Part 4: Ebbert Is Unbreakable

Whattup morioh choh radio, 

So I'm officially in my 4th area, and I'm also simaltaneously in my like 4th character arc of my mission. We love the mish 

This area is dope, there are some pretty cool members here. Unfortunately the other elders left us n o t h i n g. I guess president likes to put me into dead areas. We're still having trouble finding people to teach though kind of depressing tbh, but a member who is leaving on her mission soon did invite us to her going away part and she was like "elders I'm gonna invite all my non member friends and I want you to get to know them all and also teach a lesson from PMG as the spiritual thought" so hopefully things get spicy this week and we get some people to church. 

But in terms of emails... we have no emails. How far I've fallen. I used to be unable to go more than a week without writing a college length essay incorporating general authority quotes and Cradle metaphors, and now... Yeah, writing is hard, but my mom still scolds me every week for not writing emails so we comin back. 

Kinda cool

OK so the only thing that happened before I got dengue like 4 weeks ago was that we had interviews with president and it was pretty sick. He gave me a priesthood blessing for s t u f f and it was kinda crazy because 50% of the blessing was him like quoting my patriarchal blessing or directly responding to my personal prayers 

Pretty cool. President Rollins is sick. 

The plague 

But not as sick as I was!! 

I think I'm hilarious.

(OK now that I think about it interviews were on my first week of being sick, but I somehow got the time-line screwed up.) 

Anyways I got dengue a couple weeks ago. If someone pointed a gun to my head and said to use one word to summarize dengue that isn't "pain", I would say "dor". Then the person with the gun would just be confused because he probably doesn't speak Portuguese. But yeah it's just pain. Just like, everywhere. Pretty rough and kinda killed our area cuz I couldn't do like anything for a week. 

So that kinda lasted up till transfers. And transfers were... 

TRANSFERS

Took a taxi from the mission office to my new area with my new comp, Elder Bawden. He's sick. He's pretty old on the mission so he's a little trunk - ok, maybe a lot trunky - but he's super cool so we're chilling. Our first day we had lunch with this funny family in our ward, the husband had like no filter and was saying also this hilarious stuff and the wife was like "elders I don't like gossip" and then gave us the whole story of an area 70 who cheated on his wife with a girl in one of the next door wards. And she kept being like "I don't like gossip, but here's the full name, address, phone number, and social security number of everybody involved in the incident". It was pretty funny. 

We still didn't have our area book so we were kinda like "well let's go to the chapel" and there was an activity going on. And I just wanna flex really quick that when we got there the members obviously asked where we were from and I lied and said I was from Rio de Janeiro and they All believed me. They even did an accent check by having me repeat this crazy word I've never heard before to prove I was carioca and I passed, had em all completely fooled. Proudest moment of my life. Eventually I confessed that I'm a wisconsinite, but it was fun while it lasted. 

The next day we had district council and practically our whole district is Americans. Kinda crazy, first time that's happened to me on the mission. After district council we went out and tracked down a billion people and nobody cared. We did contact this one old guy whose daughter is a member of the Church and we were like "hi there sir" and he was like "ahhh the mormons?? Your book is false scripture because in revelations it says so" and I was like "actually [insert respectful bible bash]" and he was like "really?? Well Adam and Eve shouldn't have eaten the forbidden fruit!" and we were like "...what?" and then basically he just continued spitting all this memorized anti-lds rhetoric that his church taught him until we ran away because he wasn't listening to anything we said. Kinda funny. 

Literally Dross from cradle

So side note, at some point during the week I found this contact on our phone called "LuzIA". That means "Light" and then the abbreviation for artifical intelligence in portuguese. It's an account run by Facebook (meta?? Idk what they call themselves anymore) and it's literally like an AI assistant you can ask anything and it's lo-key wicked cool. Especially for missionaries cuz we don't have Google lol. So over the past week LuzIA has:

-taught me about alchemy 

-taught me how to Bible bash catholics, protestants, and muslims

-written a script for a short film where a cat gets baptized

-written a talk about missionary work to use in sacrament meeting

-generated images of missionaries wielding various firearms and also nephites in fortnite

-made a plan for me to save money on the mesada and also to sleep better

-taught me how to play harmonics on guitar

Literally like having a presence from Cradle, technology is cool

Party rock

Friday last week after lunch we went to the ZLs house where the other elders in our ward live because it was closer, and coincidencentally the other elders from the other ward were also there, so we got 8 elders in the same house and it was lit. Lots of guitar and terere. 

So at one point I started to ask our ZL a question but I only got through "Elder, can I-" before he cut me off. He looked at me with 100% seriousness and said "Elder, look. Everybody knows we're here to baptize. That's our job. Whatever you do, as long as you've got that purpose in mind, I don't care." 

Now I am 100% serious when I tell you all that I was about to ask him if we can baptize a cat and put it in the area book because I thought it was funny, but I guess he answered my question. Our ZLs are super cool. 

La muerte

Saturday we had like 8 lessons planned with all the people we found and... every single one fell through. So, we visited our ward's cool old lady and listened to her rant for like an hour while we ate 4 liters of ice cream.

Sunday nobody came to church and Elder Bawden died after sacrament. 

Monday we had a freaking awesome p day, zone churrasco and a whole bunch of games. Not much else to say except that it was super cool. 

Last week

And now we're caught up to this last week. Thursday we went to the temple, which I loved as usual. Friday we had zone conference, which I loved as usual. Saturday we had a service project for this Venezuelan family, and then afterwards they invited us to play futebol. Unfortunately we did not, but we did buy some juice. After lunch we hung out in out house while Elder Eaton played the Home Deopt theme on guitar and said some of the most brain dead things I've ever heard. Aaaaand basically that was our whole week lol

Welcome back

So today we're gonna make some stroganoff in the ZLs house and I'mma make some mousse, so that should be sick. But that's about it. I'll try to write more emails. Maybe. But I love you all and I'm praying for you without your consent! 

God is Good, 

Elder Ebbert