Oi minha famiha!!
First of all, Happy Fathers Day to all the dads out there and a shoutout to my dad. He's a huge inspiration to me and I'm really proud to be his son. My second week at the MTC has been really really awesome, and by that I mean that it went by a whole lot faster than the first week haha. Seriously though its been a really great time. My portuguese has really come along and I'm feeling pretty confident with my ability to speak about gospel topics, but there is no way that I would be able to hold a normal conversation with anyone. So when I get to Angola, I'm going to have to steer the conversation to religion so I can actually communicate haha. We taught our last lesson to our "investigator" Fabio which went.....ok. We asked him to be baptized and he said (in Portuguese) "I was baptized as a kid into the Catholic church. Does this mean that I have to do it again and it wasn't valid?" There was a lot of silence after that and then my comapnion patted me on the shoulder and said good luck. Thanks a lot Elder Dawson. I then spent the next ten minutes trying to explain to him and he said he understood and he'd think about it, eventhough we're not teaching him again. Overall, I was just really fed up with this guy and super glad I didn't haev to embarress myselk in front of him anymore. And then we showed up to class the next day to meet our new teacher and who's sitting at the desk wating for us? Fabio. When the two sisters walked in, they were literally crying and although he kept trying to communicate with us, we were just kinda staring at him in shock. THEN, he started spaking English, which blew my mind. We've been struggling to speak to this guy in broken Portuguese for two weeks and he could actually speak English the whole time! The MTC is cruel. He's actually a really really cool guy and "Fabio" is just an act. His real name is Hirmao Clements and I've learned more from him in two days then from anyone else in two weeks.
Other than that, not too much happened this week, except our super awesome trip to the consulate in LA! Ok, so last week, three of our seven elders of the Angolan squad got called to the travel office for somehting about their visas. They told them to come back the next day and they were probably going to fly to the DC consulate to pick up their visas and they were super excited. But it made the rest of us super nervous and wondering if our visas would actually go through. So they went to the office the next day and they said it was a mistake and they actually wanted three other Elders, myself included, and that we were flying to LA the next day at 4 AM! We were so pumped!!!! The original three were pretty upset, but what are you going to do? hahaha. It was a struggle getting up early but we got the airport at around 5:15 only to find out that our plane was at 8:30 and we had to entertain ourselves for three hours ahhh. We ended up just talking to people who came up to us and talking to them about news and sports (more about that later). Then when we finally got to LA, we were delayed outside the terminal for an hour and a half and then spent 45 minutes in a taxi in LA traffic with a driver who didn't speak any English, so we weren't sure if he was taking us to the Angolan consulate or going to murder us somewhere. But we finally got there, and we spent a grand total of 25 miunutes at the consulate. Really the only reason we had to be there was to give them some fingerprints. But they said that they would send the visas in the next couple days and we haven't heard anything since then. But anyway, we were pretty mad that our adventure seemed like a waste of time while we wating for our taxi driver back to LAX. But then we got into the taxi and the driver was this African American woman who told us that she would take us to In N Out along the way. This lady was SO funny. She was completely blown away that we were devoting two years of our lives AND that we were going to Angola AND that we had to pay for it. She seemed super confused why they were sending us to Africa and how they picked us to go. We did a pretty terrible job of explaing because at the end she said " So let me get this straight.. your leaders chose you online, kinda like a dating site, and instead of sending some brothers, they decided to send the three whitest boys they could find to Africa?" But she had major respect for us and she took us to proabaly the sketchiest In N Out I've ever been to. We almost saw a fight go down between two guys, but one of them ran away through four lanes of traffic. The LA trip definitely ended on a good note haha.
Other than that, not too much to report. I litreally asked every person we talked to at the airport if they liked basketball and if they watched the game the night before. And got some really good news. HUGE shoutout to Andre Iguodala and the rest of the Dubs, taking care of LeBron and the rest of the Caves. Really frustrating that it happened when I wasn't there, but I see it as a test of my commitment to the Lord. Have a fantasitc week!
Elder Christensen
