From Elder Lobo

Hey everybody!

Thanks for the emails and everything, once again. Thanks for the dinheiro! I'm really excited to get some good keepsakes. I got a book for myself for my birthday called "Lisboa Panoramas". It's a picture book, basically, but it has a ton of pictures I tried really hard to take but couldn't because of my camera and not being able to take pictures while proselyting. It's a really good flavor of the Lisbon I know, and I've been to all the places in the book but two or three. You can even see the house in Almada in a few pictures! It's cool. I'm also thinking about getting some custom azulejos done, and I'm thinking I'll get the Greg Olsen Lehi's Dream done.

Elder Hatch deixou de ser teenager today. We're having a churrasco at the chapel and playing some super awesome volleyball (we're not allowed to play soccer anymore).

Oh, last week we went to Belém for P-Day and went to the Ultramar memorial. It looks REALLY COOL. Look it up. I don't know exactly what the battle of ultramar or whatever was, but they made a memorial for it with the names of all the people that died. There were only two people with the name of Lobo, and only one had it has his last name: Manuel Pereira Lobo, and he was a 1st Sargeant. I got a picture with his name on the wall.

The work has been really slow here thanks to a lot of different factors. A lot of our members are still on vacation (along with the rest of the city) and it's been really hard to find people that aren't tourists. But we've been trying to get creative. There's a ton more pressure for numbers now with Presidente Torgan than with President Terry -- we didn't have any baptisms as a zone this week, so we're supposed to baptize somebody this Saturday. We're looking...

My plans for tomorrow include going out to lunch with António Fragoso from Almada (he works in Parque das Nações at the courts), teaching the mother of a recent convert, and eating dinner with a member family I haven't met yet (they just got back from vacation).

In reflecting over the year, I remember how I felt on my birthday last year when I played tennis. It was one of the few times I had felt like a real human being on the mission. It's been a gradual process breaking out of the robot personality that was infused into me at the MTC, and now the phrase in Preach My Gospel that basically says that sharing the gospel will come more naturally in relationships of care and trust, or something like that. I can't do robotic missionary work anymore, and even though my numbers aren't as inflated as they used to be, the effects I have been producing are much more real and lasting. We've had a lot of pressure recently to get numbers, and it's been pretty frustrating for a lot of people. The best thing about being a missionary is being a genuine human being with other people. Slapping on a fake smile doesn't convince anybody.

Well, I'm running out of time and I can't remember everything I was going to say, but I hope everybody has a wonderful time and that everything goes well.

I hope everybody follows Christ because they want to, not just because they're supposed to. (I'm the post man, doin' what I'm 'post to!)

Abraços!

Thanks for everything!

Elder Lobo

More from Elder Lobo....(sorry, been neglecting the blog lately!)

FYI -- His new address is:

Elder Christian Lobo
Rua 6, Nº 20
Bairro de Encarnação
1800 Lisboa
PORTUGAL

He'll be coming home December 17th!! They are letting a group of missionaries come home a month early so they will be in time to start the Winter 2010 semester at BYU (otherwise they'd miss it by just 2 weeks.) He'll be home for Christmas!! :)

BTW, Elder Lobo's birthday is this week -- Aug 27th! Send him an email!! elderlobo@myldsmail.net and wish him a happy birthday. His P-day is Wednesday, so if you send an email by Tuesday night, he'll get it first thing in the morning.

-Ariana

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Hey everybody!

Thanks for filling me in on everything going on. It's crazy to hear about all the stuff going on with everybody. Good stuff, crazy stuff, it's all good to know. It reminds me of driving with Elder Barrett while I was in the office and he turned the wrong way down a one-way street -- there is so much stuff that happens and I just kind of roll with it now.

Well, it's been a very different week this week. Living on the ground (instead of floating 16 stories up in the air) presents a whole different lifestyle. For instance, Elder Hatch and I walked in one night to a ginormous trail of ants. One lint roller and some sprays of AJAX later, we were back to life as usual.

Serving here has made me ask myself a lot, "What in the world do missionaries in the States do to find people?" Olivais is the most US-like place I've set foot on in Portugal. The only difference is that here we only have about 30 active members. It's a completely different dynamic than any other area I have served in. We're having to get really creative in ways to talk to people. For instance, yesterday we made a big sign to hold that says in Portuguese, "Have you ever asked yourself 'why?'" I think it'll be good because it causes people to come talk to us, often asking "why what?" "Oh, why am I here... etc." We're experimenting with having people come talk to us instead of hunting them down ourselves.

I met Orlando last week for the first time -- he's awesome. He is very well-integrated conceptually into the Gospel -- he speaks and understands the lingo, and that surprised me. It's a significant indicator when somebody starts using terms like "Heavenly Father" or "Atonement". He's been working on Sundays, but he's going to have two Sundays free a month starting this Sunday. He's a blast to talk to and really absorbs what we teach. He's currently renting a room from a guy named Zé who is, as Elder Hatch says, "permafried". Imagine a guy whose brain has been completely scrambled by just about anything you can find under the kitchen sink try to talk, and you have just heard Zé. Unlike Orlando, he doesn't absorb just about anything anymore.

I ran into Willian Rau after English class yesterday -- he's from the ward I served in when I was in the office. Either he changed a lot or I changed a lot since the last time I saw him -- I could keep up with everything he said (he talks really quickly), and it was a lot of fun to see him and talk to him again.

I got the birthday package from Ariana yesterday -- I'm saving it for my birthday so it will have something special about it. It's crazy to think that my birthday is next week. It was just a month ago that I realized I was going to have my birthday so soon.

What else...

They had me play piano for the other ward that meets in our building because they don't have anybody that plays. It's really bizarre to me -- that ward has about 20 active people and ours has about 40 but we meet at the same time in the same building but separate.

On that note, because of the high number of unactive people, we mapped out every member in the ward and started visiting everybody. We do the five rotating names here, too, but we've been focusing more on it. It's helped me get to know the area quickly and MAN there are so many people that need to come back. Most of the people on the list, however, have either died or moved. Very few of them are still living when it says they are living. We visited one old lady who didn't even remember who the elders were. There was another lady out doing yardwork when we rang the doorbell in the apartment building who told us that nobody lived in that apartment. When the door buzzed open, we both looked back at her like, "oh really" and then she said that she was baptized 20 years before but they didn't want anything to do with the church anymore. But we're trying to find that little candle of desire hidden deep down inside. So far, we're still looking.

Oh, so the city is extending the metro (subway) line all the way from Oriente to the airport, and we're going to have a metro stop right by our house. We use the busses mostly, but once the metro line is done, it will be really nice.

I realized why you get carsick when you sit in the back of the bus, too: if you're behind the back wheels, when the bus turns right, you go left, and that movement doesn't match up with what you see, so it makes you carsick. That's my theory, at least, because when I sit back there I always get carsick. Bussick?

I had an idea the other day to find people to teach -- I'm going to get my hands on a phone book and pass by the any Lobo in our area. I've never met another Lobo here that I know of. It's a really uncommon name here, but I've seen it a couple times. There was a singer that came to Almada named Rita Lobo, but asking if we're related is like the classic question of "So are you related to Rebecca Lobo?"

Well, that's the news from here for the week. I love you all! Thanks for everything!