Elder John Hiatt's Mission Blog

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 Dear Hiatt family, It was a pleasure to meet and interview Elder Hiatt in our home this morning. He arrived at approximately 10:30 am and we spent the morning and afternoon together with the missionaries that arrived today. We focused on the Savior and His saving doctrines. We also provided them with mission guidelines and answered questions. The assistants to the president and mission secretaries were also present and gave trainings. Afterwards we visited the Mission Office and a local Stake Center where he met his companion. We ended the day with a tour of the São Paulo Temple Visitor´s Center and he went to his area. It will be a privilege to get to know him and we know that he will be a wonderful and powerful servant in the Lord's work. Thank you for sending us such a wonderful missionary Elder Hiatt will serve with Elder Bulkley in the Osasco area in the Osasco Zone. We want to inform you that his preparation day is Monday. We encourage you to commu...

Hello family and friends, I took a picture this week. I don´t have any way to get it onto the computer, so I will try to send it next week. A few things to note about this picture: * I am wearing a suit. Some of you said that I would wear a suit about 12 times during my whole mission. Following expectations of the CTM, I wear a suit every Sunday and Wednesday for church and the temple. I have worn it 12 times already, and will wear it again tomorrow. * The clock of the building is in 24 hour time. This is Brazil, where things are a little different from the USA. Times are written in 24 hour time (but said in 12 hour am/pm time). Fasts go during dinner and breakfast and end at lunch. Cars can make left turns from the right lane right in front of another car in the left lane about to go straight. (I did see this happen once.) * My watch. Before my mission, the knob broke off, so I couldn´t change the hour to match Brazil time instead of Colorado time. For the first several weeks, the t...

Here are some pictures we received from Nícolas Oliveira, one of John's instructors at the CTM.  

Hello family and friends, First of all, I would like to apologize for not actually finishing my letter last week. I only have an hour to do this, and I ran out of time. A correction: * There is a district here learning Japanese. For some reason, one of my roommates has the Book of Mormon in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Last night, I read from 1 Nephi 1:1 with one of the Japanese elders. I could almost read fluently. Additional note: This week, I learned a new phrase in Japanese: O genki des ki? Genki des. (This is equivalent to "How are you?" "Pretty good" or "Como você está?" "Muito bom.") Also, I didn´t finish my explanation of Morôni 8:16, but I won´t do that now. This week, there was just a little that happened. I read more of the Book of Mormon. I learned more Portuguese. I taught a few more practice lessons. People fixed a broken sewer pipe in front of our classroom. You know, the normal stuff. I´m still re...

Hello family and friends, This is Elder Hiatt, currently training to serve a mission in São Paulo Brazil. I will be sending these emails once a week for the next two years. If you don´t want to receive these, know someone else who wants to get them, or have anything else you want to tell me, you can contact me at john.hiatt@missionary.org . If you missed any of my previous emails, they are all posted at https://johnhiattmission.blogspot.com . Thank you! A few interesting things happened this week. In no particular order, here they are: * One of the other companionships in my hallway has been talking with one of the people around the CTM on preparation days (Wednesday). They left last week, but before they left they asked me to continue talking with him. As many of you know, I have difficulty talking to people, but I did manage to get his name, which the other elders hadn´t managed in three weeks of talking to him. We´ll see him again tomorrow, and see if we can get him to read any of t...

Hello family and friends, First off, I would like to apologise for not giving a title for the last email. I don´t remember everything that happened this week. It was mostly more classes. One important thing we started this week was TRC. (That´s an abbreviation for something, but I don´t know what it is.) TRC is practice for actual events in the mission field: teaching people who are interested in learning about the church. We get to teach two people, one this week and next week, and the other for the last two weeks. (These are instructors acting like interested people, but they are pretty good actors.) My person for this week and next week is extremely excited about literally everything, particularly baptism. Teaching is sometimes difficult, but in our two visits on Tuesday and Thursday we managed to get through most of the points of The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the first lesson in Pregar Meu Evangelho (Preach My Gospel in English), which is our manual for everything ...

Hello family and friends, This is Elder Hiatt, currently training to serve a mission in São Paulo Brazil. I will be sending these emails once a week for the next two years. If you don´t want to receive these, know someone else who wants to get them, or have anything else you want to tell me, you can contact me at john.hiatt@missionary.org . If you missed any of my previous emails, they are all posted at https://johnhiattmission.blogspot.com . Thank you! This past week has been muito bom. For those of you that don´t speak Portuguese, that means very good. I sent the last email on Tuesday. Our preparation day here in the CTM is actually Wednesday, so the day after that email we got to go out and see other areas of São Paulo First, all of the missionaries had the opportunity to attend the temple. There are actually two temples nearby: the São Paulo temple and the Campinas temple. Last week we went to the São Paulo temple, and tomorrow we will go to the Campinas temple. In the temple, we h...