Hello Family and Friends,

I am doing really well.  I will be getting a new companion soon.  My new companion was called to be the assistant of the mission president.  I am very happy for him, but it is a little sad to see him go.  He and I were working really well together this time around and we have many good results to our work as of now.  My new companion is going to be the old assistant.  His name is Elder Monteiro.  He is from Belo Horizante, which is the capital of Minas Gerais.  It is a huge city.  I really do not know the exact population but I would say around the size of Chicago.  

 The weather is about the same.  I think I am getting used to the weather.  It is much easier now. Although I am sweating bucket all the time. It is really uncomfortable sometimes, but I am getting used to it. I am red. It is my color it seems. I am using the sun block that Mom and Dad sent me for Christmas, and that seems to be helping me just great.  I am not nearly as red as I was and I am getting tan.  Thankfully.  I am looking good. I like it.  It is a nice change of pace, although the rest of my body beside my face and arms is the color or refined sugar.  I am afraid of what people would say if I ever left my house in shorts and a t-shirt.  It is somewhat embarrassing.  

Tonight I will be making pizza for a family home evening that we will be having. I am very excited for it. It has been a while since I have made pizza.  I hope I can still please the masses with my culinary mastery.  We hope to baptized this family here soon.  The father and mother need to get married, and we are working on that and they have three children who are already members of the church.  It is good.  Keep Alex Dos Santos in your prayers for me.  

I heard that Lafayette will be getting snow soon. Oh how I miss snow.  Thou knowest not.  Life is good, and it is a good test of faith and patience, and I hope that I will pass this week with flying colors.  

Love, 

Elder Caleb S. Carriere

Hot Hot Hot

Hey everyone,

My goodness it is darn hot, hots I's tells ya.  How hot, thou knowest not.  Today however is cooler, and it looks like it might rain.  I hope it does, although I bought myself a hammock and I was looking really forward to taking a P-day afternoon nap.  I while simply have to do that in my bed.  Oh wo is me.  I am just kidding of course.  I am really happy. My new companion, well old companion and I are getting alone great.  He was in Cruz Alta with me for two transfers and now we are going to be together at least one.  It is good. We already know our idiosyncrasies and we are used to them.  He had a good week however for being a short one.  We had a day where we taught 9 lessons.  It was great. I really enjoyed working like that.  I hope that we can continue the pass. 

We are going to have another baptism this week.  It is a nine year old girl named Luiza.  She is super smart, and she wants to be baptized. She is a daughter of a less active member of our ward, and she was going to be baptized when she was eight years old, but for what ever reason it did not happen, but she now wants to get it done, and we are more than obliged to help.

My new companion, like I said is my old companion from Cruz Alta, Elder Vianna.  He is from São Paulo.  He is a hard working missionary.  It is a good thing. I want to work hard, and reap the things with I have sown.  He and I are having a good start. He found some good new investigators this week, and we are planning and how to find more in a different and more effective way.  I am very excited to see how this transfer pans out. 

I have had a good couple of weeks. My last companion and I reactived a couple of families who had been inactive for more than a year. It is a good thing to see them in the Church with smiles on their faces. I get joy in seeing these families in the Church.  It is good.

I love you guys, and I will talk to you next week.

Elder Caleb S. Carriere

An uncle once more!!!

Well family,

I am very happy to hear that I am an uncle once more.  It is a good feeling to see the pictures of Olivia and Amelia playing well together.  It is something really nice.  I did get a laugh out of the penguin thing as well. It is the coolest animal.  It is always very well dressed. 

I am doing well. I had a good week this week. We taught some very good lessons and my companion is being transferred this week.  I my new companion is also my old companion. Elder Vianna is my companion once more. That is a funny turn of events. It should be a good turn of events. I hope you all are all fine and well.

I got Mom's and Dad's Christmas gift. I am super excited to eat a whole lot of junk food from the good olé U S of A.  I have got little to say about that what is going on.

I love you all and I hope that you all doing really well.  

Love,

Elder Caleb S. Carriere

Short term Goals

Well family and friends,

I am happy to announce that I am alive and well and that my new years thus far has been good. I had troubles sleeping on new years because of the heat, and also because all the fireworks.  I must say, if there is something  Brazilians love other than Soccor it lighting off fire works.  It is somewhat rediculous at times.  They shoot them off in the middle of the day time, night time, or any time that tickles their fancy. So on nights such as new years eve they started at 6 o'clock and did not stop until 2 or 3 in the morning, and they promptly started back up again at 7 in the morning. I really have never seen so much in my life.

I am still working on completing my short term goals, which are for the next 2 to 3 years of my life.  Then I will start with the mid-term goals which are 5 to 10.  I am trying to be more proactive with what I want to happen in my life than simply letting things happen as them may.  I am discovering this daily in my work as a missionary.  I can be much more productive then I could be with out a plan for things.

I can officially say that this is my last year on the mission.  I have 7 months now before I get home. exactly.  The 3rd of August I will be arriving in the Indianapolis airport.  I would like to get myself registered at Purdue, so that way I can get my mind out of that and continue with work at hand. If you guys can get a start on that that would be great.

I love you guys

Elder Caleb S. Carriere

Happy New Years

Hello world,

I am going really good. This week was not that great with two exceptions. I got to talk to mom and dad on Saturday, and on Friday night we ate dinner at the house of our mission president.  That was a good thing.  Everyone had a good time, and we got to stop and relax.  It is a good thing to take your mind off of things, and just relax. I hope to do that to, when I get back to Lafayette.

Another good thing that happened, was an idea that my companion had about putting out a box with an ad that said, Hey you want a Christmas present.  We got a whole bunch of names that way, and we hope to contact them all this week or in the next.  It was a good idea on his part, it takes out a lot of work for us.  We just now search and destroy instead of a mass bombing raid.  

This morning was also a good one. We climbed the mountain once again, with a couple of the youth here. They brought a friend with them that wants to get baptized, but his parents are less then thrilled with the idea of letting their child enter the church.  Keep Mike in your prayers. He is a good kid, and wanted to become a member.  

I love you guys, and I am sorry that this letter in not as big as past ones.  I hope that you all are going extremly well ,and that here in a couple of weeks I will be a uncle once again.

Love,

Elder Caleb S. Carriere

Feliz Natal

Dear family, and friends, or any other unfamiliar people that might read this,

Well family, I really do not have much to say, other than this week was a hot one.  It continued to be 100 plus degrees, and I did not like that, but I tried to work.  My companion on the other hand really got sick.  It was not the best week that we´ve ever had, but it is now raining which means that this week should be a lot cooler.  

We had a zone conference, that was really good. I learned a great deal about the importance of goal setting.  Our mission president gave us many reasons why we should be people who make and set goals, and also that these goals need to be written.  He gave us the out come of a study made by someone who look a class at Yale and only 3 percent had made goals for their lives.  Well to make a long story short, all those people, the three percent were much more sucessful in their family lives and also had more money than the other 97 percent put together.  So yeah, it seems that I must begin to make a list of plans.  

Our mission president broke it down into three types of goals.  Short term 2-3 years, Mid Term 5-10 years, and Long term 15-20 years,  I have the short term and mid term goals already made, but the long term I think I will wait until the end of the mission to make those things, but I have several ideas of what I want to do with my life, and I hope to realize them.

That is my life at the moment.  I hope that you guys are all good, and warm. I know that the US is really cold this time of the year.  

Love,

Elder Caleb S. Carriere

Ask and You Shall Recieve!

Dear family, friends, fellow Canadians, Americans and Brazilians,

How are all of you doing?  This week was an interesting one. One week which I hope, not to repeat, but it did lead me more to Heavenly Father than other weeks.  It is sort of like when Lehi said to Jacob, that all these afflictions are for your benefit.  These week we meet some very interesting people... and those people are the cause of my woos.  

One woman that we meet is kind of... strange... I lack a better word.  She believe Spritism, which is a common religion down here in Brazil.  I am not sure if you all know who Allen Kardec is, but he is the founder of that religion, who believes that in stead of resurrection there is reincarnation. It is kind of a strange thing, but anyway she begins to talk about that and then she stops me in mid sentence to say... " I have the book of the Aliens, and I believe it to be true." Which begs the question, What does it  say?  It says that Mary had "relations" with an Alien, who is God, and that Jesus is the son of an Alien, and that the star that guided the three wise men, was not a star but a UFO which was God's spaceship.  That was a difficult day.  The next day we went to a guy, who we had been teaching for a while now.  He became crazy.  He also was talking a lot like Satan when he tried to tempted Jesus Christ in the desert or Moses when he was at Mount Sinai.  He invited my companion and I to be his disciples and to follow him, and that we needed to prepare ourselves for a life of trials and pain for his cause.  Oh, and he was also inventing words which my companion wrote down, but in the process of all this he stops and asked me a question which I did really understand because he really does not ask questions. When I said that I did not understand him, he said that I had already sown the seeds of my own damnation.  Then stopped in mid sentence and began to put his hands in the air and pray to himself  quietly.  This is when my companion and I decide to leave.  We leave, and he noticed, so he follows us talking nonsense and says that if we follow him, anything that we want will come true.  He said, if you want to health of you parents to improve follow me.  If you have enemies, they will be gone.  If you want money, or women just say it, it´s yours.  Then he said that I was more prepared to follow him because my companion has too much Karma, and that I had less because I am white, and white people are closer to God than darker people.   Yeah... that was the down side of my week, but the good side too all this was we now know that we ought not return to that mans house.

Also the good thing about this week was we had good numbers including one baptism.  It was great.  The kid is Gabriel.   He is 13 years old, and a good kid.  He has friends and family that are members of the Church, and they brought him to Church a couple of weeks ago.  He liked what he felt and saw there, and we brought those same feelings into his home.  It was quite an excellent feeling.  I think that maybe after a short time we might be able to teach his parents and they to can know the truth.  

Also another thing that happened was an answer to a prayer.  I had been praying for some time now, for a family to go to Church.  They are Miguel, Gladez and Gabrielle and Grazielle.  They are good people.  I love them to death, but the only thing that was lacking was church visits.  They have already gone three times before, but it had been more than a month since they had gone.  My companion had the great idea about making breakfast for them so that we could help them go to Church.  It worked. We made pancakes. Which they do not have here in Brazil.  They really like it.  It was something excited and new for them.  I loved it because it has been almost a year and three months since I had pancakes in the MTC.  It was a good thing. They went to Church, and I had a prayer answered.  I almost cried during sacrament meeting because of the stresses I was having, and that they had been taken away from me and I was left with just comfort and peace. As it says,"Ask, and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you."  I have gained a testimony of the Law of the Harvest as my mission president calls it.  If we want something me must asked for it, and try to make it happen, and if we are obedient to the commandments that Heavenly Father gave us it will come to pass.  I am a proof of that.

Love,

Elder Caleb S. Carriere