On the Streets of Sao Paulo

Ola, everyone! Hope you all had a fantastic week. Not a whole lot happened for me except spending 10 hours a day in class learning Portuguese. It was good though. On Saturday, we had the interesting opportunity of going proselyting. We took a bus to a fairly busy street in downtown Sao Paulo, and we just started talking to people. Our goal was to invite people to meet with the missionaries and learn more. It was really difficult. We only got one referral, and we think he may have been homeless, so the missionaries might not actually be able to visit him...but he was super nice and very patient with our Portuguese. Almost everyone we talked to were super impressed taught we had only been learning Portuguese for 3ish weeks. Other than our one referral, we talked to 3 Jehovah Witness missionaries. (We didn’t know until we talked to them. It was really awkward.) We also talked to some kids who couldn’t understand us and we couldn’t understand them. It was pretty rough. They were cute though. We talked to a sad looking guy at a bus stop, who didn’t want to talk to us. And we talked to some younger guys, who we found out were only interested in talking to us because we were young, white Americans...they asked us to go to a party with them I think. It was weird and kinda uncomfortable. But if nothing else, it was a really good practice speaking and understanding the language. Overall, it wasn’t my favorite thing. It really pushed me out of my comfort zone, and it was kinda emotionally and mentally draining, but next time, it’ll be awesome!!

Nothing else really happened this week, so I guess I’ll just share some weird Brazilian culture things. One big one is that they are very blunt about race. Me and my district are sometimes really shocked at the things people will say, but apparently it’s totally fine. They really like jello type desserts. Almost every dessert they have here is like sweetened condensed milk that has the texture of jello. I don’t really know. Brigadeira is really good though. It’s the same texture but it tastes like chocolate cake batter. Last p-day, I bought some chocolate that has sugar crystals in it, and that is really good. I also bought a Portuguese hymnbook last p-day and I am super excited about that. I promise my emails will be more exciting after the MTC. Pretty much every day is the same here and doesn’t make great email material. 

A spiritual thought from this week is a thought from Elder Holland. He said the reason missionary work is so hard is that it was never easy for the Savior. And I think that applies to other aspects of our lives, too. He suffered everything for us, and sometimes, if we are trying to be like Him, we’ll have to suffer a little too. We won’t have to suffer anywhere near as much as He did, but if we want to have charity and become more like Him, we’ll need to feel some of that pain He felt. On that happy note, I hope you all have a wonderful week! 

Com amor, 

Sister Herron