Lindsay, CJ

Can you send this to the people I the chain and on Facebook?  I am alive! I am being trasferred, so things have been super crazy down here! I haven't had a phone for the past few hours, but there was a kind Elder down here that let me use his phone to call my family and send this email. I will not be serving in Codó anymore, but in Teresina proper... the city. I will no longer be serving with Élder Azevedo, but Élder Simão, another Brazilian native. He seems like a pretty awesome guy, so I'm really looking forward to it. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to send photos this week. I'm without a phone.  Love you all! Have a great week!

Another solid week down here in Itapecuru! While the chaotic, very not G-rated, atmosphere of Carnaval is very much on the scene here in Brasil (can't even imagine what Rio must be like right now), we were still able to see some great miracles here in our little group. In the beginning of the week, we ran into Antônio in the city's center. He had been asking us to show him how to contribute his tithing so that he could be living this wonderful commandment, so we took advantage of his being there to show him how (as our little group has no financial secretary, the paying of tithing is strictly limited to a rather difficult online banking process). The smile on his face shows just how happy we can be keeping the Lord's commandments. Vitória was baptized yesterday! Her friend Yan has been going to church every week since gis baptism and had brought her as a friend the past couple weeks. She wanted in as well so we helped her with that "na hora!" The other youth and t...

Boa tarde everybody,  This email is being written as I ride on a bus from "KM 17" (a bus stop about half an hour outside of Codó) to São Luís de Maranhão. As Elder Azevedo and I missed our own zone conference about a month ago, we are fortunate enough to have this opportunity to travel to São Luis for a different zone's conference. It will be my first one down here in Brazil, so I am very much looking forward to it.  The highlight of this week was getting to baptize Levi. The rest of his family was baptized a few years ago, but he had not yet turned 8. As his parents split up and his father was no longer in the picture, we were able to step in and help him make this huge blessing a reality! I was also able to give a discurso (talk) during sacrament meeting on Sunday that I'm sure hoping went well. We are so busy during the week that my preparation really only consisted of what I was able to jot down the night before and the morning of. As I was speaking, there were pe...

Boa tarde, This whole week's kind of been a blur, mainly because of a random trip we had to Teresina. In the middle of a day of work we got a call that we had to be to the bus station in an hour to go to Teresina because of something to do with my passport and visa. That's all the more information they gave us. For the next 36 hours I was either on a bus, in an Uber, walking around a "shopping" (what they call a mall down here), or hanging out in the mission office waiting for a bus. All in all, the process of going to the federal police station (which was located in the shopping) to get fingerprinted and my photo taken was about 30 minutes, but with travel time and all of the other crazy things that had to also take place, it ended up taking much longer. It's been crazy seeing how different a Utah mission and a Brazil mission really are. I know these emails haven't been all that descriptive, but P-Days down here go by wicked fast, as do the weeks. While we un...