Longest Week of My Life

June 20, 2016

Wow I am actually here! And wow it is actually p-day! 

I have t-20 mins to write this email so sorry if its kinda short! SO much happened this week though and I love to share details so if I don't get everything in today I will write it next week.

First off, yes my comp is Sister Hansen and she is great! She is catching on to speaking the language super fast!

The CTM is CRAZy and everyday feels like a life time and this week felt more like a year.... but it was great anyways!

We are SUPER busy. They schedule every minute of our lives for us out here... 

By the 2nd day EVERYTHING  was in Portugese. Crazy right?!?! Everyone here is Brazilian or Spanish and very rarely know english. Brazilians are VERY nice but speak wayyyy too fast to understand everything. 

This area is super sketchy and apparently we are a high target for getting robbed on p-day so that's pretty exciting.

We learned SOOOO MUCH in just a few hours! But even by the 3rd hour I understood about 90% of what she was saying! Spanish helps a lot in understanding but it makes it harder to learn how to speak cause you get all the words mixed up. Our teachers talk in only Portuguese but they talk slower and use their hands a lot so that's really nice and easy for me to understand... but then you get in the real world and they talk so fast and you can't understand anything. Hahahah it's great. 

Having a comp with you all the time is weird... haha. I have some funny stories about that if I have time. 

I have been told a lot that it is very cold in Porto Alegre. YAY!!!! 

8% of people in Brazil are fluent in English. and about half of those are already Mormon... hahaha.. so pretty much we HAVE to learn the language before we leave otherwise we are dead. 

An instructor once told us "You will come American and in 6 weeks you will leave Brazilian!" and I completely believe that. You are just thrown into everything all at once here. 

I have been able to really help our class understand our instructor a lot. I think living in Spain helped with that. 

We had to teach an investigator in Portuguese on our 2nd day here....YUPPP. And now we do it pretty much every night. Its insane. 

I have been able to be myself a lot and I love it! Super confident and happy and its all been great.

I have a ton of funny stories but no time for them! I will tell you them next week!

The Elders in our district call me Sister mail key... cause I am asking to check the mail ALL the time. Send me letters people! I love them!

Our saying here is " Its like ____.... but not...." Pretty much everything here you can relate to something at home... but then it's different from that thing. If that makes any sense. hahaha

Sundays are the best days. So spiritual and in English! So I just have to make it to Sunday... then to p-day... then to Sunday... etc. Its working out alright.

We have Brazilian roommates and they are the cutest, funniest, most kind people ever. I have a bunch of stories about them too that I will have to tell you about later. 

FIRST TRIP TO THE PORTO ALEGRE TEMPLE

Me and my companion, Sister Hansen

Sister Hansen and I with our Brazilian companions

Our district

My district is GREAT, 6 girls. 3 elders. They are AMAZING and we have gotten super close just the past couple days. I love them all and we have a good balance between fun and studying.  

We aren't called Irmãs because that is what they call the sister Nuns here or something like that.... So they just call us Sister _____. Lammmeeeee. 

I gotta run though! I LOVE YOU ALL!!! I will write more next week

Thank you for everything.

Love you DAD! Happy Fathers DaY!

LOTS OF LOVE,

Cassie