CTM Week 2

To start off, we don´t have a lot of time. 

You said you have snacks. What kinds of snacks do you have? We get a snack before bed which usually consists of juice, crackers or muffins, and some chocolate thing. Other than that I just snack on the snack mix that I still have.

You said you wish you had brought more exercise shirts. Can you buy t-shirts there? Yes we can buy t-shirts here. On P-day we are allowed to go out into the city for some time so we can by some. I bought a Captain Moroni shirt, and a Muller soccer jersey. They were 25 reals each so pretty cheap.

Do feel like the CTM is like EFY, where you feel the spirit all the time? Life in the CTM is cool, but it is a lot more work and less sleep than EFY so I wouldn´t compare them in that way. Although we do get a lot of meetings where we feel the spirit.

Do you have districts and zones there? Yes we do have districts and zones here. There are now 6 elders and 4 sisters in my district and there is one other district in the zone. Me and Elder Porter became zone leaders this week, which is pretty cool.

How many missionaries are there in the CTM, would you guess? There were about 150 missionaries but yesterday about 100 of them left so now somewhere around 60 or so.

Who is in your same room, where you sleep? How many in each room? There are 6 missionaries in a room usually (six beds) and in ours there is me and Elder Porter and 4 Brazilians. We got moved out of the other room when one Elder come unexpectedly last week. It is better though because we get to bed on time now. The Brazilians in our room are really nice and friendly. We read the scriptures in portuguese every night before bed with them which is awesome.

What do you do on pday? On Pday we go to the temple, email, and go out into the city.

How far away is the temple? It takes about 45 minutes to get to the temple.

How are you doing?  I am doing great and I love hearing about you guys.

So a little about life here. We live on the 4th floor and the missionaries aren´t allowed to use the elevators. So we do a lot of stairs. We get to exercise every day and my district does the most actual exercise.  Most everyone else does the laps they have to do on the track and then plays basketball or volleyball. They have a gym here but you have to go out and around because the door is welded shut for legal reasons so I haven't been there yet. Portuguese is really interesting because a lot of words are spelled the same as Spanish, and pronounced the same, and some are spelled the same but pronounced differently and some of them are completely different words. Also different regions pronounce things differently, like in Curitiba they pronounce ``te`` normally while everywhere else it is a ch sound, but ``ti`` is still a ch sound and de and di are j sounds but de only at the end of a word. There are more things like that, so people say that it is a mix of Spanish and Portuguese. Splits are cool, but hard. You get put with a Brazilian Elder then have to teach a lesson. I got put with Elder Lima who was in my room before I switched, and speaks English, which is nice. Splits are hard because you teach other missionaries, then get taught, and so you rely on the Brazilians a lot, and whenever you speak you feel stupid, because you can´t communicate.

Elder Porter is really awesome. I am glad that he is my companion. Also he is a light sleeper so whenever anyone gets up for any reason he wakes up. So I also forgot an umbrella, so I will be getting one today. Interesting fact, I am the youngest in my district. So apparently when shipping packages to Brazil there are two ways to get them here without being opened. The first is fed-exing it here, which is supposed to be expensive, and the other, which I don´t know for sure if it works, is wrapping the package in pictures of Jesus. Apparently the postal workers don´t like cutting through that. Concerning breakfast, they basically have bread, meat and cheese every morning with some type of porridge. They did have cereal a couple of times here, and they also had scrambled eggs twice and sunny side up eggs once.  

Love you all and I am glad you are all doing well.

--Elder Pettingill