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!