Transfer Terrors

Dear everyone back home,

I think about you a lot. Love you more than you can imagine. Who would
have known that leaving you all for a year and a half would have just
made me love you more? After eighteen weeks here in little Brazil I
have PERFECTED the Brazilian hug and I can't wait to give each and
every one of you one when I get home.

Yes eighteen weeks is all I will spend in little Brazil. I had twelve
weeks with a native Portuguese speaker, six weeks with my dream companion from the
MTC, and one week with the craziest Brazilian I've ever met. This last
week is the most hilarious story of my being.

Sunday night hits, we're at our busiest and the assistants call. They
asked us to take the two and a half hour train ride out to Tokyo to
pick up our new companion Sister S. She's Brazilian, and was
actually a sister missionary here in Tokyo until she tore her knee.
She went back, got surgery, and came back a week before the transfer.
We knew she was coming a day in advance. We scrambled to make room for
three Latinas in our little Japanese apartment. She got here just in
time to spend all of two days cooped up in our apartment. In our
mission we don't go out for New Years, we clean the apartment all day
on New Year's Eve and read the Book of Mormon all day on the first.
She slept. She deserved it.

Never have I laughed as much as I have this week together as a trio in
little Brazil. It broke my heart to hear I'm transferring.
Well family it's been pretty consistent. Three transfers in each area.
Enough time to know the very souls of the people, commit every street
to memory, and see all the miracles I can wring out of the place.

Should the pattern continue, this next area will be my last. That's
right everyone, the date is May 13th. On Friday the 13th I will board
a plane home with all the confidence in the world, with enough zeal to
preach this gospel to the world. Where is my final area? Shibuya.
Ladies and gentlemen I am headed into the heart of one of the biggest
cities in the world. Oh I know all too well that I am headed into a
very real furnace of pure sweat and blood and hard work but it feels
SO RIGHT. Of course they would put my big curly haired head in the sea
of heads in Tokyo. After this time in actual actual Tokyo, I will come
out unstoppable.

I'm so scared. I'm so sad to leave everyone. But I am eternally
grateful for a Heavenly Father who sees ahead centuries and
millenniums ahead, rather than only seeing till the end of the
transfer like I tend to do. He has blessed me with a fluency in
stinking Portuguese and now is sending me to the area I dreamed of
ever since I opened my call.

I know this email is a whole lot of nothing, but just settle in for
the roller coaster that will be this next how ever many emails there
are to come. I love you all, I'll see you soon, but good luck
recognizing me.

Love,

Sister Goldsberry