Como vai?

it was a super good week in Brazil!! this week i survied my 1st transfer and my first 100 days in the mission. dang its going by fast. in the pictures:
first is a picture of a coconut farm here in my area. beautiful right? right next to it was a nursury (for plants) they had all the furit trees there really samll and forsale. and the average fruit tree was less than $2!! crazy hu? i wanted to get on sooo bad! but we dont have any dirt at our house. no yard at all. almost no houses have a yard here becasue its just sand or dry dirt. no grass.
the next picture is ofme at a phone booth. they dont all look like that, but they all have the same general shape as this one.. whithout the ears haha and they are normally blueish. they have the normal blue ones that the people call "big ear" and they also have a few of these cool ones. haha so i wanted to get a picture of it
you can see in the next picture that this "big ear" attacted me and i just barrley escaped! luckily my companion had his camera ;)
the next 2 pictures look weird too. we have two toilets in our appartment, they both have problems. one of them is always running, so it uses tons of our water that we have very little of. the other does not flush because a part was broken inside. so i have to say thanks to my dad, he taught me how toilets work and how to fix them. so when i got to the area i went to the hardwear store and got the parts i needed and was able to fix both toilets this week. the cool thing is now we have not run out of water since the toilet was fixed, and before we would run out almost every day. woot woot!

so this sunday we took one of our invertigators to church with us. her name is Pamela, she is 15. we found her by tracking. apparently her mom was baptised like 16 years ago and only went to church for a year. so we started teaching Pamela and after two weeks we got her to go to church with us. one sad thing is that she is missing her left arm, just below the elbow :( whats even more sad is that my companion and i never noticed that untill 2 weeks after we had been teaching her.. it was a pretty big shock. i guess i need to be more observant.
this tuesday was transfer day, my companion and i are staying in Petrolina West but the other two elders in our appartment got transferred. which was a good thing. haha so we got two new elders who seem pretty cool. an american and a brazilain who is brand new in the mission. they seem pretty cool :)
this week besides fixing the toilets, my comp and i cleaned and scrubed the floors of the appartment. it is so much better having a clean house!
oh, so that family we are teaching, they wanted us to make dinner for them (we have only known them for a week, they're amazing) so we dicided to make french toast. becasuse its somthing then have never had, and its in our budget haha my companion braught a bottle of Mapeline from home, so i was able to make maple suyrup too! it was soooo good! but im not sure they liked it all that much. its so different from what they have here. they eat the same things every day. rice, beans and some spegetti. and some kind of meat. (almost always chiken) they think its so weird when we tell them we eat different things everyday in the US. they dont understand. they cant imagine their luch or dinner without rice and beans.. haha
my feet are getting more acustumed to walking all day and im not getting anymore blisters, but im still waiting for the skin to grow back. i have lots of holes in my very white feet haha.
now that it is getting colder where you all are, its getting hotter here. these last few months we have been having about the same weather (your summer, my winter) but now you will have cold and i will have... death. haha i cant imagine it getting hotter, but bring it on! haha we will see how white i can make my body look compared to my arms and face haha
by the way, thank you to Cheyenne who has been keeping a blog for me with all my past "mass emails" so they are there if you want to see them.
i hope everyone is well, im doing amazing and loving every second! im honestly loving it, i'm always happy and trying to do my best.
one more thing, the mission president of my mission who left right before i got here said something that i like a lot.
"what happens when you get to heaven and God says to you, 'the Mormon church is not true' what do you do?" then he said "Elders, its simpel. You bare your testimony!"
its so ture, even if that did happen, i would get to heaven and say, i did my best, i tried my hardest to do what was right and what you wanted, and when i asked you if this was the right church, if Joseph Smith really was a prophet, you testified to me that it is true.
thats all for this week, keep me updated on whats new!
Com Amo
Elder Cluff

This Week!

hey!
i can't believe how fast the days are going! time is seriously flying!
the pictures: the first is of me in a Catholic church! a huge church! it was really cool. its in down town Petronia. i hear that the ones in Salvador are really really old and famous. that will be cool. something that i thought was funny, while i was in the church walking around, there was a man kneeling in front of the big statue of Jesus praying, but while he was kneeling there, he pulls out his cell phone and answers a phone call. so he puts the Lord on hold and for 10 minutes he talks on the phone, on the alter.. interesting.
the second picture is one of my favorites! its in the area that my comp and i work. in Brazil there is tons of cars with huge speakers on them that drive around advertising. also motorcycles. their really annoying, because their sooo loud and interrupt our lessons all the time. but this bike is my favorite! a bicycle with huge speakers on the front and back! blasting an advertisement for some church. i thinl its amazing. i may have to do it to my bike when i get home. haha
the next picture is me eating Acarajé. its a Brazilian food that is famous in Salvador. they say the further you get from Salvador the worse it is, but this one was really good! i like it a lot! im not sure how to describe it. it was my first time having it, and its pretty famous in brazil, so i thought it was picture worthy.
the last is a picture of the two districts in Petrolina west. their all pretty cool. 5 Americans and 3 Brazilians. one of the Americans looks really Brazilian. he is from Alaska. the second from the right.
so this week was pretty cool. my camp and i found an amazing family!! a man and women and 3 kids. the oldest child is 9, then 6, then the youngest is 3. the family is really interested and we took they to church last sunday and they loved it!! so the only thing holding them back from becoming members is that the couple is not married. but this week we will find out why they are not and we will encourage them to get married. they are a perfect family and all supper happy! the ward loved them! so that helped a lot. we think they're not married because they dont want to pay for it. if that's the case we will help them out. so we will try to get the married in the next 2 weeks, even if we have to do the planning and decorating haha the family is awesome!!
the weather is getting hotter, one night i worked out and then took a cold shower and when i got out and dryed off, i was all sweaty again!! its crazy! i cant stay dry for 2 minutes! its so hot. but i like it. im glad im not somewhere cold.
this week is ward conference and my comp and i are working hard at getting investigators to go and less actives. its a lot of work but always rewarding.
this week we were visiting a family in the ward and i was watching their little 3 year old daughter play at the park and the mother is pregnant and will have her baby soon, while im still here. and the father of the family was talking to us and giving us advice and telling us he wants to go with us to help teach the family we found. and i was thinking of how blessed i am to be here right now. if not for this mission i would never get to know any of these people here in my ward and my area. the people of Brazil are so amazing and i have such an amazing opportunity to be here and get to know them and help them. its amazing. a mission is hard, very hard. but i cant call it work. i love being here! i love getting to know new people everyday that i immediately care about and want to help in any way i can. this has been the best opportunity of my life.
i really hope everyone is doing well, im doing good and loving every moment. keep in touch
com amo
Elder Cluff