Feb 28, 2008 Sister Dragao

Bom Dia from São Paulo. It has been another week full of learning and growing here at the CTM!! Our two favorite Brazilian sisters left for the field yesterday, and we have a new roommate, Sister Erickson. She just arrived today and was supposed to be in another trio, but her two companions did not get their visas in time, so she will be rooming with us for a week until her companions come. She will, however, be the only sister in her District for a week. We look forward to getting to know her better!The language continues to get a little bit better each week. I think I can understand the best from people speaking, as I can pick up context clues and basically understand enough, plus I always have Sister Todd and Sister Martin at my side to pick up the slack and translate. We also found a copy of the Friend, or "O Amigo" and have been working on translating the stories out of the magazine to practice our português since they are written for children. Sister Todd has also been reading the Book of Mormon out loud each night to Sister Martin and I while we follow along in Português. An interesting word that I came across this week was "Holocausto" in the Book of Mormon. Translated to English it literally means "Burnt Offerings". Chew on that for a minute. This Saturday I just about had a melt down. It can be very stressful here at the CTM knowing that in about two months you are trained to speak a language you have never heard before, and teach lessons about the Gospel that you respect and love to strangers in a language you dont know. Anyways, Saturday night comes along and we have to write letters to our Branch President about how our week has gone. I wrote the most depressing letter about how much I feel like I am struggling. That night as we were all saying our personal prayers I could hear each one of us crying. But our rule is to not talk once the lights go out at 10:30, so we didnt talk about what was going on. The next morning was Sunday and we were rushed to get to breakfast and then to Sacrament meeting on time and did not talk to each other about it. After our meetings we went up to our room and unanimously sighed and agreed that the Branch President would pull us in for an interview because we had gone clinically insane! Haha, we had all been feeling the stress of the week! It was so nice as a companionship to talk to each other about our concerns and worries and to support one another. We reevaluated our goals for the week and set new ones, that we would devote at least half of our free study time to language, and the other half to studying gospel principles. We have put it into effect, and the last two days seem to be relatively smooth and stress-free. We will be proselyting in two days, and we are so excited, yet so stressed about the event! Expect a great email next week!So our district has had some quite entertaining experiences in the past few days! Irmã Valéria taught us a lesson the other day on how to correctly pluralize various words. Unlike English you cannot just add a -s to most words. Instead you either add -s, -es, delete an -l, add an -is, -éis, -áis, or change ãos to ões, etc. The list goes on. So for a fun learning experience she has us play charades of animals where we had to correctly guess the animal and then pluralize the name of the animal. Yeah, guess animal I got. "Dragão". I bet you can guess what that is without translating it. So I proceeded to flail my arms in the arm and make a hissing/screaching sound as to immitate fire-breathing capabilities of dragons. Instead of guesses made by my fellow district members I got hysterical fits of laughter. Irmã Valéria couldnt stop laughing, she had to actually leave the room, I was afraid she might wet her pants. So some Elders from my district have taken it upon themselves to only grant me access into the room after I have imitated my previous charade skills. I also caught Irmã Valéria in the hall yesterday laughing and giggling and imitating me to another coworker. At the rate I'm going I think my name will be Sister Dragão by the time I leave the CTM. We have had some wonderful speakers/talks this week that I want to share with you before I run out of time on the computer. We had a wonderful talk about Faith in Christ and why we should have faith in Christ. My new motivational scripture comes from Ether 12:6 which talks about how we will only receive a witness of our faith AFTER the trial of our faith. In other words, we have to work, struggle and experience the trial exercising faith the entire time and THEN we will receive a witness of our faith. Faith is not simply knowing God could do something, but knowing that He WILL. Part of this message was also about knowing that Faith is the true converter to people that we will teach. Faith will be the teacher. If we put our faith in Jesus Christ, faith that the seed will swell in the hearts of those we teach, it will. But only after we have exercised that faith.Sunday nights Fireside was very good too. We had a darling family come Sister and Elder Maheiro. They brought their six year old son and he stood in front of hundreds of missionaries and in a cute little voice bore his testimony in Português and said how excited he was to one day be a missionary! The scripture that both speakers used was from 2 Timothy 4:7- Combatei o bom combate, acabei a carreira, guardei a fé. May we take advantage of the time we have, fight a good fight, work hard and keep our faith the entire time!Tchao!Sister Tittelfitz