Mossoro: Week 3

Well we´ve been working pretty hard here! We are working with lots of people and we have been trying to double the weekly mission standard of lessons/people in church, etc. The people here are very receptive. It´s very easy to find people who will listen to a message, invite us into their house, etc. But the harder part is finding people that will go to church on Sunday. We have lots of people who say they will go to church during the week, but then Sunday morning comes and they don´t end up going! We always get up early on Sunday morning to go to peoples houses and walk to church with them. But sometimes more than half of them that said they would go end up not being able to, or they make up some kind of excuse. But in these 3 weeks in this area we have been able to have 7 or more investigators in church every week!
Unfortunately our baptism yesterday ended up falling through. Her name is Cleide, she is about 40 years old, and she is a part of a family that we have been working with ever since we got here. She lives with her brother, mom, and daughter. We were able to baptize their mom a couple of weeks ago, and both she and her brother want to be baptized too. She had stopped smoking and was ready to be baptized yesterday but she travelled at the last minute. Her brother, Claudio really wants to be baptized but unfortunately he is alcoholic. But he´s a super nice person that wouldn´t harm anyone. His alcohol addiction has just become stronger than him. It was so serious that he went to the hospital last week. He actually stopped drinkng for a few days, but he went back. He is super funny though and he always says funny things that we laugh about later, haha. For example, he tells us everytime we go there that he wants to be baptized on sunday and he gets mad that we haven´t baptized him yet because he´s already been to church a few times. Haha. We will help him though.
The members are great here and lots of them are converts within the last few years. I like the elders a lot in the house that I live in. Elder Juma is super funny. He has lots of stories from Mozambique. The sun here is super hot, and i´ve been starting to use sunscreen. Today I will go to Natal for a mission council but we´ll come back tomorrow.
I´m loving it here and this area is one of my favorites for sure. The church is growing quickly. I haven´t been taking a whole lot of pictures here, but I´ll send a couple of the ones that I have.

1. Maria, the mom of the family I mentioned. Elder Bento was nervous about baptizing her because she only has one arm!

2. The four elders in this ward, a couple of members. The man in the green in the middle is a man that the others baptized yesterday and the others are his family that came to watch his baptism! It was a really cool baptismal service.