It is so hot!  Oh my goodness, it does not even feel like Christmas.  It is about 90 degrees each day.  I am not in Fortaleza!  I was put in a rural part of the mission, which I wanted, and it is called Canindé.  It is so, so poor.  But what has really been the struggle, which I am still baffled about is that Elder Garcia, my trainee from New York is still my companion.  We get along great, but do you know what that means?  Neither of us speaks Portuguese!!!  And, Canindé is a new area, which has never had missionaries. There is only one member here!  I am so lost!!!  I get home at night and just want to cry.  We street contact in the sun all day...we walk about 12 to 14 miles each day.  It is funny, everyone here thinks we are evangelicals...they have never heard of the church.  In terms of the work...super, super hard.  The people here are very open but they do not understand us.  I cannot tell you how many times this past week that it has taken Elder Garcia and me something like twenty minutes to carry on a conversation, which the equivalent in English would take two minutes.  Not only can they not understand us, we cannot understand them.  Canindé is notorious for being the most "slangy fast" Portuguese in Brazil.

About my apartment…  Well, the first three days we did not have electricity or running water.  Now we have both but the water that comes out of the shower is lake water and is pitch yellow.  So gross...you can smell the rotting flesh which has been brewing in it as it comes out the spout.  It is quite the experience.  I am so, so grateful for America.  I am happy I am here, though.  I know the language will come.  People just laugh at us when we speak because we are so bad!   Everyone here thinks I am German.  They ask me to speak German to them...

The church is brand new here.  They literally have never seen us before.  Everyone here is of the Catholic culture and we have to go to the slums of the city to have people listen to us.  But, we teach a lot because everyone is very hospitable.  They all wonder why people in white shirts and ties are here because they have never seen us before (rather they ask why we are wearing pants in the heat!)  It is so hot here and so poor that most people do not even wear clothes besides short shorts and torn up shirts.

There are famished dogs and cats everywhere.  There is this one pack of dogs which roams the city.  The dogs are super afraid of humans here.  And, there are frogs everywhere...so many "sapos."  The other day, while walking, I counted hundreds of frogs flattened by the millions of motorcycles which are here.  So, if I have a message to share with you this week, it would be this: be grateful for what you have!

I really do love it here.  I have never been as stressed, though.  The language is so, so, so, so...HARD!    Mom, I am sorry, but I know longer take spiders out of the house anymore.  I wake up each morning and part of the morning routine is to grab my shoes and kill the spiders that are the size of my hands.  These things are huge!  So big!  They could probably take on a small pitbull and win.

2 Nephi 28:30 has become one of my favorite scriptures...line upon line...precept upon precept…

Feliz Natal.

Elder Larkin

Elder Larkin and Elder Helvey from the MTC 

The town of Caninde where Elder Larkin is serving.

It is so dry in Canindé.  In this picture it was raining.  It has not rained here in three years.  Pretty awesome that the day the church came into the city for the first time with missionaries was when it rained for three consecutive days for the first time in years.