Hey!!

well this week has been really good. i´m super excited to go out into the field and things are gonna be super awesome. i´m stocked! the next time you get an email from me, i´ll be in Vitória and i´ll be rockin it. SWEET! i´m excited. i think i´m ready. i can understand some portuguese and stuff and i´m ahead of most people in my class, but really, i don´t care. i´ve been in for almost 9 weeks and i´m going crazy. i just wanna get out and serve.
On friday, we had the chance to go proselyting again, and this time they bussed us into the heart of the city. it was crazy town. more people than i´ve ever seen! they just let us loose, and we just ran around handing book of mormons to peolpe. i thought it was a lot harder than the first time we went proselyting. for about the first 25 times we tried to talk to someone, they´d just say ´obrigado´which means thanks, and walk away (and that may sound lame that i´m complaining that they wouldn´t listen to us, considering in some places its a lot harder). but then we had more success and we found some poeple that would listen and take the books. yeahhhh!!! we basically went on a book of mormon spree after that and handed out 3 in about 5 mins. awesome!! anyway. proselyting is the best. the Spirit is so strong with you, its amazing. as i teach these people in my broken portuguese, the Spirit testifies of what i say and it makes me so happy to know that they can have the same happiness and joy that i experience every day. i was a little nervous at first , but the people are super nice and if you can get them to stop and listen, then its game over.

and...i´ve got a story. so i have had this plantar´s wart on the bottom of my foot for a while now (more than i year i think) and it hasn´t been a big deal at all, but i´ve still been meaning to try and get rid of it. anyway...so i decided to go to the doc here at the CTM cause its free and i figured it just be a simple little operation. he´d probably just burn it off with some cool gadget or something. well....no. the first time i went to the doc, he looked at it and decided that the best thing to do would be to put some sort of liquid on it that dissolved the skin around it. he did that for about 45 mins, scratched at it a bit with his tweezers and picked off some skin, and then pronounced "its in there pretty deep. i think you better come back again in a couple days and a work at it some more."
So i came back a few days later and its the same thing all over again. he puts on the juice that dissolves the skin, and scrapes at it. then he says that its in there so deep that it might be better if we leave it for today and i come back AGAIN. well.....i wasn´t feeling that, so instead, i say to him "you know....i´ve got a pretty high pain-tolerance. its cool if you just wanna chop it out right now, cause i don´t feel like coming back."
he responded by saying that he didn´t think that was a good idea, cause there would be a lot of blood and its hard to pick the wart out when its covered in blood. but a couple mins later, he announced that he´s going for it.
So here i am, laying on my belly on the doctors table/bed thing, with my foot up in the air and the sole of my foot facing the ceiling. he´s bending over my foot, and i can´t see anything cause i´m looking down at the floor. but i can feel him cutting open the skin on my foot. at first its not that bad. but....the wart´s in there pretty deep. super deep. probably a little more than 1/4 of an inch in down, so he´s got his scissors and tweezers, chopping a hole into my foot so he can yank out the wart. ouch! i was just laying on my stomach on the table for almost 5 mins, gritting my teeth and closing my eyes and hoping it would end.
when he finally finished, it was bleeding so much that he had to cauterize the would to stop the bleeding. then, he had to wipe up the blood that had splatted all over my foot. cauterizing hurt too. i looked at my foot and there was a big black spot in the middle of my foot, about 3/4 of an inch across. in the middle was a small crater. then he bandaged it and said i was "good to go." anyway....i´m doing good now--it still kinda hurts, but i´ve decided that if this is what an american doctor did to me in brazil, then there´s no way i´m ever going to a hospital down here. i also took some sweet pics of it. it looks like death, but i´ll send them sometime.

yeah. so i´m doing good. don´t worry about me. brazil is awesome and i´m super excited to leave. i love teaching the Gospel and the brazilian people. i´ll talk to you again from VITÓRIA!!

love,

Elder Tasso