Of course wayy to much happened for me to even attempt to put it into a 20 min email.. Let me start of by telling you about my attempt to stop drinking soda. FIrst of all I have decided that my diet is actually pretty good and what i am eating is pretty healthy most of the time... Minus all of the soda i drink. My attempt failed terribly.

People only serve soda and so its kinda weird to ask for water if they dont have any. So I dont. Plus some members have learned that i love the fanta here.. I Loved it in the states but it is different here and it tastes even better. So members will stick a two liter next to my plate and every time my cup is empy they end up refilling it. Instead of ending my soda driking i end up drinking almost 3 liters of at lumch on sunday...

So i was eating lunch with the family that had me eat a bucket of ice cream the other  day. One of my favorite familys in the ward by the way, he is leader of the quorum here.. They are a younger couple. Well at lunch his brother (who is 31) was also there with his wife(21). I wish i had the time to tell you about all of the conversation that we had becuase we were almost in tears... One thing i have had to learn here is that english swear words are not swear words... They mean nothing to people here so members say them.. It is the worst when there is a song playing and members sing along and they sing all the words.. Which by the way i cant say i miss music. I honestly hear more american music here then i did before my mission. People are always listening to there music as loud as possoible and every one here has speakers that can shake your house. So about every 100 feet we just hear a knew song. This is kind of difficult and can be very distracting. I have tried to explain to people that you shouldnt do this and its a bad word but its just hard to understand.. But at lunch this one day. We were all laughing and having a good time and my companion was explaing that he is the only one in our house that doesnt understand english. we have 4 people in our apartment. He wants us to speak portuguese and we try but sometimes it is difficult when you have no idea how to convey your thoughts. The president of the quorm had a solution for this problem. When ever we all start talking in english he suggested that my companion start screaming f-u..I think you can imagine how much shock i was in when he said this at the table.. My mouth dropped and i had no words. I didnt see it coming at all. They all laughed at me becuase of my face. He then explained just like how they cant understand when i speak in english they dont understand the swear words. After this i have pretty much given up on trying to help people understand that swear words are bad...

Church this sunday was awesome. We had 4 investigators show up and this was awesome!! But the highlight was when I gave this 5 year old a little tiny smilely face sticker before the first meeting. He was instantly my best friend after that. He tried to sit with my all through sacrment meeting. But there as no room on my bench so at first his sat on the bench in front of me which was the very front row. So for the first 20 so min of church he sat on the front row (by him

self) and just would look back every few min. He soon got board and started coloring on the flooor next to my bench. I thought this was pretty cool and after 3 hours of church he still had that little sticker. By the end of church all of my class from last week had learned about the sticker and i gave them all one. This made me think of the atonement and the gift we have been given... The ability to repent for your sins and become obtain perfection is amazing. But often times I think that we dont give the attention to our Savoir that he deserves.. We should always be trying to be as close to him as possible and always looking towards him. With out fail and luckly when we fail at this we have the atonement and through it we can change.

Probably my coolest experience this week was with a more active memeber. A lot of times members will just give us money for lunch instead of actually feeding us. You can get a very large plate of food for our 10 heis which is like 5 american dollars. Sometimes its very hard to share messages with this people becuase they dont even invite you in even after you ask if you can share a message and so we end up jsut givng a message in front of there house. But One time this week i had a very strong feeling that i should ask this older sister if i could share a message with here. I didnt have anything planned and so i flipped open to one of my tabs that i had on my portuguese and english scriptures. I read the scripture and explained the meaning the best i could.. She was in tears and the spirit was very strong.. I didnt think a lot about it at the time but later that day i decided i liked the scripture and wanted to share it again. I searched and searched for the scirpture but couldnt find it... I still cant not find the scripture. This was really cool becuase i know that the lord showed up that scirpture for the member so we could help her.. It is a little aggrevating that i still cannot find the scriputre.. its like it is not in the scirptures..

Well i am out of time.. sorry for my english.. My portuguese and egnlish are starting to melt together.. its not a good thing..

--

And they call me

Elder Anderson

For behold I am a disciple of Jesus Christ