September 9th

This week was a busy one because we had zone conferences!

So the way that it works in my mission is we have 3 of them, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, once per transfer. We do 2 in Ribeirão Preto and the other one on the other side of the mission in another city. Not sure if I've explained them, but basically it's where a few different zones get together and we have trainings from President, the assistants, usually some zone leaders, etc. There's a lot of preparation that goes into it. Normally Sister Scholz likes to show a video as a part of her talk, and this time she showed a clip about teamwork from a  movie called Coach Carter. I looked on the internet forever to find it dubbed in Portuguese, but couldn't find it! So I ended up having to manually put subtitles on. She writes a talk and then puts it through a translator and then sends it to me because translators always have a ton of errors, so I go through and fix them. I also have to manage all the materials that get distributed, like pamphlets, pass along cards, Books of Mormon, and other things, which we give out during zone conference.

This time it was really cool, we talked about the importance of teaching pure doctrine and other teaching skills. One thing that President Scholz talked about too was Mosiah 5. He really dug into the first few verses of the chapter and talked about what real change is, when we don't have the "disposition to do evil" anymore. He taught us about the covenant that the people of King Benjamin made, and how we as missionaries also made a covenant to God to devote everything to missionary work during these 2 years. It was really cool to see how much he was able to get out of a part of the Book of Mormon that I've read so many times, but with the way that he dug into it and explained it I learned something new! It really goes to show that we can always learn more from the Book of Mormon no matter how many times we've read it. 

On Monday, I went on a split with Elder Breno (one of the financial secretaries) because our comps had to stay at the office to do stuff. We went to his area to do a family night with some of the new members. We got there and met up with other missionaries, and one of them is Elder Ross from Washington who got here at the beginning of the transfer. I was talking to him about how he's doing, what he thinks of the mission so far, etc and he was telling me that it's really tough, especially with Portuguese. Talking to him reminded me of the beginning of my mission. He said, "In school I always did really good and I was smart, and so I figured that I would be able to learn Portuguese without too much trouble, but now I'm here and I basically understand nothing that anyone says and I can't say what I want!" Man, sounds like me when I got here! I did my best to help him out and give him hope that it'll all work out. One thing that I said that I'd never do is take the language for granted, and even though I've been pretty solid with it for the past 7ish months, I am still super grateful that I can speak. I know that the only reason I can is because of the gift of tongues! So Ty, hang in there! It'll come!

Something else happened this week that made me super sad. There is a missionary in my zone that was training a brand new Elder. But lately his mom has been super sick and this week she finally passed away. His dad and his brother already have passed away too. And then his new missionary that he was training went home today just a month after starting his mission to get surgery because of problems that he has in his feet. Geez... I really have been thinking about how blessed I am in my life. We tend to forget really easily how much we actually have. It made me feel pretty dumb when I get a bit frustrated with my "probelms" that I have. That's something that I've been trying to pay attention to since the beginning of my mission, not taking stuff for granted.

But, there's a little of what happened this week. Have a great week, talk to you later! Love you guys!!

-Elder Odom