Zoo and Thanksgiving

-

 Tuesday, November 26, 2024; Floresta Ward, Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil:

Ooopa olá a todos. Vocês estão bem? Espero que vocês estão prontos para comer muito nessa semana😋. Aqui tô vendo mais árvores de natal🎄, então, sim, podemos escutar para música de Natal. Antes E depois de quinta-feira🦃😅.


Hey y'all, how's life? I hope you all have had an awesome week! 

This week has been pretty good, or at least my attitude about it was pretty good😅. I'm writing this email a day later than normal because our p-day was changed this week.

We got to go to the Zoo and it's not open on Mondays. So, we went with the other missionaries here in Rio Branco to the zoo. It isn't the biggest zoo, but it was super-cool. The zoo has several types of monkeys, parrots, Eagles? (Or something like them), deer, A Toucan, Boa constrictors, and Alligators. But the best part wasn't even the animals in the cages/enclosures. It was several monkeys. One which was sneaking into another animal's open-topped enclosure to steal food. Basically, the monkey was stealing food from other zoo animals. And the others were also monkeys. But a different type. At one point we went and sat down on a bunch to eat lunch. We had been there maybe 30 minutes when out of nowhere we realize the trees above us had some monkeys in them. They were sneaking around without us even realizing it!🐒🦍🦧🙊

This week we saw a bunch of awesome sunsets. #Aproveitei. It didn't rain too much, but just stayed partly cloudy, which made for even better sunsets.

I turned 21 on Friday! For my birthday, I didn't do too much special until that night, when we ordered a pizza. 🍕

Our Zone Leaders made a challenge for our Zone to see who was working the hardest and most effectively, and really, just to help motivate us. The winner got a pizza. I, sadly, did not win the pizza. I do feel that I won on the competition though, because it helped my companion and I try harder and meet some new people, do some new things, and have a little more success. 

My favorite question some people ask me is: What are two Americans doing in here in Acre (being one of the least known places in Brazil). It's funny cause people say sometimes they go to other cities or states and when others find out they are from Acre, Brazil, they think it's another country. But #AcreExists.

We talked to a group of kids who were eating raw/underripe mangos🥭this week... crunch crunch crunch.

This week I was reflecting on humility. Being more humble. My current companion, Elder Johnson, has 5 months on his mission. Being that I am a lot more experienced than he is, and that I speak much better Portuguese than he does (for now😅), it would be super easy to just lead the way, take control and not worry about his thoughts. Focus more on helping him learn. But I try to be nice and a good companion, so I will often ask him how he thought a certain lesson went, or how we can work better. And some of the things he said surprised me. Things I hadn't even thought about that I should think about and do better with in my work. I won't go into details, but just the fact that he said those things made me think about how much I can and should learn from him, even though I have so much more time here and experience than him. How much any of us can and should learn from others. 

So that's my invitation, be humble, and learn from others. Learn what God is trying to teach you!

That's it, love you all!

Elder David Scott Olson
🌴Missão Brasil Manaus Sul🌴

Pics-
-Porcos
-Sunset
-Us
-Monkey

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rain, General Conference, voting

-
Image
 Monday, October 7, 2024; Floresta Ward, Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil: This past week was pretty good! How was y'all's week? This week's weather was fun. It rained a few times, one of them being super-hard. The options were Rain, Sun and humidity, or clouds and smoke in the air. The rain was the best option.  One of the days that it rained we got soaked. So... I won't be using those shoes for a few days.  Sunday was like national Brazil voting day. So, we had a decent amount of rallies, car honking parades, and other campaigning happening this week. I guess someone thought that throwing small campaign cards on the ground will make people vote for their candidate... But it's required to vote here in Brazil. Even the Brazilian missionaries like my comp, Elder Santos, from other cities and states had to vote, though online. I'm still trying to figure out exactly who and what places were being voted on   but yeah. Definitely interesting to see the voting culture here....
Read more

Conference and a... Surprise!

-
Image
 Monday, April 8, 2024; Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil: Olá pessoal, tudo bem com vocês? Esta semana passada foi boa, com duas conferências, serviço, devotional e uma surpresa! Last Monday all the missionaries in Manaus had a devotional with the Manaus Temple President, President Milder. He gave a superb devotional on Jesus Christ and his Atonement for us.  Other things that happened: -We had Zone Conference this week -Tried sushi for maybe the first time... yeah, I'm not a fish guy -Did a service project for an awesome family -Some awesome sunsets this week -Lots of rain too -General Conference was interrupted by a car playing music super loud in the street As my comp and I were walking along, I subconsciously saw IT. Right after my companion pointed it out, and then my brain finally realized what it was, and I literally jumped away from it. An Iguana. This one living though. It was probably 5 feet long, with its tale being super long and skinny.  This past weekend was General...
Read more

Transfers, Faith and obedience

-
Image
 Monday, February 12, 2024; Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil: This week's letter will be short.  We had a ward barbecue-the food was awesome-and played games like Ping Pong and Uno. Because of the Lord's commandment, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints don't drink coffee. But here in Brazil there is a drink kind of similar, but also different than coffee, called Cevada. The members here drink it. Personally, I don't like drinking hot drinks in a hot climate, but it's ok. But this week we were working with one of our friends on stopping his use of Coffee and took him some Cevada to try instead. One day this week we were walking near a store and saw an older woman who had a grocery cart full of heavy things. We helped her load them into her car, said goodbye and left. Then a few minutes later her car pulled up to us on the road and she asked if we wanted a ride. In the end she saved us around 30 minutes of walking and it was on her route. God works so m...
Read more