EASY MAC = DELICIOUS

Buenos dias!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JEFF AND LARABETH!!!
Thanks for the emails this week!! Thanks mom for the summary of the pedigree chart – it’ll take a while to decode that. Of the islands of the Azores, we only have missionaries on São Miguel and Terceira, and Angra de Heroismo is one of the two areas on Terceira. Looking through the pedigree chart, I also saw Pernambuco, which is where two of our English class students were from.
Anyway, on Wednesday we went to the Panteão Nacional again. It was pretty cool. That night we had dinner at the house of a less-active member, and it was very Portuguese. As I wrote in my journal: “Chicken gizzard soup, rice, kale(?), pork and bones, and baked apples.”
Thursday was a wonderful day. I woke up at about 1:30 AM with a massive earache and took the only decongestant I could find. Every single decongestant here uses paracetamol, which doesn’t work and is overwhelmed by the effects of 30 mg of caffeine in every single pill you can pop. So I was up for another two hours. We went over to Irisvaldo’s house that night and taught him about how amazing it is to have scriptures, and it turns out that a few days before he had broken his daily reading habit, so it was great to see the Spirit help us know what to teach. We found out he was moving to a bigger house down the street, so we offered to help him on Saturday.
Friday was the day when my voice was completely gone. I felt great, but I sounded TERRIBLE. “I wish I could write as badly as I sound.” We took President’s van to the dealer that morning to get serviced and then took the metro (subway) back. It’s so weird to walk down into a hole and then pop up in a completely different part of the city. We made fish and chips for lunch, and Irmã West was very pleased upon hearing about that (she’s from England). “Did you eat it with baked beans?” While it was still light outside, we entered the metro to go get President’s car back. When we popped up in Cais de Sodré, it was dark. We took the car back to the office, then went to English class to plan some advertisement for English classes… it’s been sparse lately.
Saturday. Felt great. “Sick, but great. Voice is gone. Still.” We went after studies to help Irisvaldo move, and we found out that he had an old station wagon but hadn’t used it in a long time. He had us follow him while he drove to the gas station in Belém just in case his car ran out of gas. We filled up, went back, and loaded up all his stuff. It’s hard to have a lot of stuff when your house is about 300 square feet. So that went quickly and we took it over to his new house (still in our area). When I walked in, it started a huge chain reaction of CRAZY BRAZIL SAUDADES. The tiles were dark and glazed with a pattern just like the ones I remember, and then, being a Saturday morning, we were the only people out, so it was Irisvaldo and us. I wrote about it like this: “After starting to feel sick in the same way I did during my first few days in Brazil four years ago, a series of events has caused me to feel both in and ever far from Brazil. On a recent, calm Saturday morning, we helped Irisvaldo move into a new apartment. The tile on the floor was just like some I saw in Brazil. I looked out the window with the sound of birds in my ears with a sheltered view of the city beneath. Since then, life has felt different. It’s a calm combination of bustling, low wispy clouds, green growths of trees sprawling at angles up from the streets, carefree people, smiles, smells, and wet concrete. Overall, it’s a feeling of externality to the world. It’s a state of constant escape from the chaos everybody knows to be there, but people instead just take time to smile. It’s comfort in chaos.” There was a baptism that night in the Benfica ward, and we got Irisvaldo and his nephew (not a member) Edson to come. Edson is intrigued but doesn’t want to act on it quite yet.
Sunday. I taught the “apostasy cup lesson” for Sunday School. (I hear this is a world-famous missionary lesson, so somebody might recognize it.) We had Vanuza and her son in church. Vanuza is from Angola and has been a member for a while, but we’re not quite sure yet if she’s… stable. She’s living with Carlos, a Portuguese guy at least 20 years older than her, and he has a 14-year-old son Fabio. The sisters taught them once already, and we have an appointment on Friday. Carlos seems genuinely interested, so it’ll be interesting.
Monday. We had a pleasantly surprising district meeting that preceded a trip to the Vodafone store to get a replacement card for the sisters who got their phone stolen on the Metro. All the computers were occupied when we got back, and Elder Barrett was doing the jobs, so I spent the time organizing and de-stressifying. “My voice was lost but now is found.”
Tuesday. “Still feels like I have cotton balls in my ears.” President came in to authorize some payments on the bank website, and to my horror, I watched President give Elder Barrett the wrong code three times. BAM. LOCKED OUT. OF OUR BANK. I called the help line, and the person said that the person whose name is on the card has to go to the bank and request a new one in person. This should have freaked me out, but nothing really fazes me anymore. Elder Barrett turning down a one-way, landlords being ridiculous, people being ridiculous, locking our internet access to our bank, taking wrong turns, being sick, etc. We ate lunch at our bishop’s house by the bull ring in Campo Pequeno, and it was sooooo cool. Their house is really nice and the both of them remind me of a Columbia catalog. Our bishop was baptized in the mission home swimming pool in 1977 on a rainy February afternoon, and we found out that our chapel is probably the first chapel in all of Portugal.
I’m out of time.
Amo-vos e FORÇA PORTUGAL!
Elder Lobo