WEEKS 6 & 7: August 12, 2019

August 12, 2019

WEEKS 6 & 7: August 12, 2019

Companion, Elder Garcia from Mexico

(Andrew didn’t get to communicate with us last week because he spent the day traveling to his mission and then to his area.)

First week in the field!

All the "Greenies"

At the mission office

This was an interesting week. It started with me waking up at 3 in the morning to fly from Sao Paulo to Florianópolis. It was only a two hour flight, but felt way shorter since I got to take a nap haha. Anyway, we landed in Floripa and it was the most beautiful place I have ever seen, like straight paradise, like massive beaches, palm trees and nice houses! I knew it was too good to be true... then the mission president told me I was going to Caçador, which is 12 hours inland in the mountains of Brasil! So I waited at the mission home for like 12 hours, then took a 12 hour bus ride to my area. ‘Twas rough haha, but I made it... and had a brazil-style apartment and a Mexican companion (Elder Garcia who’s been out a year and speaks Portuguese well.) waiting for me haha! We cover the entire city of Cacador, which is massive, about 15 miles across I think, so we do a lot of walking, which my ankle didn’t like very much apparently because it swelled up and I had to go to the hospital to get an Xray, which cost all of $20.00! [No broken bones. Not sure what is wrong, but I’ll take a lot of Advil and see what happens.]

First Area

Anyway, we teach new people every day because the people around here are too nice to say they aren’t interested until after we are done teaching our hour long lesson haha. I have a small miracle from this week! As I said earlier, my ankle was giving me issues this week and it made it hard to continue the work, so I decided to have my companion give me a blessing. After the blessing I had enough strength to go out for around an hour, in which my ankle didn’t give me any trouble. During this hour, we found a new family that are SO nice and seemed super receptive to our message. This experience reminded me of the scripture that talks about `God doesn’t give a commandment except he prepares a way to keep it.’ My commandment was to bring people to the gospel and I found that family even with my bad ankle! Lots of long days this week and good nights’ sleep. I would imagine Cacador is the only place where I constantly see brand new Range Rovers parked in front of houses made of scrap wood, very odd. We had our first baptism on Sunday which was cool! My compánion is cool besides the fact that he loves to eat all my food and ask to borrow money haha. I’m just hangin’ in here!

‘Til next time

-Elder Hammond

Highlights from our conversation:

He absolutely loves his mission president and his wife!
He is doing pretty well with the language, but says he nods often to questions that he doesn't understand and hopes he hasn’t agreed to anything he wouldn’t want to do.
He still doesn’t like beans, but hasn’t had any terrible meals in his area yet.
He was missing home pretty bad this week, but I think that was exasperated by total exhaustion from traveling for hours, working long hours, walking on a sore ankle and not getting to communicate with us for 2 weeks.
He got a package from Becca which he was SO GRATEFUL FOR! He actually started crying when he was showing me what she had sent him. She sent him a marked Book of Mormon with pictures of family inside, a hymn book, a journal, some study materials, a small bible and other stuff. It was really touching to see how much that meant to him. He was genuinely excited about it and if you know Andrew well, you know that he doesn’t get excited about study materials usually.