Missão Brasil Fortaleza: Cinco por día, mais um

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories. -Florence King

Yes. I'm going to talk about MORE mission stuff . I hope you'll indulge me just a little. I promise not to bend your ear for too long. I have a few odd memories that really didn't have a place in my other posts about my mission. This post is rather disjointed and these are things of little consequence, but stick in my mind nonetheless. It is an interesting thing to be thrust in a world that is so completely different than your own.

In my first post about my mission, I showed pictures of all of my companions. I only had one picture of my first companion, Sister {Rose} Soares, with her hiding way in the back. However, I found some old rolls of film that I had developed and I found a picture of us together on my first day in Brasil. The quality of the picture isn't super, but considering it sat in my suitcase in a tropical climate for several months, and then in a drawer for 16 years, I'm really glad to have it. She was so patient and kind.

The little monkey sitting on my shoulder here was someone's pet. His name is Chico. I thought he was cute, so I asked to hold him. He climbed on me a bit and then that cheeky monkey bit me on the neck. I was a bit worried about it for a while, but it's been 15 years and I'm doing pretty OK, so no harm done, I think.

Chickens were frequently kept as pets. Here and in many other countries, hens are allowed to be kept in residential areas, but roosters are not. And I totally understand why that is a law. In Brasil, there wasn't a law about where roosters can be kept and so when the sun came up {at 6:00 every morning} the roosters would begin to crow. And they wouldn't shut up. Look at this gorgeous rooster someone had living in their yard. The colors on him were amazing, which is why I took a picture of him. Unfortunately, the film didn't quite capture his beauty.

One rule for missionaries is that you are to write your family a letter every week. I have this 'thing' for packages and letters. I love to put them together and I love to make them pretty. On my second day in Brasil, I got a letter together for my family to let them know I'd arrived and was on my way. My companion and I went to the post office branch near our home so I could mail it. They only offered one choice of international stamp, and it was pretty boring. So the next time we went into the city center my companion took me to the main post office to get some pretty stamps. They didn't sell them at the main windows. We had to go into this little side office to get them. After that, I would make my companions go to the main post office to get stamps. I would buy enough to mail my letters for that week and the next because we would only make a trip into the city every other week. I asked my mom to save all of my letters and when I got home, I made a collage of all of the pretty stamps I'd procured during my time in Brasil. A few weeks ago, I scanned the collage in and was looking at the digital images. The quality is incredible and I can see details that were almost too small to see on the original stamps. I put together a little slide show of them, with that first boring international stamp at the beginning. One interesting thing about stamps in Brasil is that the cost of international postage fluctuates so frequently that they seldom print the value on the international stamps. You pay the going rate and if the rate goes up the next day, the stamp is still worth the international rate. It works like the USPS's Forever stamps.

I think I've just about wrapped up with blogging about my mission memories. I'll have some fun quilty stuff next Way Back When-sday.