Elder Landgren: Language Miracle

Okay, so the last two weeks have been really busy. I don’t have much time again so I will try to be quick on my update.

Last week we moved into the new apartment. It is swwweeeet. It has the best view in the world. I love it so much. I always loved to be really high up on mountains and over-looking Salt Lake City so it’s nice that I can still look over a city.

We have had a good amount of luck lately because it’s summer. It’s a lot easier to contact people on the street and a lot easier to find people who speak Portuguese. There are about a million Brazilian flags everywhere because of the world cup so we always know what houses to knock because they’ll have a big old flag outside their door waiting for us.

Last week we had a couple people come to church. Please pray for Marli, Rosa, Rafeal, and Rodrigo. These are our progressing investigators who are supposed to be baptized by the end of this month. We have been working really hard with them. Marli and Rosa have a date for the end of June so hopefully by the end of this transfer they will be baptized. They all are really great people who have gone through some really hard times. I just pray they can learn the gospel. I know it can and will help them in their lives.

Our recent convert Natasha is now a ward mission leader so she is doing great. Symar is still having a hard time letting go of the Catholic Church mostly because he has been having a really hard time here trying to learn English and work to support himself.

Every Saturday we play soccer with a huge group of Brazilians and a lot of less active members come and a lot of people we hope to start teaching. I can’t run nearly as fast as I used to.

The miracle from last week was this: So I sat on a bus the other day and usually I sit down and try to listen to people’s conversations to see who is speaking Portuguese. So I sat down and heard a group of people just behind me speaking Portuguese. I turned around and asked voces sao brasilieiros? They all smiled and said e ai carda voce fala Portugese? Voce e branca! Which means, what? You speak Portuguese but you’re white? So we then had a nice little talk. They are here to learn English. I wanted to get their information but I didn’t have time cause they were getting off the bus. So we went on with our day and had a pretty rough time. We just walked around aimlessly for a while, which I feel happens way too much. Later we got back on the bus and I hear oi meu! Which means, what up brother? I look over and I see the same group of Brazilians just hanging out so we started to speak Portuguese. They said they had talked to missionaries in Brazil before and asked if I was from Brazil and if I had served a mission in Brazil. I told them I have only served my mission here and I learned all my Portuguese here. They were all dumb struck. They didn’t believe that I had only been studying Portuguese for less than 10 months and could hold a good conversation. It really was something that helped me a lot when they said that because I finally can understand people in Portuguese, not everything, but I can always get the basic thing and respond back. To have these people actually think I was from Brazil was something else. My language skills from my point of view aren’t very good but I do have a pretty good accent. We then got off the bus and exchanged information with them it was a really nice miracle.
My life keeps on going sometimes it seems slow and never ending here but at the same time way too fast. I love you all so much you are all in my prayers every night. Love you and miss you so much.

Exercise

AMOR

Elder Landgren