Saturday, July 12, 2014

July 11, 2014



Hi!

Its great to hear from you, sorry again that it's been so long since I have sent an email.  

Its so crazy that Julia is driving and Sammy lost a tooth!  How are they so old?! haha!  

This past week was a little bit more normalized, president goes to a different zone each day and is interviewing all of the missionaries.  Sister Broadbent is pretty good at Portuguese. She learned Spanish before, so she ends up saying a lot of things in Spanish, which is funny, but in a few months I think she will speak really well. It should be cool when Sister Broadbent is comfortable enough to talk without a translator, and I will definitely be here to see it!  

And Brazil´s horrible defeat...  woah... We watched the game, and I was in complete shock when it started to happen.  It was crazy seeing all of the fans there crying, like, little kids in the stands balling... It was rough, it pretty much devastated everyone in the whole flipping country.  It was a record breaking defeat, nobody has ever lost that badly in the semifinals of a world cup before, haha!  Everyone here is still really butthurt and upset about it.

I love you, I promise I will write more often, haha!

July 4, 2014

Hey!

I feel like its been forever since I have sent you an email!  Sorry about that, but this past week has been crazy! President and Sister Broadbent arrived!  They are incredible, I love them already. This past week they have spent a ton of time with us and the assistants.  One of the first things that happened is they had a meeting with the office elders and the assistants for literally an entire day.

It was intense, he ended up deciding several pretty big changes there that then got passed to the rest of the mission.  It was really cool to think that I was there for that, and knew about and helped decide those things before even the zone leaders.  Then there was the mini transfer of the American visa waiters, which president made us a big part of too.  He assigned my companion to give a training to the new missionaries, which was cool, and we had more meetings with president before and after that transfer, haha.  Then the next day was the leadership council for the mission, with all of the zone leaders and sister training leaders.  We went and actually were part of the demonstration president did on how to do a street contact!  It was pretty cool there, president made it a really open discussion and all of the leaders got to talk and express their opinion, but it's funny because everything ended up just how it had been planned in our first meeting with president, haha!  We ended up staying at presidents house for most of that day to help him with some technology stuff and sister Broadbent made us and the assistants a snack at their house and cookie cake thing to take home!  I am really surprised, and happy, with the large amount of time we get to spend basically one on one with president.  

A couple of the things that are changing are: contacts, they used to be called conversas (conversations) and the standard was to do 70 per week, now each missionary has to do 70 individually, not as a companionship.  A few things with how the mission works with less actives changed, to make things more effective and able to be measured, to be sure the missionaries aren't wasting a lot of time.  And I think president is going to use the mission leadership a lot more and give them more responsibility, which is cool.

Yesterday we had interviews with president, he is going to go to every zone and interview everyone to get to know them.  But he basically already knew a bunch about me.  I really think he is going to be a great president, he has a really huge love for the missionaries, and I can't wait to learn more from him.  He told me in the interview that I will probably be staying in the office for a good while, haha.

I am really having a good time here in the office, I am learning a lot.  I am learning a ton and getting to interact a bunch with the leaders of the mission, which is really cool.

Brazil plays again today, we have actually been allowed to watch Brazil's games, which has been a lot of fun!  I hope Brazil wins, just because it would be cool to be here when that happens, but I'm kinda thinking this might be the end for Brazil.  Have you guys been watching?  I was kinda disappointed when the U.S. got eliminated.
I got those pictures, they are so cool!

I cant think of anything else to say off the top of my head, but whats been going on at home the past couple weeks?



Love you!