Crazy Stuff

So starting off, Monday night we got robbed. Some idiot broke into our house in the middle of the night. For some reason he has a the key to our neighbor´s gate/fence, so he was able to jump the wall that divides the two houses, open our window, bend one of the metal bars, and walk in. So on my table I had a 20 reais bill drying, my pot full of about 200 reais, my bose speaker, Ipod, and Camera. But the robber just grabbed a backback, dvd player, wallet, 2 pairs of tennis shoes, and some bread. I don´t know how he didn´t grab any of my stuff, but it was a miracle. Our house has two floors and we sleep on the top floor. Where the thief broke in is on the first floor. Luckily my companion had decided to sleep on the first floor this time. He normally sleeps at the top, but I think him sleeping at the bottom helped to scare away the thief. Anyway that was stressful. Not a lot of cool stuff happened this week. It rained a lot. I´m super tired. No one opens their doors in this area. 

Last P-Day we went journeying in the middle of the jungle in search for monkeys. We didn´t find monkeys but at least we found some cool waterfalls. Brazil is very green and really has beautiful plants.

Santa Cruz

So since the last time I wrote quite a few changes have happened. I was transfered from the city Rio Pardo to Santa Cruz. I was called to be District Leader of a district with 10 missionaries. I´m working in the northern half of the city Santa Cruz. This area is completely different then anywhere I´ve ever worked. Santa Cruz is known in Brazil as the city of Germans. Most of the people here are of german heritage. It´s different seeing everyone with the same skin color as me. This city is also very rich. My area has no vilas, or favelas, are hardly doesn´t have any small wooden houses. There´s no dirt roads, and I don´t see huge piles of garbage on the sides of the road. It´s actually kind of nice beeing in this city. I don´t get home with my shoes and pants covered in mud. The tough part about this area is that almost no one accepts you into their house to share a message. Knocking doors does not work here. The first two days we spend entirely knocking doors, and during these 2 days about 5 people accepted to hear our message. This is very different than in my last area where I could spend 2 days knocking doors and teach 18 lessons, and have most of them accept us to come back. For now we´re teaching a couple who are preparing to be married to get baptized. That´s about it. One day while on the road we heard a man yell at us in English. My companion is a brazilian and didn´t understand what he said. He yelled Hey come here. I know the mormons. Come into my house. When I turned to look at who it was. It was a big white shirtless fat guy standing in his front patio with a huge samurai sword in his hand. That was weird. So we went up to talk to him. He only continued to talk in English with me while I translated for my companion what he was saying. He invited us to come into his house, but I was feeling strange, so we entered anyway. He has a huge house and all of the light were turned off. It was very dark. He showed a lot of things in his house. He said that he knows how to speak 12 languages. He spent a long time working on a cruise ship. He showed me that he has tons of money and told me that anything I want that´s his, he will give me. He offered us to use his TV, computers, speakers, or anything we wanted. He had a laugh that sounded like a crazy villan. He began to tell us that he has great power and even enought power to control the weather. He asked us why we were there and if we believed in Jesus Christ. He then said that we would not be able to teach him anything because he already knows everything. He talked a lot and hardly didn´t let us say anything. I was certain that this guy was possessed by the devil. I told him that we were leaving and we left. My companion was also certain that this guy is possessed by some evil spirit. We decided to go back with 2 more missionaries and expel this spirit. In the 2nd visit we could clearly see that he really wasn´t possessed. He was just crazy because he´s taking tons of pain medications for back pains. These 2 missionaries laughed quite a bit seeing that we had already told all of the missionaries in the zone that we had found a man possessed by evil spirits that we were going to expulse. We ended up visiting this man a few more times. One day he asked me for the book of mormon which I gave to him. We came back the next day and he said he had read the entire book. What!? He only sleeps 4 hours a day and doesn´t do anything, so I guess that´s possible. But he had marked quite a few parts in the book and told us about some of the things he had leanred, so I think he really read the entire book in 24 hours. I will have to try that sometime. Unfortinately we had to stop teaching him because he deosn´t want to live the law of chastity and hasn´t been able to go to church on Sunday. Bye, We don´t just visit people. We baptize. So things are going pretty well. I´m loving the mission. Until next time.

Josh Ritter