Sister Tk: Tudo Bem

Olá família!

I don´t know if the accents work, so I´m not going to do them just in case it doesn´t show up correctly. Man oh man do I have a ton to catch up on! As you probably noticed, I didn´t send an email last week...I was on my way to Brasil! Before I talk about Brasil I´m going to sum up my last week in NoHo.

For my last p-day in the states, we went to the LA Zoo with the Spanish missionaries. On the way there we drove by WB Studios and places like that. It was cool. Sister Ngalu and I were in a trio with Sister Stewart for the last week because Sister Bowden went back to the Temple Square mission. I thought I would hate being in a trio, but I LOVED it. Sister Stewart is awesome. Because we were in a trio we had to cover two areas - NoHo and Studio City. Saturday morning we went to an Easter thing for the Studio City ward because Sister Stewart had some investigators going. Guess who I met there...Napoleon Dynamite! Well, Jon Heder who plays the role of Napoleon Dynamite. He was super nice. Anyway, the last week was crazy busy trying to get ready to leave and balancing two areas, but it was so much fun. Like I said, I loved being in a trio!

Monday and Tuesday I spent all day traveling with Sisters Johnson and Hammon...the same two I traveled to San Fernando with. We left for the airport at 5 am on Monday morning to make a 8:40am flight out of LAX. In Atlanta we had a 4 hour layover and met up with some other missionaries who were on their way to Sao Paulo. One we met, Sister Clark, had been reassigned the week before us and was serving in Las Vegas. While we were walking back to the gate from getting food I saw two guys in suits and figured they must be elders. They were....it was Elder Lant and Elder Anderson!! The two elders who were zone leaders when I was the coordinating sister in the MTC. They are serving in Brasilia, too. I was so excited to see them.

Thankfully on the long flight from Atlanta to Sao Paulo (9 hours) there was an open seat between me and the other girl in my row which was nice. I slept most of the time. When we got to Sao Paulo we had 8 hours to kill before our flight. We went to check in at 11 am and found out Elder Anderson didn´t have a ticket. The airline lost his reservation! We spent the next two hours trying to find the Delta office to figure out the problem. I was on a different flight than them to Brasilia so I ended up having to leave before it got resolved. When I landed in Brasilia the missionaries who were there to meet me asked me where the elders were. I told them they initially had a different flight and I didn´t know if they made it or not. They did, so everything was good haha.

The mission president and his wife are awesome! I loved President Hall and Sister Hall from San Fernando and I love President and Sister Gaertner, too. The mission home is SO nice, of course. Flying into Brasilia I saw that like almost every house had a pool. Some of the homes were like mansions! Well, that´s only the super nice parts of the city, but I´ll get back to that later. We ate dinner at the mission home and then went to the church to meet my companion. Her name is Sister Victorio and she´s from Bolivia. She´s super nice and has been in the field for 9 months. She doesn´t speak any English so we resort to Spanish and Portuguese to communicate. There is also a lot of acting and gestures when we are trying to figure out a word haha. We serve in Guara II (Guara dois) which is outside Brasilia.

Even though the work is the same, serving in Brasil is way different than the states. For example, our house. Our bathroom doesn´t have a light, the only light that it has is whatever streams in around the door. Our shower doesn´t have a shower curtain or a ridge or anything to define it as a shower. The whole floor is tile so essentially there´s just a corner with a shower head and a drain and that part is the shower. The shower head is electric so if you touch it you´ll get electrocuted. We have ants everywhere...I am getting alive by ants and spiders. Earlier this week I counted 15 bites on just one part of my leg. That didn´t include the rest of my leg or my feet. My feet are covered!! It sucks, but oh well.

The ward is awesome! Everyone is really nice. There are a million things I want to talk about, but I have to get going. Life is good. The accent here is hard. They pronounce r´s in the middle of words as an h sometimes. I was hoping they wouldnt have that accent here haha. Well, just know I´m happy and relatively healthy. The water smells like dirt and we have bugs in a lot of our stuff so I don´t know exactly how healthy I am haha.

Anyway, tchau para voces!

Love,

Sister Kerr