Pau dos Ferros: Week 5

Dear family,
I realize I haven´t sent any pictures of the house that I live in or our daily routine. So here are a few pictures that show a little more about what our life is like here in the interior:

This is our home, sweet home. It´s a little small I guess, but it works for us. The open windows and dirt floors are a little different than I´m used to, but it´s no big deal.

The only water source is about a mile away. This used to be a river but it has dried up in the past several years.
It´s kind of a long process, but this is how we bring the water to our house:

We have a wood burning stove, but we have to conserve the hot coals in order to iron our clothes with this iron:

Here are some of the tools we use on a day to day basis

Haha, I thought it would be funny to send a couple of joke emails. Our house is quite a bit nicer than that and the water situation isn´t that desperate.
We had one of our friends take us to the old dam this morning to show us around. There is a historic house there that had some fun stuff in it. She said that in 2008, the dam was full. The name of the lady that took us around is Ivoneide. She is super nice and has been friends with the missionaries since the last set of missionaries that met her. She´s not a member, but she lives close to us and we always go to her family´s house a couple of times a week. We have lunch at her house on P-days and she conveniently has 4 laptops that she lets us use internet on. The deal is that she cooks and we wash the dishes. So this morning she took us on that little field trip, and she has a couple of other places in mind that she wants to take us to in the future!

I also took a picture of the city center this morning

A catholic church is in the center of almost any interior city.


This week was a good one. Things in the group are running really well. The members are helping a lot and going above and beyond to help the members (mainly the youth). Here is a picture of Daniel, one of the young men that was baptized a few months ago who helps us a lot.

He said that he didn´t come to church in his white shirt because his house was out of water and they couldn't wash it.


We were happy to finish off the week with the baptisms of 3 youth. We had been working with the two girls for a while and they finally decided that they wanted to be baptized!

On Sunday night we had a good family home evening with a recent-convert family and a family that they had given us a referral of. We watched the restoration film, played some games and had dinner.


My companion, Elder Andrade has been great. We have been working hard and having fun together this transfer. We have also been having fun with the other 2 in our house. We all come home every night and make something to eat. We play games sometimes and drink a lot of cajuina- it´s a soda that they only sell in the northeast- kind of like guarana but it´s made from the cashew fruit. Cajuina and guarana are two of my favorite drinks here. The members always make lots of fruit juices too.


Well things are continuing to go well here. I´ll finally hit the 1 year mark this week! I think about you all and miss you a lot. I wish I could be at the family reunion this week. Have lots of fun!


Elder Church