Week Twenty Seven.

 So this week was Easter, or yesterday was Easter. Here in Brazil it is really big, because it’s very Catholic here. So people start celebrating Easter a couple of days before. Some start drinking a couple of days before. This little city of Gravatá had a ton of people! Everyone came here for the holidays. A lot of people in Recife have a house here, so they come here during the holidays, so the streets were crawling with people and cars. There were more people here then there were during Carnival, which is weird. So again we had to return earlier to our house. Here in Brazil they don’t do Easter baskets but they do have chocolate eggs. Everyone buys these huge chocolate eggs, or an egg with chocolates inside. They are pretty expensive. All day yesterday people asked us if we had been eating a lot of chocolate, but no one had given us any. Finally during lunch we were given a bit of chocolate. One of the girls in the family felt bad that we hadn’t been given any chocolate, so she gave us the last of her half eaten chocolate bar, she had already eaten a couple. So we were grateful for that. haha. Both of the wards here had a fireside together or a devotional for Easter. They had speakers, and we as a choir sang, it was about 2 hours long, but it was good. This Easter we just focused on the purpose of the holiday.

This week on Friday, the start of the holidays here, one of Sister Kikuchi´s baptisms came and visited from Recife, they too have a house here in Gravatá. They invited all of us for lunch. We had Brazilian barbeque! It was pretty good. Our lunch was a bunch of different meat that was cooked over the fire. It was super good, but weird because I haven’t eaten that much meat in a very long time. Their house was huge too. They had a covering in the back of their house where we ate with a built in BBQ, ping pong, pool table, and fosse ball, so we had fun. After we ate, we then had a water balloon fight! In the hot weather it was very nice, and with these sisters they are all really cool and easy going so we had a fun time, but were then super tired after it was all over.

This week was also a bit hard because Sister Corrêa was a bit sick, fever, headache, eyes pounding. Our president’s wife said it sounded like something, but then we found out that a lot of missionaries were getting this same thing, a lot. So she wasn’t alone, I think it’s a bug that’s going around here. I continue taking my vitamins.

Things here this week were a bit difficult with teaching, but we were able to have fun. Sister Corrêa and I worked a lot this week and were not able to see any progress. We know that if we do not see the fruit of labors now, that we are planting a lot of seeds for future missionaries, but we know that this is the work of the Lord and that we sometimes have to trust in his timing! I do love the work here and the people. Right now I couldn’t have asked for better people to share this experience with then these sisters here and my Companion.

Love,

Sister Rebecca Nelson