Just Pictures This Week

letter from 5-25-09 - Yep, I'm behind - what's new??? :-)


Dear Family,
I don’t have much time to write. But you guys haven’t been writing much either. I guess we all know that soon we can talk…

Here are some pictures:

my comp

Tres Rios

(cool shirt, huh!)

(in pink is the last person that I baptized here- milena)

LOVE Elder helland

no, i am not fat!

Letter 5-18-09

big boned.

well, this week we are doing a barbeque with the zone and i am running around getting things ready.

congrats little lady, on all that mushy stuff. :) i feel kind of like i do when you are talking to somebody and they say that someone they know died. :) i mean, that whole, "gee, i don’t know what to say really...stinks huh!" only that here it is like, "oh, gee, well way to go. hope you don’t lose the ring or anything! that would really stink!" :-)

just kidding. [the proposal] sounded a little like that part in the 'other side of heaven': swing, pond, a bunch of people watching as though it were a movie or something. :) i don’t really like saying mushy words, but it sounded kind of 'sweet'. funny about that word: if you say that something is flippin’ sweet, no one makes fun of you, but if you say that someone is sweet or "ahhhh, wasn’t that sweet!" people call you fruity. not worth it sometimes, but for alyce i said it once. heck, while i am at, why not go all the way- tell nathan that i think that HE is sweet. (say it in the fruity way. :) )

this week, the zone baptized... 0. my great family is dodging baptism right now and didn’t go to church on sunday. the other lady that was supposed to be baptized this week told us yesterday that she doesn’t want to yet. we are going there tomorrow. damage control. today we met with the zone to try and get everyone excited again and we started a new strategy. if it works, i will tell you about it next week.

well i got to roll.

love elder helland

MOM- not many letters left to write home, so sorry if they are short. love you and way to go winning all that money and awards and stuff. i always knew that you were great!

dad- hang in there big guy. whatever you do - DONT LET THEM BRAINWASH YOU with all the wedding mushy girl stuff. i am coming to the rescue, in a few weeks, and i need you to still be the big burly macho man that i remember. :)

alyce- since you are the center of attention right now, i think i wrote more about you than anything else. but really, nathan will be ticked if you lose that ring. :) don’t play with it in you mouth, bc if you swallow it... there will be unpleasant consequences.

love again


This is a picture of him today - to show us how the diet is working - ha-ha!

FYI - In case you didn't know - Alyce is engaged to be married on August 1, 2009 to Nathan Robinson. We're very excited!

Message to Alyce from last week:

PARABÉNS! (that is like congrats in my language). what kind of a ring is it? (any decoder ring is NOT engagement material, although handy for reading the backs of cereal boxes.) i won’t say much more, but my comp, who has been teasing me about this since you started dating nathan says that you are going to steal my thunder. i'll get home and everyone will say hi, and then they will go back to talking to you about getting married and the wedding shower and stuff. :) cool by me, just so you know.

Here is a picture of the two of them in March at Magic Mountain. We'll take some better pics...soon! :-)

Six weeks to sexy…

Letter 5-11-09

that’s the name of the diet that elder christensen and i have copyrighted. the theory is that it isn’t so much about what you eat but about HOW MUCH you eat and what exercises you do in the morning. for example: everyday (except pday) i have to eat the dang rice and black beans. BUT, part of MY diet plan is that i am going to only eat some rice and drink a lot of water. that way you are full without getting any nutritional value, one of the keys to success. :-) I guess this diet is going to be a big high school fad, kind of like other diets that got big in the past like bulimia and anorexia. The good news is that i will come home thinner. The other important part is the exercises. Push ups. LOTS of the push ups. Then the arms get bigger and the chest muscles stick out more than the stomach. Sounds like a great idea, huh? I am looking for volunteers that way i can measure results. As for me, i will probably come home fat. :-)

Not much to say today...
The only news is that last night president called me after the our phone call and said,“elder helland, how do you want to end your mission?- as a zone leader or a trainer?” i said zone leader. He said ok and then a lot of other things about people in the zone. I got nervous, but it was cool. Form what i can tell from last night is that i will probably finish the mission here as a zone leader. Still... president is famous for changing his mind at the last minute.

Today i will go and enjoy the last pday with the zone, a lot of them will be transferred.

Well, it was nice to talk with you guys too.

Love elder helland

Alyce: Do me a favor and find some people for me to date too while you are at it. :-) Don’t tell them about the diet plan. Good luck with finals.

MOM- truthfully, phone calls are “trunky”- I mean, heck, we ended it saying- see you soon! But if it felt funny, you had to see my poor comp. The kid is getting home sick. Or mission sick...

DAD- last transfer i ripped my pants one day helping a family that we were teaching move in. It was a big one - right on the butt seam. I just finished the move and went home and changed it. That family still makes fun of me.

Trails and Trials

Letter from 5-5-09

HAPPY BITHDAY MAMÃEZINHA
This week was a good one. Lots of cool blessing and trials.
Sorry I didn’t write yesterday. We had interviews in the zone and p-day got moved to today.
This week me and my companion were in that same old thing always running around looking for people to teach. We knocked a lot of doors with little luck. On Tuesday we were all tired again and we realized that we had very few investigators that were any good (meaning interested and progressing). As we deliberated about what to do a crazy idea came to our mind: get on a bus going to a neighborhood far away from where we were at and where we haven’t ever worked. At first it was just a funny idea, but then we made it real. We had like 10 addresses there to go after so we decided that it was a dumb idea but that we would go for it. We walked to the bus stop to wait for the bus, when we got to the bus stop there was another bus there going to a neighborhood equally far only we only had 5 addresses there. Since we were just being crazy, we decided to get on the bus and go anyway. We went out there and worked the rest of the day looking for people to teach, again without luck. At the end of the day we found a family of four. They were awesome. They loved the message and were excited to go to church on Sunday. They went and liked it. We went there yesterday and they gave us food. If was great. Since we are working out there a lot now, we have since found several other people to teach- way out in the boonies.

Ok, about mothers day:
Our number here is 24 9984 0998
I don’t know what time you have church. Mine is in the morning- 9 to 12.
You can call me at 5 our time. MY time. I don’t know what the conversion is, but we have got a few people using the phone on this day so I hope it goes well. If anything goes wrong, I will call you with another number on that day. Deal? Just 40 minutes of fun though, ok?

MOM- parabens e feliz anniversario. Way to go you oldie!! 29 is a lot!
No I am not sick.
Thanks for your sweet email.
I got MY bday package this week and it was great. We ate it all already (the other missionaries in the house and the zone do not permit that food is shared for more that a day.). the shirt was sweet. Sister bezerra wanted it, but I didn’t give it to her. :-)

DAD- GOOD luck running in the morning. my comp tries to get me to go running with him but I am too tired to go. Tell gpa and gma they are in my prayers.

ALYCE - have a blast with finals. i guess that I am coming up on a sort of “finals” too. I am pretty nervous. Love ya and know that I am happy for you and doing fine.

Love elder helland
PS On Sunday ask me about a cool story that happened at interviews. It was great.

Longest week of my life…

Letter from 4-27-09

my companion- being from my group in the CTM, will go home with me. he, not me, is a trunky monkey sometimes. he pointed out that this week we were in the MTC in reverse. (the ctm was 9 weeks at the beginning and this being 9 weeks to the ...) anyway as we remembered our first week as missionaries we remembered that it was the LONGEST WEEK of our lives. i remember at the end of the first week thinking that i had been there a month. the days seemed to crawl by. this week, we commemorated that week by having the LONGEST week since the ctm. on Tuesday we did the big activity that i told you guys about (a BIG success!). BUT that meant that we were up and out of the house at 8 in the morning knocking doors and doing contacts and that lunch wasn’t going to be much rest either. knocking doors and contacting people in the street has to be one of the most tiring and least effective ways to do missionary work, but a member who hasn’t done it since his mission years ago thought it was a blast - for an hour at least :) we worked those members into the ground, but that wore me out too. when the activity was over the members went home and slept and we kept on doing the same until 9:30. i remember it was dark that night and i was beat tired and all of our plans were shot and we were knocking doors AGAIN. i thought that we were getting pretty close to closing time bc no one was letting us in and they looked like they were sleeping. i asked what time it was, and my comp said guess. i tried to guess low so that i could be surprised when he would say " eight thirty". so i said, "um, like seven thirty-ish?"- he pulled out the cell phone and looked at it and shook his heads, half laughing, half crying and said " nope, SIX thirty."- longest day EVER. the rest of the week we had similar trials and the days seemed to drag on and on- nobody seemed to want us in their house at night.

but the activity was great. we had over 70 men involved. we did 1920 contacts in 4 hours. got over 586 addresses and gave out 1771 pass-a-long cards. now we get the sticky end of the activity- working through the addresses that are mostly lies and lazy people that don’t want anything but a free dvd. (some of the members said some DUMB stuff to the people when they got their addresses. they promised books and DVDS and CDs to people. they told them tons of stuff... well, they did their best. )

the week, other that that, was hard. not much success in the zone either. this week is zone conference and we are going to train about how to listen to the investigator.

MOM- take it easy on the fingers lady. you only have ten. the little punk girl is still a punk, but her sister is acting up now so the mom thinks that the first got better. funny.

DAD- my comp is from utah- he is not a sports guys. playing or watching. BUT a guy in our house is from san diego and today we are going to play basketball together. he loves sports.

ALYCE- PARABÉNS! (that is like congrats in my language). :) cool by me, just so you know.

Love,
Elder Helland

ih-eh!

Hello Family and Friends - I am soooo sorry I am soooo behind on posting Adam's letters - this has to be a record for me (a bad record!). Anyway, I'm posting 4 tonight so enjoy! P.S. Adam's coming home date has changed. He flies out of Rio the evening of June 24 and arrives in Phoenix the morning of June 25. We're very excited! He will give his "homecoming" talk on July 12 if anyone is interested in coming. :-)

Letter from 4-20-09

ih-eh! is this weird colloquial saying here in tres rios. it is pronounced with the "ih" as in the "spit" and "eh" as in "any" (just the vowel sounds). it is really common for the young people to say. they use it like "no way!" our "whatever!" or "gross!". funny, huh! but they say it a LOT!

this week we had a baptism on saturday, but I didn’t get any pictures. one of the other missionaries did and we are going to print a few out today. her name is milena and she was a teenage punk. she still is a teenage punk. her mom kept asking before the baptism if her daughter might be magically different after the dunk in the water. i kindly explained to her AGAIN, that the gospel doesn’t work that way was and that it isn’t magic. just like pres uchtdorf said- continued faithfulness is the key. the gospel has the power to change, BUT only if they keep on going to church and reading the scriptures and praying everyday. maybe years, but things will get better. she believes me but still wishes that there were some more magic involved.

this week we had a great meeting with pres.! actually, all meetings are great with pres.! Even though i was totally sick and weird, i learned a ton.

we had some really stupid problems in the zone this week. one dumb missionary doesn’t like one of the other missionaries that he lives with. both sets of missionaries work in the same ward. i guess one spread a bunch of rumors about the new missionary. it was a really good experience for me because i felt the Lord lead me and help me know what to do. it is a long story that i don’t really want to tell right now. suffice it to say that things are getting better in their house and ward now.

president called a new mission counselor, a guy name Tita. he was a very famous soccer player once upon a time - won the world cup once or twice and stuff. he is pretty cool.

MOM- the bus ride was miserable. thanks for helping me remember. the big stake missionary activity happens tomorrow and i am a little nervous bc we have a dumb missionary who doesn’t want to participate. (yep, same dumb missionary as above.) just so you know, the majority of your letter was this weird proposition that you cancelled at the end. :) hey, what ever we do is fine with me. i don’t know about the cape, though. not that i have my reputation at stake or anything... :)

DAD- if you think that you have writers block- then i have family block. i block you guys out for a week and then suddenly i have to write down something to make you guys happy. some days i just feel like working and keeping the family block up.:-)

ALYCE- hey, i ended up getting the little note from you from last week. thx and sorry. tell nathan that i don’t have to get an email from him. if it is weird for me to get it, it is probably WAY weirder to write it. I want you to know that i am doing my best here, but it is still REALLY weird for me. so be patient.

TYSON- hey sweet guitar dude. i had a companion that played the guitar in some our investigators houses just to help that relax and to show that we were interested in them. on your mission you will use you musical skill ALWAYS. so be sure to learn some hymns along with all that heavy metal. (Truthfully, i have grown to like acoustics these days- they use them a lot here.)

LOVE elder helland

Today I’m Tired

Letter 4-13-09

i had a fever last night and i am still getting over it. i didn’t sleep much, and don’t feel much like writing a lot today. PLUS we are doing a zone activity today- soccer and pizza. (oh-yeah, elder christensen and I are still together here in tres rios.)

this last week was good, but tough. we are going to baptize a lady this week. we went to juiz de fora last week to have a meeting with the stake president (about an hour and a half from here) it was cool. we are organizing a stake mission day, where we are going to put tons of priesthood holders on the streets to knock doors and do contacts with people. there are going to be at least 50 members from the stake in our little city this next Tuesday all trying to do some good.

tomorrow i am going to rio again. (Tonight i get the bus, actually) we have a meeting with the president in his house with all of the zone leaders. it is going to be great. the last time president did a really cool sermon thing about the creation and the fall and the atonement and he let us ask all kind of questions. i hope he does something like that again.

MOM- sorry everything is so sloppy, but i am pretty groggy. this other guy that lives in our house, elder pili, got the same virus, so we both had fevers all night and kept getting up to use the bathroom. i was pretty sick. me and him were joking last night that if we were at home we would flop on the couch and turn on the tv or a movie or something to help get to sleep. i ended up just playing with that dang Rubik’s cube for 40 min in the bathroom. (beat my record, solved it in under 2 min. ) :)

DAD- elder pili loves b-ball, and is thrilled that you send such good and useful information every week, too bad he is from san diego and doesn’t care much for the suns or the d-backs. he did really like the march madness finals info. he thinks you are the greatest.

ALYCE- man, not writing to me AGAIN! i think i will cry. mom has to tell me all that goes on with you now a days. tell me about school and this nathan kid. just talk to me lady! love ya anyway.

well i am sick, i think that i will grab some more ibuprofen.

love you guys,

elder helland