Week 10 - April 10, 2017

As I'm really getting settled in and used to missionary life and missionary culture, I thought I'd give you a list of some things I've learned about this area of Brazil:

1. Most people here have cars, but a surprising amount have horses that they just ride on or that carry carts for people to ride in. It's pretty cool, but the poop in the road isn't.
2. Everyone has gates around their houses, so instead of knocking on doors, you just clap outside their gates. If you know the person, you also just call out their names. I'm still getting used to that one.
3. You can't flush toilet paper. You have to throw it in the trash.
4. I'm quite positive the population of dogs here is higher than the population of humans. And you don't really know which ones are stray and which ones actually belong to people because none of them have collars and they all just roam around the streets most of the time.
5. One of the semi-popular religions here has a ceremony where one person spins around by the side of the road while someone else throws popcorn over them, so it's not uncommon to see little piles of popcorn while we're walking.

Jacuí chapel across the street from sisters apartment.

Just a little Jacuí 101 for you. This week's has been hard- when isn't it- but I can feel myself understanding more and more Portuguese, which is always great. As we were taking a boat across the river this week, this lady came up and started talking to us. Turns out she joined the church a long time ago and is now inactive, but she remembers her baptism very fondly and says she wants to come back. Also she says she loves reading the Book of Mormon but hasn't read in a long time. Sadly, she doesn't live in our area, but we told her about what President Monson said during conference- that now more than ever we need to read the Book of Mormon every day and have a strong testimony of it- and she said she would start reading more. It was a pretty cool experience, especially since most people here are either members, don't know about the church, or don't like the church. 

Side note: Being a missionary is really weird. I'm a 19 year old girl and I'm picking people up for church (we don't have a car, we just go by their house in the morning and clap to make sure they're awake) and making sure they've been doing their reading and keeping their commitments- people that are much, much older than us. 

Anyway, I hope all is well back home. Even though everything is still really hard, I think it's kind of supposed to be because that's how we grow and learn. And I'm still feeling the Spirit a lot, so I consider that a success. I want to leave you with one of my all time favorite scriptures that I think about on a daily basis:

"Peace be unto they soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; and then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes." -D&C 121:7-8

Remember the eternal perspective. Love and miss you all.

-Sister Coleman


Note:  Just thought I'd let you know that you can send letters and packages if you want; the other missionaries here get them all the time.They go to the mission home which in a really nice part of Porto Alegre, so I don't think the stealing thing is really a problem. And we have weekly district meetings where people from the mission office bring all the letters and packages that arrived for us, so I don't have to wait 6 weeks for every transfer. I know it's expensive and stuff to send packages, so you definitely don't need to. But if by chance you do, at some point in my mission...I really miss peanut butter.