O Capeta

Hello there family, friends, and strangers I've never met.  How are you all?  I'm doing pretty great.  I just got the news that I'm getting transferred.  I thought it was super weird that I was already getting transferred.  I've only been in this area for a transfer and they're already pulling me out.  Oh well, whatever the Lord wants right?

So there were some rather interesting things that I saw this week; the first one being a singing garbage man.  Here whenever the garbage is collected there are like four guys running behind the garbage truck hurling bags of trash inside the truck.  One of the guys running behind the truck liked his job a little too much and was singing opera music rather loudly.  I don't know whether to find it a rather odd sight, or to be impressed because he was actually pretty good.

The second interesting thing happened during a lesson.  We were teaching this lady inside her house and I was sitting on a chair in front of the front door, looking out into the street.  The lesson was pretty normal until this lady, who was walking down the middle of the street, stopped and looked at us.  That lady was creepy!  She just stared at us for a good four minutes.  I felt like I was in a horror movie, she just looked irate and was distracting me from my lesson.  #oCapeta

So we're helping this guy Daniel come back to church, his wife and four kids aren't members, so we can reactivate him and baptize everybody in the family.  We brought Daniel to the church twice to play soccer with the other men, so he could get integrated in the ward and make a few friends.  While we were there, a few of the neighborhood children came to visit the church.  They just waltzed right in and started playing around and talking with us.  They were all between the ages of 8-10 and they gave us some very good insight as to what people think about us.  Here's a rough outline of what they told us:

"My cousin says you guys are a cult!"

"I heard guys worship O Capeta°"

"This one soap opera that I watched said that cults plan on killing people."

°Portuguese side note:  The phrase, "O Capeta" means "The Devil" it's just kind of a super ghetto way of saying it.

But we did manage to change their opinions though, luckily for us.

One thing I did learn that day is that there might be some differences between Brazil and the USA.  Even in the church there are a few differences here and there, but there is one thing that doesn't change.

Church ball.

Church ball may be played as soccer down here, but the result is the same:  profanity, yelling, and much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.  People get freaking ticked with church sports and it doesn't matter where you're at in the world.  Even the referee was getting irate at everyone else too.  Some things just don't change.

So this week was my last division with Elder Rutledge.  We got quite a few investigators together, it seems that I always have the most success whenever I'm working with him. After a long day of work, we were walking by this church when we decided to enter and talk with the pastor.  This church had just finished building a replica of Solomon's Temple in São Paulo and we wanted to know what it was all about.  The pastor turned out to be pretty chill.  We talked with him for quite some time about religion and northeast Brazil.  He gave us some souvenirs and we ended up teaching him about The Book of Mormon, so now I can say that I've taught a pastor on my mission.  He was really cool and offered to help us out with anything we needed.  He even wanted to take us to go visit other parts of Alagoas with him, sadly though we had to decline.

Well I think that's about it.  You all now get to play the "Where in the world is Elder Tanner Johnson" game.  Whoever guesses which ward I'm going to gets 10 Reais.

-Elder Johnson

P.S.  Feliz dia dos pais.  Father's day is on a different date down here.