He believes in us and that's the reason He sent me here

I love it here!! Brazil is awesome. It's a big city, which I normally hate with a passion, but its an odd kind of pretty here and its not bothering me much (granted, I've been locked in a concrete prison compound the last 8 days...) I'll get to go out today after I finish emailing. I may not  have much time because we went to the Campinas temple today and I had to go in the second session. Campinas temple is beautiful!! I wish I could send pictures from the CTM. The São Paulo temple is closed this month so I'll keep going to the Campinas temple.

 

The language is definitely hard!!! I'm starting to understand quite a bit but I'm bad at speaking. I need to work on speaking Portuguese more, but I hate doing it cause I'm so bad at it. I should just get over myself and talk a lot more. We have some Brazilian room mates in my room and that helps a lot! It's only been a week so I'm obviously not going to be good in that amount of time, but I know it will come! 

 

My district is pretty good most of the time.  Some of the missionaries haven't figured out they're  missionaries yet and talk about their war stories from the dorms at college and how much they partied and all the girls they kissed and want to interrogate everybody about their stories. It's kind of annoying when I'm trying to have the Spirit and study the language in class, and it upsets me more when they speak so much better than me. I know it'll come so I'm not really stressing about the language. I can keep it in perspective well and I'm loving it!! 

 

Spirit is great here at the CTM and it's super fun. They are long days and I never thought the days would end, but the last three days have gone faster than the first day of classes. How are the Olympics going!??!!!!! I'm closer than anyone and I don't know a thing! 

 

The food here is awesome and there's a lot of rice and beans. I've totally enjoyed it even though I've never liked rice! And I've had a TON of guarana!! Breakfast every morning is ham and cheese paninis and some really good sweetened milk oatmeal stuff. I have no idea what it is but its good!

 

 I need candy desperately!! That is going to help me get through my stay here at the MTC! I don't know why, but just having something to chew on would make things so nice!  EVERYONE says the same thing. The candy store by the CTM is probably the most profitable store in São Paulo. 

 

I had a night where I was super frustrated with the language because we were teaching our fake investigator and I had this huge testimony and wanted to be able to just tell her about the plan of salvation and eternal families and I couldn't! I didn't know the tenses and the words! It felt like I was trying to drink concrete through one of those tiny coffee straws! Even when I did look stuff up and write it down it wasn't everything, and I couldn't answer her questions well. I went back and just said a prayer for help with the language and asked Heavenly Father to let me feel of his confidence in me learning the language. I put together a really good study plan and decided how I was going to go about learning the language.

 

 Just after that when we went to our rooms for the night, I remembered Ashley had sent me like 15 different notes to open at different times and there was one that said `` open when the language is just hard``.  I decided not to open it because it was only like 6 days in. When I was writing in my journal, I just had this strong prompting to go open it. When I opened it, Ashley had written about how we don't know how to speak another language, but God does! We have to rely on Him to learn it and mak e sure we do everything we can. Then she said how God knows we can do this and sent us to Brazil for a reason. He believes in us and that's the reason He sent me here. It was EXACTLY what I had prayed for earlier!! She's an amazing sister and definitely was inspired when she wrote those notes! I cant wait to open the rest!

 

I love it here and can't wait to really get serving the people. But for my time here in the CTM, I'm going to keep working harder and longer and do everything I can to live up to what the Lord wants.

 

Love you and tell everyone else I love them,

Elder Little