Into the Amazon

 Monday, January 27, 2025; Iranduba Branch, Iranduba, Amazonas, Brazil: Olá a todos! Como vocês estão? Está semana passada foi muita boa. Tivemos Conferencia de Zonas, uma divisão, e mais! Hello all of you all! How are y'all doing?  This past week was another busy but normal-ish week.  To start the week off, we had a Zone Conference for all of the missionaries in my Zone. Because my Zone has missionaries in cities across the Amazon and the Amazon river, it doesn't work to hold them in person. So, our Mission President goes to one of the areas, and does the zoom call from there. This time my area was selected, so our Mission Pres. came, a few other missionaries in nearby cities, and other missionaries joined in via zoom. It was an awesome Conference, a lot about our daily morning studying and planning, among other things.  We also had an exchange with the Zone Leaders, so I stayed with Elder Alvarenga for the day. Because of distances, all 4 of us missionaries stayed ...

Monday, January 20, 2025; Iranduba Branch, Iranduba, Amazonas, Brazil: Transfers happened, my last transfer (6-weeks) on the mission!  My new comp is Elder Jensen, from Texas. He has 4 months on the mission.  This week it rained a decent amount. I love how here, it can be bright and sunny, 10 minutes later the sky is falling. Super hard rain. Then it stops and gets bright and sunny. 10 minutes later, it's back to dark and pouring rain.  I don't think I told y'all, but I saw more wild monkeys last week.  I made fresh lime juice this week, really good but a little sour. I'm still working on the recipe for how much of each thing to use. We passed this big hill with a big hole carved into it.  I had a training meeting with our Mission President and some of the other leaders in the Mission. Our Mission President gave us some tips on how to be good leaders here in the mission, but also how to apply the same things as we become leaders after the mission.  I loved ...

 Monday, January 13, 2025; Iranduba Branch, Iranduba, Amazonas, Brazil: Hello one and all! How are y'all doing? Today we had transfers! My last transfer (6 weeks) on the mission! Yesterday the President's Assistants (APs) called us super early, before our 9 am church. That was because my companion Elder Gale was getting transferred! He needed to pack his bags after church and then go to Manaus. He would then take a several hour boat ride to Borba. a small city in the middle of the Amazon.  I then picked up my new comp today, Elder Jensen. He is an American from Texas and has 5 months on the mission.  I was thinking on the 30-minute drive to Manaus and then back, about how cool it is that I'm here in the rainy season. I saw a lot of small lakes or creeks along the way, between the buildings, neighborhood, and forests that we pass between Iranduba and Manaus. Also, we cross Rio Negro on a long Bridge, and it's super awesome seeing a ton of boats moving across the water. O...

 Monday, January 6, 2025; Iranduba Branch, Iranduba, Amazonas, Brazil: Olá a todos!  As last pday and this pday are only a few days apart, I wanted to be brief.  For pday, my companion and I walked down to the river. So, basically there are two rivers kind of close by. One of them, Rio Negro (Black River) is between us and Manaus. The other, Rio Solimões, is where my current city is built off of.  Iranduba is basically on a península, or Island, with one river below and another above. But later thise two rivers come together. Many of you may have heard of it, but there's an interesting thing that happens. The rivers are actually different colors, temperatures, and different speeds. But when they come together to form the official Amazon River, they flow next to each other without mixing for a distance. [It is calling the Meeting of the Waters. You can Google it and see pictures of the two rivers flowing side by side!] Today, we went to see Rio Solimões. Its color is ...

 Friday, January 3, 2025; Iranduba Branch, Iranduba, Amazonas, Brazil: This week my p-day was moved to Friday so that we could go to the temple!  My day was super busy, as we took a taxi to Manaus, and then an Uber to the temple, and then another taxi and Uber back to my city, Iranduba. I will talk about the temple first; it was super awesome! I guess I didn't realize how much I miss worshipping in the temple, being that I have been serving in other states for several months and haven't been to go to the temple. Made me realize how lucky I am and how blessed those are who live in or near a city with a temple.  Also, I gotta say, the temple is super beautiful. They used native plants and designs like that to make decor in the temple. Usually, I love looking at that the most. But this time I enjoyed all of the paintings, of Jesus, of other prophets and Scripture stories. It made me wonder how I can make artwork that inspires people to come unto Christ to that level. Maybe I...