Camron's letter......June 18, 2012

Bon Dia como vai voces, I received my cambio this week and I'm pretty sad to not be with my old comp anymore. We were pretty good friends and we worked really well together. But we worked hard and I am sure he will have a lot of success with the awesome families that we were able to find. It was pretty sad though.  We planned a dinner with the Guaristy family Wednesday so we could tell them after we picked up the cambios and learn if we were going to stay or not or if I had cambios. Well I saw that I got the cambio and it was way sad when we told them that I had to leave. They all started to cry and the twelve year old went into his room and wouldn’t come out. It was pretty sad when we left. I gave the dad a hug and he was shaking and crying. But we will be excited to see each other again at the end of my mission.  I really realized after that even more so, how important that mission work is. I was able to say goodbye to the mom in the morning and she started to cry again, and she said,  "thanks to you guys my family will be an Eternal family,"  and I said no thanks to your Heavenly Father. I am sure they will continue to be strong in the gospel and be able to help build up His kingdom.  But I am pretty excited where I got to come for my cambio. I'm in Puerto Quijarro in Puerto Suarez which is right on the border with Brazil. There are two elders in our zone that are legitimately in Brazil in Corumba. They have to learn Portuguese because they don’t speak Spanish as their first language. Only a few do.  So they are pretty lucky. But we still study Portuguese just in case we get Brazilian investigators. So I hope that I can study really well and maybe i'll be able to build a strong base. My companion is Elder Contreras. He is from my group (has the same time in the mission as me ) and has just one cambio less than I do as a zone leader.  He is from Trujillo Peru (the same place Elder Sangay is from). We get along really well and we are working really hard together. The second day after I got here we contacted this guy from Nigeria. He speaks Portuguese, English, French, and a language from Africa. So I contacted him in Spanish and he responded in Portuguess, haha. But I understood a lot. Then he spoke to me in English so it would be easier to communicate, and my comp didn’t understand a thing. But we made an appointment and we came back and I ended up teaching his brother who doesn’t even speak Portuguese. So again, my comp couldn’t understand anything. But his brother speaks French, German, English, plus a language from Nigeria. It was so crazy to teach in English! It was amazingly hard, haha. But it went well and he has actually had missionaries visit his house about two years ago and he wants to listen again. He said that this time I need to come back with an American so we will see how it goes with him. I hope he can feel something and that we can teach him well enough.  My comp just happened to have a book of Mormon in English, so we're going bring him one tonight. And I will be going out with Elder Clegg whose area is in Brazil because it takes them 45 minutes to get to their area. So they don’t have their p-day and we do splits with them.  We are in a branch here with 30 people or less that go to church. But we are going to work hard so that we can help the branch grow. We have a 75 year old man with a baptism date. He is really awesome. He can still read really well. He reads at night and he truly wants to follow the gospel. We worked really hard these past four days and we were really blessed to find some great investigators. We came out here in a big (Bolivian) military plane, so the ride was a lot more smooth. As zone leaders we will be flying into Santa Cruz every month for council with the president. I am sure it will be great. President is coming up this Saturday for a zone conference with our zone and I am sure we will have a great time with him.  It's really cool here. Our area is like the side of a hill that goes down into this beautiful lake that belongs half to Brazil and half to Bolivia. We can even see the city Orumba in Brazil that’s way pretty . The Elders say they have paved roads and it's really clean!  A whole different world, haha. But we got to see some awesome big wild red and blue parrots fly overhead, and also a large tuacan. There was even a wild monkey running on the telephone line. I'm sure this week will be great and I can't wait to talk to you guys next week and tell you how things went. I hope that you guys have an awesome week, and that you all work hard.   Love, Elder Christoffersen