Elder Dallin Anderson's Mission Blog: Time Flies Here!

Hey everybody!

I can't believe that I have been here almost 2 weeks! We are super busy here having classes all day which makes the days and weeks fly by! My Portuguese is progressing, the first few days were pretty rough, but now I am starting to get the hang of it and things are starting to somewhat click haha I have memorized so many words in Portuguese and am able to bear a short testimony and teach part of the discussions without reading off of anything! Elder Joder and I prepared really hard for our last lesson with our investigator and we even practiced the lesson with the Zone leaders, but it turns out he came and taught us rather than us teaching him, he came and gave us some feedback and is now our new teacher.

Last week we played the Russian and Korean Missionaries in soccer. The game started out with 26 people on like a half sized field and ended with 35 players! I scored a goal haha and we tied 5-5 it was crazy! One of the Russian speaking missionaries (many of them have been switched to Ukraine) played Rugby at UTAH before his mission! he is shorter than me but is super strong and fast! It was cool talking to him about it! Sister Smith's Dad is Mike Smith who played QB for BYU in the late 80s-early 90s then played in the NBA for 5 years and is now the announcer for the Clippers! Crazy! On Wednesday many new missionaries arrived here, 10 of them are now in our zone! They are all going to Brazil and are waiting on their visas. Elder Bradford who is one of the new ones was an Opera Singer at UCLA before his mission! He is really good at singing!

We had an awesome devotional last night! The Managing Director of the missionary department spoke! He shared some stories from his mission and talked about working hard in the field so you can look back with no regrets! Sunday night is movie night, we have like 7 options of what to watch, most of them are talks from the Apostles, but there are also some church movies like 'Legacy' and 'The Restoration', we watched '17 Miracles'! It was awesome! It is amazing how hard it was for the pioneers but yet how they stayed faithful in the church and kept pressing towards Zion.