Elder Jordan Gibby - October 20, 2009

We received a short email from Jordan today. Apparently, his companion spent most of their time on the computer writing his girlfriend. They went to the temple today and he will actually leave the CTM for Porto Alegre this week. "Well, I have 3 days left in the CTM! I am so excited cause this place is getting to be pretty repetitive. . . . Our entire district is getting pretty excited to fly out to Porto Alegre. Everyone that is in our district, with the exception of 3 people, are going to the same mission so it is pretty cool."

"One thing that I did this week which was pretty cool was after our night meeting there was one of the pianos left out in the gym. I asked one of the instructors if I could play it and they said it was fine with them so I went over and started playing on it. Some kids came over and we started showing each other stuff and it was pretty fun. Then I was showing them how you can make your own songs. They didn't believe me at first, but I showed them a basic song structure and before I knew it, it was pretty much a full blown concert. There were like 50 people standing there listening. I was like What?? I felt pretty good after that."

"We went proselyting out in the city last week. It was pretty cool. We went down town in the city where they had tons of people. It was scary at first but I went up to people and started talking to them and with about half Portuguese and the other half charades figured out what people were saying. One thing that happened which was pretty funny - me and my companion were walking by this doorway and we heard drums coming from it. Not the drumset drums but like bongo type drums. We were both like hey lets go in there, we could see that it was coming from the upstairs. Before I entered I noticed that there were store hours on the door. By this point I had no idea what to expect and I was in this dark doorway with drum sounds coming out of it. We made our way up the stairs and to my surprise there were people playing bongos and doing a form of fighting dancing. It was sweet! It is called capwata ( I don't know if that is spelled correctly or not) The signaled us to come inside and then they taught me how to play the drums they had. It was pretty cool, we didn't stay long because we had to get going but it was a ton of fun. We placed 3 BOMs out in the field."

Jordan has grown so much in the brief time that he has been in the CTM in Sao Paulo. I really can't believe that it has already been two months since we put him on the plane for Brazil. I am excited for him to get out into a real area. He will be able to master the language faster and will get to interact with people all day long (which is really his forte).