April 7, 2011

Dear Family,

So we had our transfers and I was transferred to............ Salvador! Whoo hoo! I will get to know the capital of our mission after all. I’m now in a part called Brotas. It seems pretty cool. I’ll get to know it more today. It seems pretty ghetto. We live in an apartment right in front of a Catholic church on a busy street. So there are always cars honking and lots of noise... but that’s part of the city experience I guess. My companion is Elder Cruz. He seems like a really humble guy. He is very dark. Everyone thinks he is from here because he is black. We live with two other missionaries in our house and we all work here in the same ward. Elder Cruz and I are re-opening this area so we don’t know anything about it or have any investigators. I hope we can get that rolling today. I’ll miss Elder Oliveira. I love that guy. He is a really cool, chill hard working missionary.

Elder Jones was called as our new Assistant to the President. So I was pumped about that, and I’m now District Leader here... I wanted to just be Senior but whatever. (Tim told us some time ago that he was going to ask the Mission President if he could be released as Zone Leader for his last transfer so he could just train someone. One of his Zone Leaders did that for his last transfer and became Tim’s companion early in Tim’s mission and he really loved that. They had a lot of success together, and Tim felt like he learned a lot, so he wanted to do the same thing.) The district is all really new. I think the oldest one here has 7 or 9 months on the mission, but they’re all full of energy. And actually it’s my grandson and great grandson on the mission because it’s the missionary that Elder Almeida trained (Elder Melo) and now the guy that he is training. But anyway I don’t really know what else to say.

Conference was good. I watched it all in pork (short for pork and cheese… which of course means Portuguese) until the last session. I watched it in English because I wanted to hear the Prophet’s voice. But it was really good. Every time it seems like it's directed right at me, but I think everyone feels that way. We had a really cool investigator there. He watched every session and he is only 15. He is gonna get baptized this Saturday. He is really smart and spiritual. And 3 of my baptisms are now singing in the choir. They are Deise, Dani and Roberto. I’ll miss that place. There are lots of baptisms there that I truly love... but I’m excited to get things rolling here. Starting from nothing will be a treat but it’s good because I won’t even have time to think about going home. Well, I love you. Thanks for everything.

Love, Elder Anderson