Success!

Oh boy! you may say, Empty Shelves! But yes, this is very exciting. Every time we have zone conferences it gets crazy and busy and complicated and going through so many packages and other things with so many lists of areas and zones and materials, it's the one chance to get everything to everyone but there are always some things left behind. But not this time! I made plans after the last one, and went a bit nuts, but it worked. The thing you see in the mail cubby is something an elder left behind at zone conference, waiting for him to get it at his next interview. I thought I had missed one letter and spoiled it but it was something a sister missionary gave us at her zone conference to give to another.

Some of the materials going out for zone conference, about one days worth out of three.

The sisters make up a big portion of our mail sending notes to each other. They decorate them up and use folded magazine pages or something colorful for envelopes. I even went through the package tracking form and yes, everything is accounted for. Of course,that doesn't mean I won't get something sent back from the interior today that went to the wrong place, but so far so good.
Unfortunately the Liahonas arrived halfway through and only the Portuguese ones, so the nice mail cubbies are about to be cluttered up with maybe seven dozen magazines for those who had conference the first day or are getting the English one.
Update: A box of English Liahonas arrived on Friday - but not the same issue! so native Portuguese (and Spanish) speakers get the conference issue and English speakers get the June one. The others should arrive someday.....

The cooler in the picture is for shots. Many South American missionaries haven't had any before coming and we pick up where the MTC leaves off. And someone in Sao Paulo arranged flu shots for everybody but the whole process seemed jinxed this round. Among other things, on the first day two companies showed up to give shots (the second was not happy) and the next day no one did. The company scheduled for that day called a couple of days  later and offered to reschedule, umm, not that easy...getting the same group of seventy missionaries together at the same time?

I've been wanting a photo of these street cleaners in their yellow suits. Those outfits look so hot (but not bad in pouring rain maybe). Without these workers cleaning gutters and sidewalks everyday it would get really bad. Everyone just drops garbage all over the place. There are blue suits for park/landscape workers and I think I've seen red once. When they are trimming lawns there are always two workers holding up a blue net on poles making a fence to keep the clippings from hitting cars or people. Mostly lawns are done using weed whackers not mowers.

Did I post the tiny baby mangoes? Here they are a few weeks later, no longer like grape tomatoes.

Well, I realized the other evening that I was involved in playing for Sacrament mtg (every time I have done it so far they have changed one or more songs while I was playing prelude), helping teach English one and two, teaching conducting, and now being the Primary Music leader. Maybe that will keep me out of mischief. Learning the songs in Portuguese is not something I can do quickly but I am sure it will be good for me. The extra fun part is that we traded out the keyboard that had the backwards pedal (when you touch it, the notes stop, otherwise they just keep playing) but found that the other keyboard was even worse! It mostly won't play at all, but if you get the volume button in just the right spot, you can get (soft) sound - and whatever you play, it plays some random automatic song along on top of it. At least its a small group used to singing a capella. Merrell is not easy to say in Portuguese (comes out something like Meh-hoe) so I think the children decided I am "Sister Mel" which means honey, fine with me.

Big excitement, we actually found one place in Brasil where you can make changes from what's on a menu - ordering Domino's pizza. It took a long time and lots of roundabouting on the website to figure out anything besides "more of", but they will let you take things off. You can have more than one kind of gooey "cream cheese" if you want. Unfortunately their crust is kind of like pre-baked crust from the grocery store.

Did a bit more hiking to visit another sister - another over ninety, maybe they figure I can't hurt anything visiting the little old ladies. I'm not sure they can tell I don't understand much, probably when I leave they say, "that Mel person is very quiet". It was encouraging to see Sister Maria Dolores had her scriptures at her side  -- and her son was asking about getting her a temple recommend. But I was totally confused on the walk home, we came different way and nothing looked like when we went. My comp had to walk me right to our complex.