Racism but no one cares, hipster churches, and J-dubs

 Mon, Nov 7, 2022 

 I did an exchange with my zone leader and their house is like 6 times bigger than mine. it's very nice. I met my mission brother and nephew during the exchange. Meaning my brother was also trained by my companion and he's training therefore my nephew. My "brother" Elder Romero made me the best dinner it was super good and it was basically just a breakfast burrito but idk it was better. In their area they have a lot of people to teach so I got a lot of practice.

We were walking down the street trying to do street contacts when we hear someone yell Elders! We look behind us and I see a man wearing a BYU hat waving me over We head over and he starts talking to us in really good English.  he offers to buy us lunch and Acai we say we already ate lunch so he decides to just buy us a acai we talked with him for a long time and he's telling us all about his time in Utah and his family in Utah and how he's lives here in Campinas but he visited Utah to tourist but also see his daughter who is married to a BYU football player named Tyler little who isn't little at all then two absolute mountain of acai come over for me and my companion and he's asks us the question are you racist? I respond with no and then he asks me who looks more like a monkey the black man or the white man. Me and my companion start beating around the bush I say it depends on the monkey my companion says it depends on the person. He then says it's the white man because the black man is already the same thing he starts dying of laughter and says that's what his black bishop told him as a joke in Utah. He then tells us all about how after the mission will go home and then saying the n-Word because in Brazil all it means is black person. It's like racism doesn't exist here. I could call people the n-word and also monkey and they would laugh. However this guy was super nice and really fun to talk to. We were both at the Saturday afternoon session of General Conference which was cool. We also found out he's only been learning English for six months and his English was perfect. 

Later that same day, we met these two cool dudes that are a bit younger than we are and we talked with them on the street for a long time they were very nice we asked them what church they were a part of and they said "Bola de neve" I probably spelled it wrong but my companion Later explained it's a hipster church and the name literally translates to snowball they believe in Jesus as well but like their podium is a surfboard and they have bands in their church and they believe you can break the law of chastity 7 times before its a sin we talked with them then found out they knew English we asked how long they had been learning and we complemented them on their English because it was also very good they said 12 years then explained why they thought it was the gift of tongues that helped them. They complement my Portuguese and I explain that I've only been in Brazil for a week and that I had six weeks of training and it was online and that I also think it was the gift of tongues that helped me it was fun talking to them and they were nice hopefully we can teach them soon. We are teaching a man named Luis who is super ready to be baptized he's just got somethings needs to figure out before he can but other wise he's very ready. It was a awesome experience teaching him because this week I've been really focusing on making sure I'm teaching by the power and authority of the spirit and not enticing words of man as preach my gospel and the scriptures say I can confidently say that I did indeed teach with power and testify with power it was awesome lol now it's just up to him to use his agency