Elder Kasey Lightheart

Elder Paulson, me, Elder Ruiz, and Elder Castillo Hey Everyone!!! Boy has it been an interesting week... to say the least.  Unfortunately, last P-day I wasn't able to draft up a blog myself, and rather my mom had to give a short little update on all that was going on with me.  Basically at the start of this week we were quarantined to our house in Brazil, still able to walk about close to our home, and walk over to our chapel to play sports.  Honestly, the saving grace of our weekend in quarantine in Mooca was being able to go to our chapel.  One of our members, who is honestly the BEST, not only bought us a basketball (since Elder Vanderwerkin was dying to play b-ball), but he also brought us dinner one night, and breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day, during our quarantine.  Ismael is honestly just so amazing, and we were and are incredibly grateful for his charity and love for the missionaries.  During the quarantine, they had to close the São Paulo MTC and thus, had

This week has been a long and CRAZY week! I am not able to write my usual email this week, due to Sãn Paulo being in somewhat of a lockdown, similar to what you all are experiencing at home. Because of this, the internet cafes are closed, which is where we go to get internet access each Monday. So, my mother asked me for a timeline of events that have led up to the crazy news that we just found out, which is that all missionaries that are not Brazil citizens are being sent to their home country. Everything has happened SO fast, as you can see from the following timeline: Thursday, March 12th - Church announces that church meetings worldwide will be suspended until further notice due to Covid-19 virus. Brazil only had around 75 cases of the virus at that time. Wednesday/Thursday this week (March 18th or 19th) - missionaries were told to avoid coming in contact with the elderly and anyone else who might be more susceptible to illness. Brazil had around 613 cases of the virus a

Wow, has this week been crazy!! All of you are probably much more aware than I of all that has been going on in the world, with closures of just about everything that involves large gatherings of people, but even here in Brazil, which has been less affected than most places, we have had our fair share of strange and sudden occurrences.  But nonetheless, I have had a great week, and have learned a lot from my experiences this week as well. So this week we started of with our Zone Conference (which luckily we had before everything blew up about the Corona Virus) in which all the missionaries in our zone met up together for a big conference with our mission president.  We basically had our meeting from 9:00 to 4:00 in which we listened to talks from the President, his wife, the Assistants to the President, and our zone leader.  I was actually quite surprised with how much I understood from the meeting considering it was all in Portuguese.  In fact, it was very nerve wracking becau

Hello Everyone! My 2nd week in Brazil is already almost up, can you believe it? Because I definitely can't.  Let me just start by saying that this week was very interesting and different, to say the least.  It included lots of traveling, many testimony building experiences, and some difficult experiences as well. All in all, however, it was an amazing week, and I am grateful to be out here serving the Lord! Also, for this email, I would like to go day by day since I feel every day had something interesting or profound happen.  Monday : Today, after our P-day ended at 6:00 and the work continued, we were out and about trying to visit some people we had been teaching, yet no one was home.  While walking down a street full of houses in the light rain, I felt an impression to knock a certain door, but since we were not necessarily doing finding, and my companion wasn't stopping, I decided to ignore it, thinking it wasn't a big deal.  As we continued on, however, it co

Me with my Mission President, President Miller, and his wife. Hello Everyone!! I finally made it to Brazil!! I don't have a ton of time today, unfortunately, to talk about everything that went on this week, but I'll try my best to cover all the fun stuff that happened! First of all, I am now serving in the São Paulo East Mission of Brazil, in the Mooca area, and my companion is named Elder Steere.  Elder Steere is from Colorado and has been out on his mission for 8 months.  He is an awesome guy who, thus far, has been just a great companion who is doing his best to make sure I learn the language quickly here. (Side note from Kasey's mom: Elder Steere said during our call "Your son speaks Portuguese very well.") It has been pretty hard here with learning Portuguese, as upon arriving I discovered that I know so very little, but alas I am learning!  The people here, however, are very kind, and either give my reassurance with learning the language, or tease