Pictures

Here's my district.
And here are some of the pictures of the cool things that I saw that are not native to Brazil. (The monkey was actually on a tree on the path to the zoo, so that counts as wild). And Elder Allen and I in front of a falcon or something that you can't really see.

We live in the center of Belo Horizonte, and our area is way on the outskirts of the city, so we have to walk like, 8 blocks to the bus stop and then take the bus to our area from there. Between our house and the bus stop, there's this one street that we walk down every day that only sells mannequins. The whole street is just a huge line of naked mannequins. Apparently it's the only place in the city that sells mannequins, so it's a hot spot for clothing retailers- people come from all over to get their mannequins here by our house.
Our whole mission has been fighting to get all of our media references contacted before the end of the month, and we had a couple that we weren't sure where the were, so we just kept asking directions and finally ended up very far into the sisters area- so far in fact that we ended up running into them around 7pm. We told them where we were going and one sister says, "Don't go there at night; you will die." So we turned around and started heading back to our area. We hadn't walked 20 yards when this guy walks up to us and starts telling us not to go to house number 90. We were like, "no problem, we were leaving anyway. We don't even work here." But then he kept insisting that we not go there. He was very concerned about his friend that lives there who has started following this religion of ours. "I have nothing against you guys," he says, "I just don't want her to be brainwashed by your church. And let me tell you another thing: Jesus is not an American! And he never went to the United States! You know why? Because they didn't have airplanes in his time!" It was all very unreal. I wrote down the address just to appease him and assured him that we would not go there. I found out later that it's one of the sisters' recent converts and that the guy is the lady's crazed ex-boyfriend.
I did my first baptismal interviews this week. The first two weren't really ready; they each took about an hour. Neither of them passed. The third one though, went really well. She was a 13 year old girl that has been coming to church for about a month. She knew everything, and really seemed like she was ready to be baptized. So we were all set and I just asked her if she could say the closing prayer for us, and she was like, "no."
"What? I'll help you."
"No. I know how to pray already. I don't want to."
"It's really simple, you can just repeat what I say then."
"No! I'm not doing that."
I spent about ten minutes trying to get her to pray, and to figure out why she wouldn't do it, and finally she stands up and says, "Man! This is taking forever! I'm outta here!" And she left. Weird. But she's still getting baptized on Sunday.
Two days ago we were waiting for the bus to take us home at night and this guy drove by and offered us a ride. He said he's a member from another stake but he knows a bunch of people from our ward. When he saw us waiting for the bus, he just drove by, but the spirit reprimanded him, he said, and he felt like he just needed to give the elders a ride so he turned around and came back to pick us up. Who knows? Maybe we would've died.
Then yesterday, Elder Madeiros the 70 year old missionary from our ward came out to work with us all afternoon. It was really good to work with him, he has no fear of anyone. I sent you a picture of him a while ago; he's the old man with a plastic white hand. So, that being the case, I'm concerned that he may have been offended when, as he was descending a muddy slope, I asked, "do you need a hand?" Especially since that doesn't translate in Portuguese.
"What?"
"I mean, do you need help?"
Hopefully he knows I wasn't mocking him.
I decided I'm going to kill whatever missionary came through our area and did magic tricks for all the little kids. Everyone under the age of 12 in our area knows the missionaries as "those guys who do magic." They all follow us around when we're walking asking us to do magic. I learned how to "rip off my finger", but I think that one's getting old. It's so bad that last night a girl followed us onto the bus asking us to do magic. The driver told her to get off so she left and ran and jumped onto the side of the bus and, looking through the window, yelled, "magic!" I felt like a famous person being persecuted by paparazzi.
Well, that's all I've got for now.
'Til next week,
Elder Sisco

July 17th, 2008

My first two weeks as District Leader have gone pretty well so far. I haven't had to do anything really leader-ey; I haven't even had to give a training yet. But tomorrow I believe that it begins. I not only have my first baptismal interview, but also my second and third. I'll let you know how that goes.
President Frei asked that every companionship in the mission do something special for their bishop to show that we love and appreciate them. This Monday we're having a special FHE at our bishop's house, with our Ward Mission Leader, his wife, and the couple missionaries in our ward. The sisters planned out everything, since they're amazing at that sort of thing, and we're sort of socially retarded when it comes to planning out special appreciation parties. They even made three special gift baskets of chocolates and things- one for every couple.
The two guys we baptized a few weeks ago, Claudio and Cesar, are doing really well. They've improved dramatically; they have friends in the ward and they come every week to church and to all the activities. I'm very proud. They went to the movie theater for the first time this past week. The girls that brought them told us that the theater was so packed they had to sit in the second row, and that Claudio and Cesar were sick by the time the movie ended because they were sitting so close to the screen it looked like things were going to pop out on top of them.
Elder Allen and I are doing well. He's from Sandy, and he used to be an artist for a video game company near Salt Lake, and I'm pretty sure he's gonna keep doing that after the mission.
The gang wars in the area have died down a bit, but we always see people smoking weed in the middle of the street in broad daylight, which is strange to me. They don't even try to hide it. I was talking to one of the sisters the other day, and she was like, "on my mission I learned to distinguish the smell of weed. I also learned what cocaine looks like and how people act when they are on it."
I tried to make brownies last night by substituting chocolate milk powder for brownie mix. It turned out like more of a soft chocolate bread/cake deal, but everyone seemed to like it anyway.
So things are pretty hectic these days. The church headquarters in São Paulo is threatening to shut down the referrals system in this mission if we don't start contacting ours. Our mission is ranked last in percentage of referrals contacted. The problem is actually just that the missionaries are lazy about relating them on the site. They're probably all contacted, just that no one bothers to tell the people in São Paulo. So we've been running all over the place trying to get all of our references contacted as fast as we can. The whole mission is.
That's all I've got for this week.
'Til wednesday,
Elder Sisco

July 9th, 2008

Note from Amy: This email came to Pop and I with the following:
I'm gonna send this email to you guys, and if you could just remove the part about guns and gang wars and forward it on to Mom, that'd be great. Thanks.
But, Mom already found out, so I guess it can all go in the blog now.

So things are going pretty well.
On Thursday, Elder Allen's first day, we were walking through the middle of the ghetto part of our area and he saw this guy run by with a gun in his hand. He turned to me and was like, "I think that guy had a gun!" So, we turned the corner and started walking down the hill. Not a minute later we heard a volley of gunshots coming from not too far away. I became concerned. More gunshots. We went to a members house who lived on the street we were standing on and she said this kind of thing is normal, but if we really wanted to get out of there we could go down the hill and to the right. We went down the hill, and when we turned right there were three police officers with guns drawn sitting crouched around the corner getting ready for more volleys of gunfire. We went back up the hill and waited in the doorway of the members house. Things only got worse the longer we waited. More police cars. More cops walking by with huge machine guns. More gunshots. They even sent a helicopter. After about an hour, it all ended, and we went and got ice cream. Apparently it all started with two kids who had tried to steal a car.
This issue of discrimination and prejudice in our ward is not getting better, but it's becoming recognized by the bishopric. Last week we had a great experience with the Area Book. After study, I picked it up and started leafing through it, and the teaching record of an old investigator of an elder who passed by here two years ago caught my eye. I wrote down the address and we went there the next day, a Saturday, at night. We talked to him really quickly in his doorway, but he said he had been thinking about the church lately and even asked if we would come by and pick him up the next day. He went to church on Sunday, loved it, and on Monday we went to his house again. We taught another quick lesson, and marked a baptismal date with him, and asked if he would say a prayer for us. In his prayer, he asked Heavenly Father to remove the doubt and fear he had about baptism and to help him have courage. The Spirit was so strong that he even shed tears- even we almost did. Afterwards he said that not only had he been thinking about coming back to the church, he had also been praying to know the right path before we showed up at his door. It was really clear that we had been instruments in the Lord's hands.
I'm hoping that his baptism will help clear up some of this "the missionaries only baptize ghetto folk" idea that has been floating around the ward. He's 19 but seems well off.
I haven't had to give a training yet as District Leader, because we had Zone Conference this week. I think next week I'll have to prepare something for our district. It's a little intimidating with sisters...
Anyway, that's all that's going on with me lately.
Love you all,
Elder Sisco

July 1, 2008 BIG NEWS!!

This has been a very, very trunky week. Elder Franklin is going home tomorrow. A lot of our Weekly Planning Session was him drawing a very detailed picture of him in an airplane in his planner. Don't get me wrong, it was a good planning session. It just made me sad, and wanting to see my family, and everyone at home. But I should snap out of that pretty quickly.
I'm a District Leader! I found out last night, I'm going to turn both Senior and DL in this next transfer on Wednesday. The DL of two sisters, even. They say this is the transfer when you learn/grow the most (turning senior).
Last P Day we went bowling with a bunch of Elders from our zone. It was very weird- very American. I bowled a 132. And to top it off, we ate at Pizza Hut afterwards.
On Sunday in sacrament meeting I confirmed one of the two boys that we baptized a week ago. I was pretty nervous about it since it was only the second confirmation I'd ever done- and this time it was in front of a bunch of people- and because President Frei was there. But it went well. It was short and simple, but I pulled it off.
Our ward is having some difficulties. It's actually a problem in all of Brazil, but it's loud and clear here in our ward: discrimination. If anyone remembers me saying that in Paraguay there is no middle class- just very poor and very rich people- it's the exact same thing here. And we mostly baptize very humble people, because it's extremely difficult to get to even talk with the wealthy here. But our ward consists of mostly people who are very well off. So things get difficult when you have 22 investigators (between the sisters and us) in church, all from very humble, poor circumstances, and the members act as if they're above these people and even have the nerve to complain about the people we're baptizing. Do you think our investigators are going to want to come back? Absolutely not. It's an ongoing war.; keep us in your prayers.
'Til next week,
Elder Sisco