Not in Atlanta Anymore!

Well hey there!! Goodness has it been a year???? AH. Where do I even begin!? First here are some pictures from the MTC.

Me and my comp Sister Greenall. She's the best! 

Flying over sao paulo

MTC district!

I guess I'll start with the trip over to JDF. Me and 3 elders travelled together to the Campinas airport. 

me and the elders

We took a little plane to the small JDF airport. Here's a comparison of the overview of crazy Sao Paulo and my first view of JDF......

JDF from my little jet plane.

We had quite the ride in a van from the airport to the city. The MTC president told us to record all of our first thoughts and I will go ahead and share those with you....

"Oh no... this is the middle of nowhere. I've never seen so much bare land. Where are the people???"

"What are these weird rock clumps in the ground??? Did Dr. Seuss design this place?"

Can you see the weird dirt clumps?

"We're going to die. Cause of death: Brazilian driver on mountain passes. Mom's not going to be happy about this!"

"Is that woman really carrying a stick with a cloth sack? Is this a movie?" (I couldn't snap a picture of this in time but I swear it's just like Zip a Dee Doo Dah!)

"Goodness I've seen a total of 35 people in this 40 minute drive... where are the BAM"

....

Don't worry...we didn't crash. But it seemed like the city crashed into us! You drive over a small hill and BOOM there's a city full of 500,000 people. It's like a brick wall when you see it for the first time. 

Juiz De Fora is pretty cool. It kind of reminds me of Miami but just a much, much older version and lots and lots of hills. Anyways we got to a church building and had a zone conference where I met President and Sister Cascardi and my new companion Sister Oliveira from Sao Paulo. We spent the night there in JDF and then we were off to my new area Muriae. It's about 4 hours away from JDF and a much smaller city. My companion doesn't know the area very well because she's only been here for a few weeks. We don't have much to work with so we're honeslty just starting fresh and rebuilding the area. The church is quite new and located in a house owned by the church. It's been here in Muriae for about 6 months now and it's apparently a branch but we had 19 people at church yesterday (4 of which were missionaries and 6 kids). 

Toto.... we're definitely not in Atlanta anymore... or the good ol' USA. 

Jesus statue in Muriae. 

Looking out of my apartment window

It's not been a terrible culture shock. Everything seems fairly easy to adapt to! I guess the trickiest part for me is that I've never done this kind of missionary work before. And quite frankly I'm only pretending I know what I'm doing. It's not like they teach you how to solve these kinds of struggles people have here, but there is one thing I know and that is that the Lord is really blessing me! SO much! Portuguese isn't even a worry. Sure I have lots to learn in Portuguese... but it's coming along 100x faster than Spanish! I can't thank the Lord enough for this miracle. The gift of tongues is real, and how blessed I am to even be able to experience it first hand! 

Thank you so much for your prayers! I know I would not be here without you all. 

More adventures to come next week! 

LOVE YOU ALL!

Sister Hawkins

Cool little brazil plane