Pau dos Ferros: Week 3

Interior Zone Conference

Well another week passed by quickly here. We´re working hard here and the time goes by quickly! We spend our whole week focusing on possible baptisms forsaturday. We follow up with all of our investigators throughout the week, finish teaching what we need to on Wednesday and Thursday, do the interview on Friday, baptize on Saturday, and confirm on Sunday. Unfortunately, a couple of the baptisms we had marked fell through, but we were able to baptize one young womanon Saturday. Our house is fun because the four of us are good friends and are united. We still haven´t really divided the area, so both of the sets are working a lot in one neighborhood.

We had a fun ward integration night on thursday where we played some games. One of the games was one that I had remembered from home. But from a long time ago- the thimble game. One person thinks of a certain thing in a certain category, and if anyone guesses it, they get splashed with water. But with us, the splash of water quickly turned into a full cup of water being dumped on someone haha. We always start with a spiritual part and then play some games or do some sort of activity. I wish the other member families would come, but usually it's just the family of the group leader and all of the recent converts. But they are a lot of fun. On sunday we had a good turnout at church, too.

Finally we have a little break here of not having to travel all the time. The trips in the last few weeks used up a lot of our time and money. But pretty soon the reimbursements from the mission will come back!

Yesterday, Elder Solorzano got a visit from a member in Natal- an older sister who really liked him. I also met her when I was his companion in her ward. Anyway, she drove all the way to us on sunday (5 hours by car) just to see him and to bring us food, haha.

In the past couple of weeks we have been working with one of our recent converts, Cristiane. She is a single mom of 3 little kids. When she was preparing to get baptized, she had several friends and family members tell her that she shouldn´t, and a few of them told her rumors about the church that were completely untrue. Thankfully she has learned not to listen to bad influences and to follow her true feelings. After her baptism, one or two of her friends stopped going to her house, but she wasn´t sad about it because she realized they weren´t the best friends anyway.

Mom, thanks for the quotes and scriptures that you sent. They are really helpful to me right now. I also downloaded and listened to the two conversations you told me about on the Mormon Channel with Elder Bednar about teaching. I really enjoyed them. I have been thinking a lot more about how to ask good questions in teaching and how to help people act for themselves as agents and not be acted upon. I liked the story about how Elder Bednar helped a difficult child--persistence, patience, and quit acting upon them and let them act. I hope your summer family scripture study continues to be a success.

Well I love it here, but I still think about home a lot and I miss you all!
I hope you all have a great week!

Elder Church