This week was awesome! We´ve been teaching a lady named E_____, and she was baptized on Sunday! It was an awesome experience. It was the first baptism I´ve actually had the opportunity of being at here in Brazil. I was just thinking of how all of the Elders felt, showing up into an area and having like 8 baptisms waiting for them. Well now I know! We still taught E_____ everything just to refresh her mind, but it was way cool. Her husband was inactive for years, and they were living together for a while too. He cleaned his life up, they got married, and he got to baptize her! It was way cool.
Our area is picking up nicely. We had basically nothing to work with when we got here. The other elders left only 2 names in the area book, without the addresses of the people, but the work in this ward is picking up nicely now! It´s cool to see the work progress like it is.
The assistants called us this week and told us we need to look for a new house. The elders that we live with have 2 wards, and we have 2 also. But next transfer they will be putting one companionship in all four wards. That has been one of our priorities this week. They want us to have a house, and everything straightened out by the end of next week. So maybe this time next week we´ll be living in a new house!
One of our wards has just called a bunch of new ward missionaries, and they are all pretty young. They are starting a little thing, where every Sunday they will go visit all of the in-active members of the church. They all were wondering what they could do when they got to the house. And our ward mission leader told them that we could have a class on it! So, Sunday night we set up a class, Me and Elder B____ taught it, of how they can teach. We gave everyone the pamphlets and taught them how to use them, and we had everyone practice teaching the first lesson with each other. It was awesome, kind of like a mission prep class. Most of them are like ages 14-18 and preparing for missions anyways, so it was perfect.
Saturday night the bishop stopped us in the street and asked us to talk in church the next day. Of course we said we would, so when we got home that night we prepared a little bit and talked Sunday. Both of us talked about missionary work, and the people in the ward liked them so much, they gave us a couple of references after sacrament meeting. (which is pretty rare here)
Today we went to a college here in Fortaleza for my companion to take a Portuguese test. They wanted to see how the missionaries speak. They were all impressed, that we all have different amounts of time here and that we are all speaking so well, with basically just learning on the street! I wasn't scheduled to take the test, because I don't have a ton of time here on the mission, but when we got there, they said I could take it too. We don't know how we did, but it was still pretty cool!
The other night we were walking home from ending another exchange that we did, we walked passed this little restaurant and we heard all of this yelling! Some girls stopped us and told us to go in and they would buy us food! We quickly found out that they´re members of our ward. Funny because I´ve never seen them before. But we set up a family home evening with one of their friends that is not a member. She´s gone to church a few times, likes it, she just needs to be taught!! We´ll be going over there tonight and we´ll see how it goes!
We might be having another baptism of an 18 year old boy. He´s kind of sketchy, but we´ll see if he really wants this. He´s super cool, just not very educated and forgets a lot.
Sounds like everything back home is awesome!! Everything is great here too! Have a great week!!
:) -Elder Kyler Blane Farr
