Elder Joseph Sant: Week 45

Olá gente!

This week was crazy! This week was hands down the hardest week of my mission and life. I have learned so much! And I don't even know how I can convey what I have felt, learned, and seen this week, but I will try!

This week we had a lot of lessons in person, and that meant a lot of walking. Some of the pessons were in very nice, gated communities and some were in homes that are wooden shacks built over a river. It has been crazy to see the extremes of rich and poverty here in Belém. Also it rains every afternoon here in Belém. It has gotten to the point where I don't care about the rain anymore. You just keep walking to the next place. Occasionally we will walk to a cover for a few minutes if it is raining really hard.

Also, my comp got pretty sick this week, so we spent one day locked up in our tiny little apartment. And let me tell ya, I was literally going crazy. I have never felt this way in my life. Sitting in an oven of an apartmment, in a foreign country, with no one that I can really communicate with. It was terrible. So we went to the ZLs apartment the next day. And from there they started showing me the ropes of work in Brazil. I was very grateful for that, because the work here is very different. In the US it was all on FB, and here none of it is on FB. We are walking around and talking with people and interacting with them constantly. We will go to the neighborhood of someone who is interested in hearing our message and we'll walk around and gather the people in the neighborhood and teach all of them. And it has been working pretty good so far. It is really good to learn Portugues but also very new and different.

However, my comp kept getting more sick. To the point where he felt like he couldn't walk. He has asthma and he thought he felt this way because of that mixed with the extreme physical demands. So our mission nurse sent him to the hospital. There, they would not let me go with him so I sat in the waiting room for over 3 hours by myself, with no internet to call anyone if it was needed. I also had no clue what was going on with elder Ossovski. So it was high stress, but we got through it, and he now has medicine to help him out.

So needless to say it was a wild week, but a good one. The Lord has helped me and I am so grateful for the experiences I have had so far and I am looking forward to having more fun adventures, but hopefully much less stressful.

Last week I said I could understand 50-60%, but I did not know what it meant. I understood about half of the words said by nice Brazilians who know I am a struggling american. This week, I learned it is much harder to understand context and those things. And right now I have my ups and downs with it. There are some moments where I listen to someone say something, and I don't know what they just said, and then there are sometimes that I have been able to have short conversations with people! But no matter which end I am on the Lord is magnifying my efforts. I have noticed that the times I understand and the people understand me are always at the most important moments where I need the most help. He will help his children according to his timetable. I was reading earlier this week in 2 Nephi 19, and it repeatedly said that God's anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still. Times will be touggh and hard, but we just need to put our head down and work through it. Trust in him and grab his outstretched arm.

Alrighty, I am out of time, so it is time for pictures!