So, I am here in Portugal!

Hi family!~

So, I am here in Portugal! It is so beautiful! I am here in an area called Oeiras, which is west of Lisbon right by the sea. You can smell the salt in the air sometimes (and lots of other things too, but we won´t go into that :)



I am with Irma Nkutxi (nuh-kucci kind of like gucci but with a k). She is from Angola and is a native Portuguese speaker, of course. My first day I had a really hard time understanding her because she speaks really fast and her accent is a little different. But, now, it is better. I understand most of what she says, except for when she gets really excited and starts telling a story for 10 minutes, I kind of get lost. But, I am trying to pick it up. The Portugal accent is a lot different than I thought it would be, but it´s ok because it is beautiful and one day I will speak like these people. When we have contacted Brazilians, it is amazing the difference of accent!



My companion is the only member of her family and her family does not approve of her serving a mission, so they have never written her during her entire mission! and she has been out a year! It is really sad, and she hopes they will accept her into their house when she goes home. I hope so to. (At least I think that was her story--she told it to me the first day and it was of course all in Portuguese...) Irma Nkutxi knows a lot of English words because she studied for three years when she was younger, but her accent is terrible, so I am pretty sure my Portuguese is better than her English, even though she knows more vocabulary than me. But, we study English and Portuguese together, and it has been fun trying to explain some of our phrases to her.

Anyway, my first day in the field, we had a baptism to go to! What a way to start a mission. Her name is Maria Natercia and she is from Angola too. She has two daughters and such great faith. I have really enjoyed getting to know her. We also have another investigator that we committed to baptism this week--Jose. He is simply amazing and I have really grown to admire him and his faith. He walks 40 minutes every week to church. He has only been to church twice and wants to be baptized! That is amazing in this area. I am seeing miracles already and I am so excited to teach more of Heavenly Father´s elect here. The mission is having a lot of success. We had 47 baptisms last month, which is three times more than last year and we have about half as many missionaries as last year. I am amazed at the people that are accepting our message. I know that when we serve with faith, heavenly Father will lead us to those elect people just waiting to hear the gospel.

It has rained A LOT here! Today I forgot my guarda chuva and it has been interesting...Oh, and also know that I am safe, but I know that Satan is trying hard to keep us from our work. Our hot water ran out, we don´t have a refrigerator, we´ve missed our autocarro a couple of times, and my debit card from the office didn´t work for a couple of days...but everything is good. I know that great things are coming since Satan is working so hard on us. I love my companion and her patience with me. She makes great jokes in Portuguese that I am finally starting to get :) She is so happy and willing to talk to anyone. I hope to be like her in the mission. Also, she doesn´t have a very good sense of direction, and we all know how I am with directions...yeah...so we´ve had a lot of good laughs over that.

I went to church yesterday and the capela is absolutely beautiful! We have about 80 or 90 members in our ala. Oh and don´t worry because it is just as freezing in the building here as any other church building--yeah, pretty funny. The members are amazing and really showed their love to me. There was one sister in particular that impressed me. Irma Niza--she is 32 and is not married, she is from Brazil and has about 4 callings in the ward including young women´s president, Primary teacher, Sunday school teacher, and I think music director. Yeah, pretty amazing. (We have RS, SS, Sacr. Meeting, and then a little primary class after church that we help out with.) Oh, and yesterday I got to bear my testimony in Portuguese to people who could understand me (in the MTC there were only about 5 people who could understand me), which was really cool. I loved feeling the spirit of the people during testimony meeting. Oh, and I get to give a talk in Sacrament meeting in a couple of weeks! Not a month will go by without be giving one of those...lol.

A lot of people ask where my last name is from and I explain that my poppy is from Chile and they always ask how the people are doing down there, which I think is a funny question seeing as how I haven´t been in the real world since Christmas...

There is lots of cobblestone here, which is kind of fun and different from America.

Oh, and you send packages to the office:
Rua Jorge Barradas
Nº14C 1500-40054
Lisboa
Portugal

And send letters directly to me:
Rua Porto Alegre
Nº2 5Rect
2780 Oeiras
Figueirinha
Portugal

It sounds like all is going well at home. I´m sorry Summer didn´t make it into all state, but maybe next year? Yeah, in states with a lot of people, it is harder to make it to state things. Kim was amazed that I made it to state in track--she never made it to state in California, which I thought was weird because she was the fastest runner in her area. Crazy.

I send my love to you all. Eu amo voces muito! Thank you for your love and prayers--seriously, I can feel them helping me. I pray for you often. Thanks for absolutely everything--especially your support.

Love,

Irma Perez