Pictures!

We walk by this cool... thing.... every day. So I got a picture of me in it. It seems like it would be fun to drive.


First baptism.


Catholic Moroni.


Second baptism.


Very rainy season.


So rainy that my umbrella turned inside out while seeking shelter.


This elder 3 transfers ago planted one corn seed.... or something. So we had one random stalk of corn growing in front of our house. This is the one piece of corn it produced........ I didn't actually eat it. We're mailing it to him.


Fourth baptism, last Saturday.


Pictures of the moldy walls in our moldy house.... sweet.




The view from the backyard of a recent convert's house.

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

I don't have much to report this week. It flew by so fast, I barely remember what happened.
On Saturday, we moved. Finally. Our new house is amazing. I think I'll have to take pictures of it. I took some pictures of the old house that I'm sending right now. I'm so glad to be out of there.
On Sunday we had a meeting with just us, the bishop and this guy from the stake presidency. He talked about the quality of the sacrament meeting. Because it's bad. Everyone gets up and walks around, leaves, comes back, talks, everything. Last week this girl was sitting in the very back row on top of the pew talking to her friend with her back to the pulpit. Awesome. Our chapel is huge, but our ward is tiny, so everyone sits spread out everywhere. It's no good. Hopefully we'll be able to get our own building soon that will accommodate our ward a little better (I don't actually think we even have enough people to qualify as a ward).
I've gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks, by the way (or 4.5 kilos, if you will). I have a gut. It's disturbing. A woman in our ward, and one of the elders from the CTM both told me that my face looks chubby. I'm working hard every morning now to get rid of the gut. It's because we eat so much. I only want to eat one plate of food... .I always get enough. But then after I eat someone always says "you need to gain wait, eat more" and so I have to eat more. Then there's dessert. Sometimes people are even offended if I try to decline- they think I don't like it. So lately I've been trying to do smaller portions on the first time around to accommodate seconds. The other day, only a few hours after one of these huge lunches, we went to a recent convert's house for a special family dinner. I just got a little bit of the rice, beans and noodles that she made and was fine. Then when I was done, Irma took my plate out of my hands went into the kitchen and PILED the food on! She came back and put the plate in my hands and I almost cried. I was already full! She did the same thing to Elder Wilson. Finishing that plate of food was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. But we thanked her and went on our way. I almost threw up after we left. And that is why I am fat.
We have to go eat lunch at the Bishop's house tomorrow, which I'm not looking forward to. The food is fine, but he has this 2 year old boy that hates clothing. They try and try to get him to put clothes on, but he just runs away and takes them off again... and then comes and wants us to play with him. And it's weird. Amy: Please don't let your baby run around naked when the missionaries are at your house eating lunch. It's awkward for them.
Love,
Elder Sisco

Ok. I feel like I can finally tell you about this because it's over- or ending. Our house: It's disgusting and terrible. I will take pictures before we leave, but I probably won't send them to you; I don't want you to get frightened. When we leave, we have to close the windows and lock the doors, and since we just passed 3 weeks of straight rain it gets a little humid. 7 of my 20 ties are unwearable because of the massive amounts of mold that is growing on them. I took a shirt out of the closet the other day that I had never even worn before and it had mold all around the collar. It was literally a blue fuzzy collar. 3 pairs of pants were rendered unwearable overnight- I had to wash them twice to get the mold completely off. If I leave my garments too long without washing them, they get moldy. There's probably mold on a lot of other things I wear too, I just cant tell because it blends in, I bet. The walls are covered with mold. It smells like mold. Our house is a rat hole. Speaking of rats, we have them, so we sprinkled rat poison all outside the front steps. I haven't seen one since then, I hope that means its working. When the mission president was here in Sete Lagoas his wife came to look at our house, since we had complained. She walked in the front door, her mouth slightly ajar and she said simply, "this is not good." That was last week. So last night we finally found our apartment, and we're working on closing today. I think we'll be out of there within 3 days. The other reason we're moving is because the ZLs are having some sort of problem and there needs to be an emergency transfer, and another companionship is moving into our area. I'm not sure about the details, since they don't tell us, so I cant really explain them to you. All we know is that last week President Frei was pretty chill about us getting a house and then two nights ago he called and was like "you need to get a house tomorrow." So we spent all day looking and finally found it last night. Our p-day has been spent doing paperwork. All day. I spent all morning in a real estate office. Tomorrow we'll have to go to Belo Horizante to get President Frei's signature on our contract. So this has all impacted the work quite a bit, we haven't been able to teach much, but I'm so glad that we're finally getting out of our crappy house.
We had 2 baptisms on Saturday and will have at least two more this Saturday, if all goes well. I'll send pictures- I wanted to today but its not looking good for time.
I was talking to this guy at church on Sunday and he was telling me a story about this bishop, not in our area but somewhere in the mission, who had this girl in his ward who was really upset about the fact that she couldn't pass the sacrament. She just REALLY wanted to help pass the sacrament, and she made quite a big fuss about it to everyone. So one Sunday the Stake President is visiting and he sees that the girl is passing the sacrament to the ward, and he says "Bishop, what's going on here?" and the Bishop says "Don't worry, President, I gave her the Aaronic priesthood."
Not sure if this is true, since it seems so ridiculous, but he seemed quite adamant about it even though I doubted it so thouroughly. If anywhere though, that would happen here in Brazil.
Speaking of apostasy, it's everywhere here. I have photographic evidence. Mary worship is a big thing in Brazil. My favorite so far is this poster we saw with a big picture of Mary and at the bottom it says "Tudo por Jesus, Nada sem Maria" or Everything by Jesus, nothing without Mary." Awesome.
There are a lot of poor Brazilians. A lot. The majority. The problem, that I'm seeing is that they don't know what to do with money. They have way crooked priorities. People ask the church for help, and the church gives them food or money for food, but then you go to their house and they have a giant flat screen TV and a nice DVD player middle of their crappy hovel, and all of their kids have cell phones. It's weird. Everyone has a nice TV and a cell phone, no matter how poor you are. Scary, actually.
I have to go, so I can't write more, but I just thought I'd leave that tidbit about the house with you all. Don't worry though, the apartment we found is SUH-WEET. I love it, it's sooo coool. And the guy who's renting it to us is awesome too. I want to baptize him.
Okay, I must go, sorry I spent so much time reading emails I ran out of time to write.
Bye,
Elder Sisco


Note from Amy: You can click on these photos to view them larger.

It took a long time for us to get to the internet place; we had a zone p-day today that lasted 'til 3 and then we had to bring one of our investigators to the church for a baptismal interview during our p-day time, so I'm actually over time right now since it's past 6 but apparently it's okay because we used p-day time to do work. The guy we picked up and brought to the church for the interview is Alexandre. He's 20 years old, has approximately 8 earrings/1 eyebrow piercing, multiple tattoos and a light Clayton-esque beard. Everyone who sees him assumes he's either a pothead, womanizer or alcoholic, etc. But he's actually this way shy guy who doesn't like any of that stuff. Carnaval was this past week and we were pretty nervous about it, but he barely left his house. When we picked him up, he had shaved his beard (we didn't say anything about it) and when he came out of the interview with our Zone Leader all the piercings were gone (we hadn't mentioned them yet either). Incredible. He's getting baptized on Saturday and confirmed on Sunday. Yes! I don't think I'll be the one to baptize him, but we'll see.
Speaking of Carnaval, it actually wasn't bad here in Sete Lagoas. We're far enough inland and our apartment is kind of out of the way of the main drag that we didn't have any problem, really. I contacted a lot more drunk people this past week, but that was the only real difference. That and every morning after was absolutely dead. No one in the streets, everything closed. I've heard that missionaries serving in Rio and places closer to the ocean like that have to stay in their apartments for the whole week of Carnaval because it gets so crazy there- glad that's not me. I ran into one guy the other night who was so shocked and horrified that we didn't engage in promiscuous acts of random sexuality before marriage that he got up in my face and was grabbing my arm and telling me to "leave this life" or, in other words, "join the dark side," if you will. Also he so cleverly insisted that you have to "know the other side before you can shun it." We said the same applies to him. Then he invited us to his house later to "have some fun." Really sweet guy. I don't think he's interested in the church, though.
We only have 1 investigator that I personally contacted and invited to church and everything- Xisleine. Also, I still can't understand a word she says. We're trying to get her to stop smoking, and she's very receptive when we're actually there but we hear from inside sources that she lied to us and is really barely making an effort. Sad. We'll talk to her tomorrow I hope.
I've been doing a ton of divisions lately, and with Brazilians which is awesome because I learn so much more Portuguese that way. I went out with our Zone Leader last week Elder Vitório and it was amazing. He only has a month left, I can only hope to be as good as he is when I reach that point. There was a point where we were just walking around doing contacts until an appointment we had, and he did a contact with this girl who wasn't interested, asked for a referral, got nothing but "yeah, Maria, down the street" (everyone in Brazil is named Maria, by the way) and 20 minutes later we had met Maria, taught her some of the first lesson and she had accepted a baptismal date. Unfortunately, it wasn't my area so I don't get to see the progression of things. Only glimpses.
At our zone p-day today we got to watch Charly (in English) and then Narnia (in Portuguese). I had never seen Charly before- and I don't plan on ever seeing it again. Narnia, though, was amazing, as always. Love it. And being on a mission and watching it was also a neat experience- my understanding of the symbolism is deeper.
On Sundy I had fechuada for the first time in the field. For those of you unfamiliar with fechuada, it's beans and rice, of course, but with the beans is mixed in... basically whatever is handy. Just, anything. This one happened to be pig meat. But they waste no part. Some of the pieces that I got still had stubbly pig hairs on them. I'm told that this was mild; tolerable even, and that it gets pretty bad in some places. Another characteristic of fechuada is that it literally smells like poop. This one not so much, but it didn't smell great.
As far as the laundry situation goes, for one thing it's so humid here (did I mention that since I got here we haven't passed one day without rain?) that clothing hung out to dry literally never dries. I've been ironing things and/or hanging them behind the refrigerator the night before. Every night when I climb into bed, my sheets feel damp. It's gross and uncomfortable. Anyway, we have this machine that does basically what a washer does- you put your clothes in, it fills up with water (or rather, you fill it up with water from the hose connected to the sink), you dump some laundry soap in and it just starts chugging and gurgling. Then you just pull the stopper out, it drains, and you hang up your clothes. And then you put on your clothes and they smell worse then they did when you put them in. I haven't figured that one out yet, but we're buying different soap today to see if that helps.
On Monday I did a division with Elder dos Santos, an elder in our district, and he came to my area and my trainer went with his companion. This was my first time being alone. We had one appointment, and I thought I knew where it was. What I actually knew was what it looks like when you get there, not how to get there. We spent about an hour and a half walking around, asking directions, and doing contacts with the people we were asking directions from which isn't so bad except that the whole time we were looking for this womans house it was raining harder than I've ever seen, and it seemed endless. You couldn't see the streets because they were no longer streets, but rivers. I was walking on sidewalks through water that was halfway up to my knees. (My $35 Maine Sport umbrella broke, the fabric tore off of one of the spokes or whatever they're called. It's still functioning but that was just an unfortunate side-affect of the rain). We finally made it to the woman's house after traversing many waters, and she hadn't read or done anything that Elder Wilson and I talked to her about the day before. Awesome. So we read what we had asked her to read with her and then talked about prophets, Joseph Smith, the restoration, etc. and so that was nice...
That's all.
I love you all, thanks for your letters/emails I enjoyed them all! Thank you.
Love,
Elder Sisco
PS Note to the Hutchins from Amy: Dan said thanks a bunch for the email and just wanted to let you know that he can only email family, thus the reason he hasn't written back yet. But he can receive emails from anyone, so just use the email address on the right and send him a note!