arrival in Brazil, apartment

Since we were traveling on tourist visas, we couldn’t wear our name tags. We arrived in Sâo Paulo early in the morning, before 8:00 a.m. and Fred wasn’t there to meet us!!! Here we were in a foreign country and no way to get to the Mission Office. We tried calling but as it was early in the morning, no one was in the office. Fred finally came; relief! He took us to his apartment, which was on the 17th floor of an 18th floor building. Carol had given us Violet’s room, with twin beds, in which we stayed for several weeks before an apartment was ready for us. Fred, Carol, Lexie, Jonathan and Violet lived in that apartment.
When he took us to the office the missionaries had prepared a big welcome banner for us and made us feel very welcome. My trainer was Elder Brown, who had been the executive secretary and Elder Boyer trained Leon, he was the financial secretary. There were a couple of other missionaries working in the office, the historian and the commissary elder. Leon’s office was rather small and had a huge, old safe in it, where we kept the missionaries’ passports. All passports had to be taken to a Cartório, a notary public, where they were copied and the Elders carried the copies with them at all times. My office was larger and I had a computer and printer. It had an old version of Word Perfect. The keyboard was in Portuguese and so I wrote my friends at UVCC to send me an old template with the commands in English. This really helped a lot.
The mission office was located in a three story building which housed the Area President’s Office as well as the Church Offices and it also had a branch of the Itaú Bank that we used for all the missionaries and office monies. This was on a huge block that held the Temple, a Stake Center and there was also a building used as lodging for visitors to the temple and as the MTC or CTM in Portuguese. We had guards at the entrances to the complex.
After a few weeks, an apartment became available in the Vertentes apartment complex across the street from the church block. There were about eight tall buildings, four on each side of a little plaza. We were in building Lambari apt. 51. Several apartments in the complex had been purchased by the Church for temple workers but there were not anymore American temple couples so these apartments were available for us and later for some other missionary couples.
We had two bedrooms, a bathroom with different shades of dark blue for the sink and toilet; also the tile on the walls was turquoise. Very colorful. The kitchen had a marble counter. No hot water; it had to be heated for dishes. We had a washer and dryer which I appreciated but I had to wash with cold water the whole time we were there. My stove used a propane tank and was quite small, it looked like it belonged in a doll house. We also had a refrigerator. There was another bedroom and small bath (which we never used) which would have been the maid’s quarters. We had a large water bottle which we kept filled at the temple complex where a well of pure water was located. The apartment was like low class student housing but we were happy to be in it. All fresh vegetables had to be soaked in a special solution before we could eat them.
We did have hot water for showering. Every night, when we got back from the office, we would turn on the fuse that the water heater for the shower used so I had hot water for my nightly shower. We would turn it off when we went to bed and by morning the water was still hot enough for Leon to shower. We didn’t dare leave it turned on all day, the water just kept getting hotter and hotter and we were afraid it would explode!