Tropical rain, the hot sun (I'm convinced Itanhéam has two suns), walking, and talking. Here is Itanhéam there isn't a moment of silence. Either you are talking to someone, someone is talking to you, or you can hear a pastor somewhere yelling "Gloria!" as he pounds his pulpit. The traffic is constatly passing our apartment window, and at any point during the night you can hear people talking, or yelling, or singing. I don't know when these people sleep. Even when we are walking through the foresty parts there is the constant noice of frogs, birds, and insects. I saw my first cobra the other day. But it was just a little guy... said my companion... he was only four feet long... sadly I didn't get any pictures! ha ha
Sister Farias and I are doing our best to talk with everyone. We surprised ourselves when we made 30 contacts in one day! A contact is when you talk to someone, either on the street or knock on their door and they say you can come and teach them. This has let to us teaching three different families.
On sunday our investigator, Paulo, came to church for the first time! He is the son of our recent convert Inez. He has been stand offish about coming to church and baptism, so we decided to let him digest everything and ask him later. But after sacrament meeting he tapped my shoulder and said,"Sister Cooorlery, I want to be baptized." And my response was, "What?" Yes... very smooth... for whatever reason this just wouldn't register. Maybe it was the portuguese, or maybe it was the culture shock finally setting in... but I was just shocked and I didn't understand what was going on! After a good laugh at the american he repeated himself. I almost jumped through the ceiling (not a hard thing to do in our chapel) and said, "How about this week?"
It is moments like this that make all the trials of missionary life worth it! You sort of forget it all when something like this happens!
Funny Story of the week:
There are tons of churches here. All of them evangelical. I really haven't given much thought to them either way, they are just there. Yesterday Sister Farias and I were especially sore because we had probably walked fifteen miles that day. As we were limping home one of the pastors must have seen us. In the middle of his surmon, in front of his entire congregation, he said... or yelled... something like this, "I will heal these two poor misguided souls and cast out the deamons that hurt their bodies!" (real life....) We were in complete shock... Sister Farias attempted to explain that we are missionaries and that we respect them, but politely decline. And suddenly all caos broke loose... I'm pretty sure we offended around fifty people in thirty seconds. As we tried to walk away we caught bits and peices of what they were saying. Lets just say it wasn't very nice... not very nice at all. I was so stunned, I was silent the whole time. So moral of the story: I'm not really sure.... just don't offend Brazilian pastors who want to cast deamons out of you.
Oh and we got to see the ocean last p day! Our feet did not touch the sand! We just took so pretty sweet pictures! ha ha