that. Then a year passes.
After about six months in the field, this elder evans gets bored one fateful p-day. Rummaging through his bags he found the pre stamped envelope that cangelosi gave to him. Being the mischief maker that he is (which is why I like him,) he sat down and wrote an outright creepy letter to elder cangelosi´s sister- and then put my name at the bottom. Six months LATER, elder evens and I finally meet up again. And he tells me what he did. I had one of those “A-HAH!” moments, when suddenly I understood why elder cangelosi had asked me if I had written again to his sister a few times. I had told him, “of course not, I am not some kind of stalker.”- Only after another 3 or 4 months did I see cangelosi again to tell him what had happened.
So besides all that weirdness- cangelosi is pretty cool. He was the executive secretary of the mission for several months. I like seeing him, we get to re-hash the good ole days in the CTM. He made these cool CDs for our whole group that had all of us talking in the CTM. He is nice, but goofy. Who says “knee slapping”?? I am going to tease him for that one. Actually I think that I will see him this Friday.
And about chess- I really am not that good either. I mean, I bet I can beat you… :-), but I have only played elder carvalho once- beat him! It was a close one. With elder carvalho I play a lot of UNO. We have a lot of fun together. Elder carvalho is going home in January. Another one bites the dust.

MOM- Hey, I didn’t get your packages yet, but I DID get the package from jay and elle. Tell them that I am totally STOKED to make those chocolate chip cookies and the peanut butter is AWESOME!! i also got a cool letter from Camille Pobst and Grandma Jones sent me card w/ 20 bucks in it! Whew! Thank you all! The funny thing was that grandma started the card like this:
Dear Adam… I mean Brother Helland.
And I was thinking, “You mean ELDER Helland?” (Brother Helland is my father! “Hey, Mister Crush- ” “Whoa- Mister Crush is my FATHER.” Finding Nemo)

DAD- NOTHING boring here. Today I had a meeting with my zone and we made a plan for our presentation for zone conference. We made a skit called “o anjo atrasado” or the “late angel” – the idea is that we will use a few scriptural stories modified. The angel gets there late. Like with Abraham and Isaac. The angel gets there late and Abraham already killed Isaac. With nephi- the angel gets there late and nephi and sam are too badly beat up to continue the journey. It should be pretty funny. The skit will poke a lot of fun at common things of missionary work- like for instance- getting to appointments late.

6 pm- pday is up . love you guys

Hope I get you package-

Elder helland