(We finally heard from Carissa!  She left the CTM last Wednesday and flew to the mission home in Porto Alegre.  Because their P-day, or prep day, is on Tuesday, we didn't get an e-mail from her.  We did receive an e-mail from the mission president letting us know that she had arrived.  So this is our first communication from her actually doing missionary work!) 


 Oh man the past two weeks have been crazy!!! I really don~t know where to start! Left the CTM at 5:00 in the morning, two hr plane ride to porto alegre, spent 2 hrs in porto alegre and then got on a bus to Caixias do Sol (my area)...ITS SO COLD HERE! Its a nice city, lots and lots of hills, and all the streets are coblestone and uneven. I understand why its so important to stretch here because there is so much stress on your joints from walking around. My trainer Sister Lira is amazing! She is Brazillian and doesn~t speak any english. Its hard at times but i usually can understnd her. We live in the area of the elders so we have to walk 30]min to get to our area. But we have quite a few investigators and the most exciting part....

my first area, my first weekend we had a baptism and a wedding! It was really neat, they are an amazing family. 

A really fun thing about my area is that my district has ALL the elders that i met in the CTM that left the transfer before! we had our first district meeting over the phone and all these elders that i knew were on the line! It was really fun!

Sister lira is a very hard worker but very caring and loving. I have been really sick this weekend, i had a fever and then a sore throat and have just been miserable for the past few days but she has been so sweet in making sure I~m all right. The members too have been so helpful. Every house we went to, they made me soup, and gave me all sorts of things to make me feel better. Its been very sweet! 

Oh a really special experience was on sunday the ELders gave me a blessing. It was beautiful and very sweet. I felt to much love from my Heavently Father. It was a really hard sunday for me because I wasn~t feeling well, I got to play the piano for sacrament meeting (it is really hard to play piano in a different language because a lot of the timing is different!) and i got to speak in sacament meeting too...i was so sick and i~m pretty sure no one understood anything i said haha. oh well hopefully someday they~ll understnd me better haha

Our house is always cold, its usually colder inside than outside. The funny (well not so funny) was it took me 3 days to figure out that our shower had hot water!!! I was taking freezing cold showers in freezing cold weather not fun. But i finally figured out how to get our electric water heater in the shower to work so now taking showers is much more enjoyable. 

Our mission President The Wright~s are from Utah and so sweet! THey are brand new! They started the week before we got here. Sister Wright doesn~t speak very much portugues, so its nice when she calls to ahve someone to talk to in english. 


(This is from a second e-mail we received!)
Sorry my e-mails right now are confusing, Tell Br. Lugo thanks that really is good advice. The language has been really hard. I feel like I~m not improving as quickly as I would like, its hard because i can~t just pull out a dictionary in the middle of a lesson and look up words i don~t know, and Sister Lira can~t tell me what it means in engish. Usually she can explain it in a way so i can understand at least the significance but othertimes i~m just competely lost haha. 
OH my first day here in Caixas....I started the lessson!!! ahhh it was so scary but Apparently it made sense...i hope haha

As far as a package goes, I had thought of  few things but at the moment i can~t remember. when i write next week i~ll tell you anything I think of. Right now the only thing i can think of is music!!! Just a simple mp3 like the one i had before. that can have a playlist one for church music...and DISNEY cuz we can listen to that on Pday!! 

LOVE YALL!
I can~t believe Lauren and Christ get married so soon!!! Its crazy! Well hope all is well. my pday is now on tuesday so we~re changing things up now haha