Letter #7

Howdy, Howdy!        
Well, It's been another great week, but I have to admit that the CTM is starting to wear on me a bit. We are feeling so anxious to get out and teach real investigators. Last Saturday we taught in what they call TRC, or Teaching Resource Center, I think. It's a pretty cool way for them to evaluate how well we are progressing. We taught in a little classroom set up like a living room and taught a lesson in exactly 15 minutes. The people that came for us to teach were a group of young men from a ward in Sao Paulo somewhere. How fun would that be for a young men's activity? They brought some non-member friends with them as well.  The scenario was a family who were really excited about church and were accepting the lessons but the father had a problem with smoking. We had to reinforce the previously taught lesson about the Word of Wisdom and commit them to a specific baptismal date. The classroom has a small camera set up the in the corner so our instructors can watch us as we teach. They said that Elder Walker and I did really well. Of course we have some improvements we can make with our Portuguese, but we are doing really well. I feel like I could leave now for the mission field and be able to hit the ground running. We also get to go proselyting again this Friday. But this time they take us out into downtown Sao Paulo. It's going to be nuts but I can't wait, especially after the experience we had last time.        
Another kind of funny story I could share is about Elder Christopherson's translating in our devotionals. He is the executive secretary to the MTC presidency here and he does most of the translating at the meetings. But it's really funny to hear because he doesn't translate word for word and it makes for some funny experiences. One time a Stake President was talking about us needing to ``cut the umbilical cord" and be ready to serve. It was pretty easy to tell that he was uncomfortable with the phrase though and he kept trying to come up with euphemisms to replace it but it just didn't work. I guess it might be a ``you had to be there" kind of thing. And this past week he was translating for Sister Clark the president's wife who is from the Czech Republic and has a strong accent. The very first sentence she said, he just stared at her blankly and said, ``I'm sorry i didn't catch any of that".  Later on President Clark was speaking in English and Elder Christopherson was translating into Portuguese, halfway though Pres. Clark switched to Portuguese but Elder Christopherson didn't really realize it and just kept repeating the Portuguese phrases. he didn't notice for a while and it made for a good laugh in the room. I guess I don't have many super exciting stories, sorry.              Well it's been great to hear from you all. I love you all a ton. I'll have some more exctiting stuff next week I'm sure after Proselyting.          
 I.U. Elder McLelland (by the way I love our last name. It's one of my favorite things to hear brazilians try and figure out the pronunciation)