Week 31 - Amazon Jungle

Hi Mom, Thanks for the recipe! Oh my gosh! I´m sorry about Trace, I hope that passes without hurting him too much.  Yeah, thanks for asking - no, I don´t have a bug net.  Some rooms do, ours does not, but when you live in the Amazon Jungle, it´s kind of how it goes, I guess.  This week was awesome! We had a baptism, which was the crowning part, and today we went into the amazon jungle for p-day, which was awesome.  Tomorrow we have our Christmas dinner with the mission president.  It doesn´t really feel like christmas, when your in the jungle, ha ha. Man, when it rains here, IT RAINS.  Part of our sector gets flooded out, too.  Our pants aways have mud on them, and there is pretty much no point in polishing the shoes because it only lasts for a few hours until they look like they haven´t been shined in a few weeks.  Within one day my white shirts are brown.  As far as the other stuff, the people that were progressing stopped, so that is always really sad, but were always finding new people to teach. So I´m about 4 hours from Brazil and Bolivia, and in that space they are still finding groups of people that haven´t had contact with "civilization" so that is pretty crazy.  Has it been snowing back home yet? Anyway, once again I´m out of time, but I love you guys.  Here are some pics of the adventure, and Marcelina, the sister we baptized. Talk to you next week!  Oh yeah, so apparently I can call you Christmas Eve to plan the time I´ll call you Christmas and I get up to an hour or so to talk to you guys, as I have been told so that will be pretty sweet!

Week 30 - Still in the "Jungle"

Hi Family -  I´m glad you got to go the Christmas Fireside, I watched it via satelite.   It's going to be weird having Christmas in the jungle - no snow, or anything to make it feel like christmas.   No street lights here or christmas trees or anything "festive" ......... not sure how I feel about that, so I have decided to go into denial, ha ha.  Anyway,  things here are going good still, we started teaching an awesome family about 2 weeks ago.  They have a lot of problems, so it´s really different teaching them, but we taught them about family prayer, and they said they would pray every night as a family, and with just that alone their family has changed so much -- like it's completely different visiting them now.   They have come to church the past 2 weeks too, so that is something special i´ve been able to witness lately.   Man it is SO hot here!!!!  I can´t sleep at night because it's so uncomfortable, and there is always the fear of the weird species of flying insects, that I'm pretty sure haven't been discovered yet landing on you throughout the night.   We always wake up with bites.  Also,  you should try taking a shower, or, more correctly, bathing yourself with cold water and a bucket.   But despite the temporal experience the spiritual side of things here is pretty awesome.  We're teaching and finding cool people.   We have some baptisms soon - so I'm really excited for that!   You could try sending me christmas dinner, but I don't think that would work,  ha ha.   We're going to spend christmas night with some member and supposedly we are going to cook something.   That's all I have for now! I Love you.