Day 252

I got to the area late Wednesday night, and it's in the suburbs of the city. I didn't manage to stop by the McDonalds close to the highway station. The mission office calls and pays for Uber rides during transfers so we got to the station, waited a few minutes and the car showed up.

In the area, you can see the city center in the distance when standing at an elevated place; the whole city sits in a giant green mountain bowl. There's always fighter jets passing over every day and at night too, Santa Maria's a major location for the Brasilian Air Force. In Ijui, jets never passed over the city but I did see military helicopters flying over.

Today I'll be buying groceries but until today, I've just been eating hot dogs or "xis" for dinner. Both are about 10 reais, or 3/4 dollars and are fairly large items, a solid dinner by themselves.

"Xis" (pronounced "sheez", taken from the English "cheese" and brazilianized) is the brasilian cheeseburger. It just happens that "xis" is also how the letter x is pronounced, so its as if we called a cheeseburger an "x".

Anyway, because the word is just phonetically translated, they don't actually bother to include cheese, at least normally. It's a large sandwich, and normally included are these two wide, flat patties almost more like pancakes than hamburger buns, plus a wider and thinner sort of beef patty, plus lettuce and tomato, and some sort of mayonaise-type sauce; really simple, but in practice its really good. You can pay more and they load it with corn and peas, which I've already tried but don't like much. I'll send pictures next week.

The area here is 20-30 minutes from the city center by bus, and each way costs 4 reais, and all hours I've used the bus it's always been packed, all seats taken.

This week, we'll be focusing on helping a couple, Angela and Rogelio, get married for free! The process usually costs an average of 250 reais but here in Santa Maria the missionaries have access to a form that allows waiving the charges. Technically it's supposed to be for people too poor to pay for the ceremony but we use it for anyone who has a real desire to get married (which is a rare case). For some reason this process only works in Santa Maria, the other cities I've served in don't have this option.

Anyway, this couple has already been to church several times, we're teaching them all of the lessons as of now, we have a family home evening with them tonight, and the whole marriage process will last until late November. If all goes well they could be baptized on November 24. So we'll have to follow up without fail the whole way along.

I'll end with a very common portuguese phrase used in a *lot* of scenarios:

"Vai dar certo!" (literally "will give right", but it means something like "it'll all work out")

Until next week,

Elder hopkinson