Pau dos Ferros: week 2

Two of the baptisms. The man behind the baptismal font is the group leader.

A lunch that was brought by some of the members for after church.

The view from the window of our house

Preach the gospel to every creature, right?

This is a donkey that one of the members owns

And this is the sacrament meeting room that is basically a garage. It looks small, but we have lots more chairs to put in the back to fit more people. Upstairs are the classrooms;

here´s another picture of the view.

Yep, this new area is pretty awesome. Yesterday there were 64 people in church but several of them were leaders from Sousa and their families that came to visit. The group should become a branch soon, we are just waiting on the papers to come back. But there is also a shortage of priesthood in the group which is necessary for real growth.


The mission conference was great. We had to travel to Sousa the evening before and then wake up at 3am to get on the bus to Caicó. We had to spend a lot of money to get there and I was really tired during the conference, but besides that it went well. Elder Mazzagardi gave a lot of instruction about how we can work better.


Water came last week and it lasted us for a while, so it wasn´t as hard. Being in this area is a lot of fun because the members are unified with the missionaries. We are always in charge of doing an integration night on thursdays. Our only responsibilities on Sundays are to teach gospel principles and to help with the sacrament.


I love the people in this area, and we have been finding a lot of success in certain parts of town. Between the two sets of missionaries, we have had several baptisms in past two weeks. One of our baptisms has quite a story- she was having doubts about getting baptized all throughout the week. She was having friends tell her things and letting negative thoughts get in her head. We stopped by her house every day of the week, and a few times she said she was almost giving up on getting baptized. So we had to talk her through it. When we got there on Saturday she was wanting to put off her baptism for another time, but we talked her through it for about an hour. Then she was finally ready. But the problem was that she lives far away from the church and we had to find her a ride. We didn´t have a cellphone with us, so we had to knock on a few doors until someone let us use theirs. But it worked out!
On the next P-day I want to go some cool place. there are lots of hills (pretty much mountains) near the city. There´s also a dinosaur park in Souza- 2 hours away, but maybe it´s worth going to sometime.


Oh yeah, there was other good news this week. The mission hit the record for baptisms in one month. The old record was 245 and yesterday we closed the month off with 246! So those are a few things that happened this week. We´re working so hard here that it doesn´t give me time to think about home a lot. But I do miss it for sure. I´m getting close to one year though!


Love you all,


Elder Church