Elder Lindquist 10/17-18

Email sent on Friday, October 17, 2008
All, so I've been here almost a month and the time has flown by. A new district came into our zone this last Wednesday so we're not the newbies anymore. We're now the middle district, the oldest ones left last Tuesday and I miss a lot of them, they were cool guys. The Portuguese is coming along, in our appointment at theTRC (Teaching Resource Center) we were supposed to speak in Portuguese for fifteen minutes, but Elder Craig and I only lasted like ten minutes. But we did a good job of teaching the second lesson (the plan of salvation). It's crazy how much you learn in just a week. Not only with the language but your teaching skills and your knowledge of the doctrine increases drasticly. The spirit is definately guiding us as we study and the Lord has blessed us a great deal in these past three and a half weeks. This last week was pretty rough I about had a nervous breakdown on Wednesday, but I'm feeling better now. Some things in Portuguese just don't make sense to me and it can be extremely frusturating. In addition, one of my teachers ticks me off sometimes. But I like my other one a lot, he's a stud. I definately have learned a lot about personalities here, because we're forced to be with so many people that have different attitudes about stuff and there's so many different personalities that a lot of times those clash. Sometimes it stinks but it also makes things interesting. We have some friends in our residence halls, (by friends I mean mice) the other day one went for one of my no-bake cookies and I knocked him out. (just kidding that never happened) but an Elder had his mom send him some mouse traps and he's caught six already. Our teacher is enforcing a rule that when any one of us passes gas we have to do twenty pushups since the cafateria food can cause extremely potent gas, needless to say we are all getting pretty buff. On a more spiritual note, Richard G. Scott came to speak at our devotional on Tuesday night. I got to meet him after the meeting and it was awesome! The second he walked in the room it was filled with the Spirit. I liked him before I heard him speak in person but he has now definately climbed up the list on my favorite twelve apostles list. He was super funny and involved the audience most of the time, but the end of his talk he bore his testimony and it was one of the most powerful testimonies I've ever heard. There was no doubt in my mind that he is actually an apostle of God. I really like Sunday nights because we have a fireside and get to watch amovie after. Gym is also fun, I'm trying to cut back on the sweets/ranch and run a little more. Well I'm running out of time so I'll bear my testimony in Portuguese. Eu sei que Jesus Cristo ama nós, e Deus vive. Deus restorão sua o evangelhoatráves o profeta joseph smith. Eu testifíco que as nossas familias podem sereternas. E Jesus Cristo é nosso redentor. well that's about all I've got and I've run out of time so take care!

Letter sent on Saturday, October 18, 2008
I hope all is well. It's good to hear that Payson is winning some games. How many more games do you guys have? It's starting to get cold out and hopefully you don't have to play in the snow or anything. I miss you guys and think of you often. I miss the little stuff like going to Grandma's on Sunday and playing backyard badminton and watching movies as a family.
Anyway, I kind of feel like the language is coming along lately. I can kind of piece sentences together (small ones). Our whole district tries to speak every word we know even if it's just one in a sentence full of English words. It's pretty funny, we'll probably look back and think oh my goodness we were horrible. But it's a fun language. Our Portuguese accent is way cooler than the Brazilian one. I feel bad for the 1 Brazilian Elder in our district because we all speak different than him. I forgot to mention that Brother Aidukaitis, (the one that gave the talk about his father being converted in Brazil, and talked a lot about the Book of Mormon). His older brother is the second counselor in our branch presidency. He's a nice guy, he also served as a mission president in Brazil. Every member of our branch presidency served as a mission president in either Brazil or Portugal. Well, I'm going to do some laundry and send an email to you guys.
Ama Jordao