Traveling the District

This week was pretty crazy.  My companion is the District Leader even though we live an hour and twenty minutes away from the city where the rest of our district is. And it turned out that everyone in our district baptized this weekend--which meant that we had to do interviews for everyone.  Because of money we couldn't really keep travelling back to Votuporanga every day so we did exchanges with everyone and did a tour of the district!  We didn't get back to Votuporanga until Thursday and then we had to go to a different city in our area for lunch.  Because of complications with buses, we didn't get back to Votuporanga that day until 5:00 PM or so.          
 Then on Friday we went to a different city in our area because we had to visit some people there. So we went to five different cities in one week and really didn't get a whole lot done in Votuporanga--except a baptism!  Juliano was baptized and it was basically awesome.  I don't have much more to say about the baptism except that it was as awesome as all the others and Juliano’s Mother brought really good cake that we all ate afterwards.  

Juliano's Baptism.  I am smiling like Dad, and by that I mean not smiling.

I will be hitting the road again this week for zone conference in Ribeirão Preto.  I am pretty excited since it will be my first zone conference.  

If there is one thing Brazil has it is hope.  It’s the young people here who are taking the lead in everything.  I honestly haven't met a whole lot of rich people here because it is pretty hard to encounter them since they live in high rise apartments in the center of cities, but the ones I have met are almost always young.  The younger generation is way better off here than the older ones.  Brazil is really moving to be a top tier nation in every respect.  

The world cup is coming up and I hear that it is likely not to be without hiccup.  I have heard that there will probably be a lot of protests because the government is spending a lot of money on the world cup while other services, like education, are severely lacking.  The education here is perhaps as good as the education a student would get if he only took the courses required to pass high school in America.  The biggest difference with schools in America is I had the choice to do other things. Brazilians never have the chance to take calculus in High School like I did.  Our education system may not be that great at the lowest end, but what is great is that you can choose to have it be way better.

I am very happy to be here.  Everyday I get to learn new things and meet lots of new people. Lots of them are interesting, some of them are crazy, only a few of them get baptized, but I love them all.

I hope you all have a good week! I love you all too, I think.  I guess there could be some people reading this that I don't even know so I guess I can't exactly say that I love you yet but I am sure you are awesome people.

Elder Russell