Life is Good

Dear Familiy and Friends,

 

Just to clear up the worries it sounds like you all are having,

 

Everything is good here.  We have very little compared to what you are used to having but we have plenty. The mission and the Lord won´t allow us not to be able to survive and thrive so that we can´t do the missionary work.  We have enough of everything here to be able to do the work that we are here to do. We have food, water, shelter, etc... enough to have energy to work hard and to be safe and everything else we need.  I learn a lot more from not having stuff then from having stuff.  There is an annalogy that goes that we lived with our father before this life, and then we were born in to the mission.  I was born to Elder Jensen, I am his first born son, and then we are here on the mission to be tested etc... and after we will recieve all our father hath (things in america) when we go home to the celestial kingdoom.  This is actually a very regularly used thing.  It is normal to talk about where a missionary was born, and his father, who his sons are and the phrase He Died In Chao Bom or other such things are very normal.  My Grandfather is Elder Curtis, the father of my Dad.  If I have a different companion for the second half of my traning (two transfers) he will be my step-dad.  i have a godfather, and everything.

 

This week was good.  We are dropping most of our investigators and trying to work better with the members to find people who actually want to do stuff to help themselves instead of people who run from us.  I are also working on getting lots of less actives back to prepare this area and zone to eventually get a stake.  

 

I still haven´t heard conference in english.  We watched two sessions in church this last weekend.  We were supposed to watch today but the person who has keys to the church computers we will use to watch on left.

 

I am not sending pictures again because the computer I am on is really old and requires me to unplug the mouse to get to the place I can plug in the card because my converter is really big.  I will try to get on a better computer next week.

 

My good friend Joaozinho left for Praia today to go to school there.  I am going to miss him.  He is the only one here that speaks good english.  A lot of people know a tiny bit but barely any.  He is a super sweet guy.  He just turned 21 and will hopefully be going on a mission after he finishes school.  I am going to miss him.  

 

I think I am going to hand write pictures and then take a picture of them and send them home and people can type them up and put them on the blog and stuff because I am out of time again.  Actually, Looks like I have a tiny bit more time than I though but barely.

 

So, a typical day here:

 

Get up at 6:30.  Excercise hopefully, find something for breakfast, and so forth and get ready.  If the Branch President´s wife comes by in the morning we can buy bread which is like biscuits.  There are like ten she puts in the bag and the bag is 100 escudos which is like a dollar 25 or so.  We get like 18000 escudos a month which is like 220 dollars or so.

8 is personal study

9 is companionship

10 is my first 12 weeks in the field training stuff

11 is language study

12 we go out for an hour.  Usually just try and contact people for other appointments because most people don´t like to talk to us at that hour.

1-3 Lunch.  We chill, make some food, usually like pasta.  They have tomato sauce and mayo and Catchup (forgot how to spell that.  probably with a K) that we bought while we were in sao filipe and so we maybe make a sauce, maybe something different.  Rice and beans.  Tuna sometimes.  Occasionally we have chicken but not much.  Never beef which is sad because you can´t really get that here and what you can find usually isn´t safe.  We don´t have the magical costco canned beef.  That stuff is amazing.  The last 30 mins we are supposed to read the book of mormon together as companions but that doesn´t always happen because of other things we are doing during lunch.  We need to have more drive during lunch to get things done.

3-9 or 9:30 depending on if we are in a lesson, we go out and teach and contact and stuff.  Our area is decently easy to walk around on.  We have a lot less up and down hill than the other companionship here.  I went on splitts all day this week with Elder Peries who is a native adn doesn´t speak english which was great because I learned a lot.  Their area is like hiking the Y multiple times a day.  It is super steep and destroys shoes.

9-10:30 maybe make a snack, etc... Get ready for bed.  

 

It´s an adventure every day.  The days go by pretty fast.  Especially if we teach a lot and aren`t hiking all over and really tired.

Things are good here.  ´MEIRCA.

 

Everyone Realize The Many things you have, aren´t nearly how important as you think they are most of them.

Love,

Elder Sampson