Oct 26

October of course is always wonderful because General Conference is a huge boost to our hearts. We were able to see all the sessions in English. This month we were able to attend some group meetings, group and district activities, training zone conferences, transfer meetings, baptisms and so many other great things.  

Typical Brazilian Street here in Cuiaba

Dad drinking a "to-go" orange juice - it came in a bag! :)

Feeding visiting Elders our standard - French Toast

The kids would love this - it's a statue thing in the mall.

I took this because we finally rode the bus! Yea!

This is Elder Tavares fixing Mom's computer because another Elder turned the screen sideways!

Of course your dad does find time to work and I continue my course of unimaginable this and that, sometimes being quite helpful and other times not so much.  But we love it. I felt I should add a few Experiences that add to the fun of it all.  The other day as I was showering and totally covered with soap when the water went off.  I rinsed off by using the clean water from the back of the toilet to rinse off and clean my bangs and dry off my soapy hair and feeling some what sticky, got ready to go to the office. (Note we did get water within two hours but how could I have known we would be so blessed!)  Que benção!  (That's what they say a lot here - kind of like "thanks for the experience!")  
The thunder here is crazy loud. We were lying in bed one night and I truly thought the building next to us had suddenly collapsed, but no, just a storm. We live in a blast furnace most of the time (95-100 and humid) but when it rains we have a cooling trend for awhile and it is wonderful.  I just broke my tooth off, post and all, so I am looking forward to a dentist experience.  

This doesn't really do it justice, but you can see some of Mom's torture.  I'll let her tell the story next time.

Last night we went to a wonderful activity with the group in San Matheus and a little four year old girl just fell in love with me and just talked and talked to me.  The awesome thing was her nine year old cousin (cutest young boy) would translate everything she said - just a little slower.  The problem was he translated her Portuguese by using his Portuguese!  He was too kind for words and his thoughtfulness was so sweet.  I understood little but I never told him that. 

This is the Elder's House (top) and church meeting house (bottom) where we went to the churrasco.

We just put the sign up above when we went to the churrasco (like a BBQ).

I thought I'd show how they get water (no pressure otherwise)

The churrasco was great, I helped with some of the cooking...

This is Mom with the little girl and "translator" by her side.

The sister in the middle was just called to Maceio (Brett & Becky have been there!)

We went to Presidents home to have lunch with the departing missionaries.  They were all excellent missionaries and it was hard to let them go.  Sister Reber gave them her final motherly advice and she cried because she realizes this will be the last time she will see some of these wonderful missionaries that she has loved so much.  It was a beautiful experience she asked them to always, read their scriptures, pray, attend the temple, and marry a rock solid member of the church, and one more thing that I can´t remember.  President Reber asked them to stay solidly in the middle of the path and not go toward the edge.   He told them about an experience he had with a rain storm and a bus.  The rain had washed away the road on the edge under the road and the only safe place was right in the middle.  Good advice but mostly it was the spirit of gratitude for a job well done.  

Here are the seven returning home, 2 Americans, 4 Brazilians, and 1 Peruvian

Loved it !!  Our hope is we will leave our mission feeling that it has been a job well done, so keep up the prayers.  I might come home speaking Portuguese. :) xoxox 
The Church is True.  
Com amor, Mom    

09 October 2014

It's been a bit since we posted, probably because there's not that much to report - a lot of office work is being done.  It's hot, but that's not unusual - this week was pretty much 100° every day, and it's only spring here.  We went on "divisions" last week in São Matheus, along with President and Sister Reber and the Davises.  Here's a picture.

Group on "divisions" in São Matheus (a new group in the mission)

We also fed the Elders in the office french toast (not in the office):

Breakfast - French toast with cream syrup

We found a really nice park (with mosquitoes), but it's too far to walk:

This is a map of the park, several Kilometers around

Speaking of walking, Mom and I walked down to a shopping area in town, about 1.5 miles from the office.  We left after work at about 4:00pm because I had to get some bills paid at the local "lotérica" (where all bills are paid, of course!) and it was closing at 5:00pm.  The shopping area is call "Praínha" (Pry-een-ya), which means little beach but we don't know why it's called that since there are no beaches around... funny.  We saw this cool group of trees with hanging yellow flowers on the way there, along with a shot of the city...

We went to two baptisms this week in our ward.  I got to baptize the two kids at the second one, and Mom was asked to give the baptismal talk at the last minute - fortunately (read, tender mercy) she picked up her little yellow thought book at home before the meeting.  Picture (font and kids and I):

Me with André and Andrea

We also got caught in the rain (real rain) for the first time, we were drenched - I'm not sure this picture does it justice.  We only walked (read, ran) from the office to our apartment, which is only a half-block away!

The banks were on strike last week - not too fun for us!

 A lot more pictures than words this week - next time we'll have more words... :)

Love you all,
The church is true!
Dad

Birthday Party - 24 Sep 2014

It was my birthday, so I thought I would post some pictures.  We had a BBQ our by our apartment pool with the elders in the office and the other office couple.  It was fun to have hamburgers and hot dogs, and cake and ice cream.  We even had french fries with the meal!
Mom had the great idea to burn a bunch (two boxes full) of paper from the office instead of shred it, so that's how we got the charcoal started - they don't have lighter fluid here.

Me - cooking burgers, etc.

Yes, I'm now 61... I know, hard to believe! :)

Elder Bonaro with office papers to burn

Love to all.  The church is true.
Dad

21 September 2014

Hello Everyone,

Another few days in paradise.  This week we went to an open market in Tijucal, close to Cuiabá. (Oh, notice that my Portuguese accents are working now that I have connected a Brazilian keyboard)  Anyway, there is a member that sells french fries at the market, so we got a bunch of them and they were good.  We also bought a "pastel" filled with cheese and it was really good also.

A couple pictures from the open market (notice the "bounce house" at the end of the row!

Sunday we drove the president's car to a group meeting in Campo Verde (we posted a picture of the group previosuly).  They called the night before and asked me to speak, and then asked Mom to speak (bear her testimony) just before the meeting - they give me notice and not her, go figure!  My talk went well and I was feeling pretty good about my Portuguese since I spoke about 20 minutes without notes...until (here's where pride goeth before a fall) afterward one of the members asked how long we would be on our mission and I said "18 years!" instead of 18 months! :(  It was actually pretty funny when I noticed the look on their faces and then realized what I had done.  Mom's talk and testimony was awesome - she came prepared with a little book of thoughts that she's been working on, so that helped.  And I should add, since she does most of the blogging, everyone loves her here - just as we knew they would.  She communicates just fine and gets along with the Brazilians even when I'm not around.

Here's a picture of the president's car.

This is President Reber's car.

The car picture was taken at the Brazilian "Bridal Veil Falls" (Cachoeira da Noiva) - here's a picture of the falls, it's beautiful!  I'm guessing it's probably a 200ft drop to the bottom.

On the way home we saw some other fun things:

This was our friendly neighborhood armadillo out for a Sunday afternoon stroll (on the side of the road)

This is a big lizard we saw along the road (it may have been a gila monster,
but we couldn't tell, it was about 2 feet long)

These three pictures were all taken at a river just off the highway on our way back.

The trip takes us though a place called "Chapada dos Guimarães", which is a lot like St. George, with red cliffs, etc.

All is well here, we survived the travel with no GPS, no access to AAA, no phone service, no decent maps, and definitely no decent roads!  Life's an adventure.

And lest you think all we do is travel about having fun, most of our days are spent working in the office.  We've actually only taken two P-days in four weeks... and those were the two days we spent in the Pantanal last week.

Love to all, the church is true!
Dad

Dear Family
We have been having a great time, spread out around missionary work, of course - which is also great.  We found this cool little museum in Cuiabá about Cuiabá History and we love Cuiabá even more.  It has such beautiful people.

One of the exhibits in the Cuiaba Museum

This was the inside of one of the Catholic churches here in town

We also visited the Pantanal (where all the animals are) on our P-day.  It was totally beautiful and you will love some of these pictures.  Our room's air conditioning did not work (well, it did run but it was VERY loud so we shut it off) so we were a little hot and we didn't get much sleep.  They fed us three yummy meals and it is fun to eat different things especially if I don't have to make them.  I don't love passion fruit, who knew?, since I am pretty passionate about a lot of things.  And they serve potatoes cold with the salad bar, makes sense they are considered a vegetable.  I can eat anything if you put Nutella on it and wash it down with Guaraná!  I might be Brazilian.  We had a delightful guide which I am sorry to say we did not get a picture with. He works six days a week, always Saturday and Sunday and makes about five hundred dollars a month.  He has six children which he sees on the one day he he has off and returns home.
He walked us all around and showed us monkeys and birds in the area.

This is a Tuuu (Two-U-U) bird, they are huge.

These are like the Rio birds.

This one I caught in the wild, on our long walk.

One of the many monkeys we saw.

A hawk I caught taking off (on our walk)

More Tuuu birds with their babies (two on the right are about 2 months old, can't fly yet)

Also got an owl during the day.

This one was taken at our"Pousada" where we spent the night.

I found the iguana all by myself! and the guide gave me a "Muito Bem!" for my find.

Here is "My" Iguana (Dad took the picture from about 2 feet away!)

The termite hills are everywhere.  They are built so strong even when the rainy season comes and floods them they still stand.  Some are six feet tall or more.

Termite mounds (Yes, it looks like a graveyard)

We did not take a boat down the river, but there are thousands of alligators, also paranha, anaconda, and various other snakes.  We hope to go back durning the rainy season and do that.    If Kevin is reading this we did find the "rodents of unusual size" and Dad took a picture:

Here it is, and they are as big as a large dog (a fat one)

They are crazy big but the nice thing about that is you would see them if they came into your house so there really isn't a rodent problem in our apartment :).  And we live on the third floor. The birds are beautiful, I could easily stand on the observation tower for hours and watch them. The pit is that you need to get them in flight because for some birds when the wings are closed they are brown when they fly there are reds, whites, yellows, oranges, you get the picture - also some have enormous wing spans that are absolutely incredible in flight.  I did try to get a picture close up of an alligator but he hissed and scared me almost to death.  We had a frog in our room which we made the owner come catch because although it was small I didn't know if it was poisonous.  I know... chicken baby (probably unlikely you'll call Mom that after seeing the alligator picture).  But just to show you how tough I am I grabbed a Gater by the tail and even though he had already eaten it was still pretty brave (just a note, when Dad grabbed his tail he hadn't eaten yet! - His picture is on FaceBook).

Yep, it's a real gator, but maybe not as dangerous as it looks... kind of tame, really

We are back to the office this afternoon with only the fun memories of this enchanted area.  Tom is off financing and I need to get some transfer papers done, so just know we love you all very much.
The Church is True.
love mom