Rio Branco: Week 16

This is from the conference we had with all of the missionaries in the capital

Dear family,

When I get home and see our living room I´ll probably feel like i´m in the wrong house! It looks great though. That´s great that Melayna spent the weekend with you guys.

Yes, I had several favorite talks too. The other conference sessions on the mission I had watched in English, but this April conference we didn´t go to the stake center- it was just in our ward´s chapel so it wasn´t worth setting up a separate room with English. Plus it was just me and the 3 other Brazilian elders that live with me. This was also the first time I was able to watch the priesthood session on the mission because it usually doesn´t work out with our schedule. I love how lots of the speakers talked on the theme of temples and/or the work of salvation. I am always uplifted by the stories of apostles that receive promptings from the spirit, follow them, and end up answering someone´s prayer. I want to be able to listen to the spirit better and be an instrument in the Lord´s hands. The Prophet´s message was short and clear. I am grateful that twice a year we are able to have these conferences that teach us and help us feel what we can improve on.

Mom, I was thinking about you on April Fool's day and wondering what prank you would come up with this year! That was a pretty good one, haha. We also had a little fun here and switched 2 of the elders´ things around when they left the house.

Yes, I was able to sign up for BYU classes. I also started to sign up for Alta Housing but I´m not sure if my request went through yet.

This week I stayed in the area. One of the highlights of this week was teaching an 80 year-old woman that I think I had mentioned before. It´s cool to have the experience of teaching someone in a nice apt building with a view of the whole city and the beach. She has 2 maids in her house. She is a member´s mom but she lives alone. Her daughter has a neat story of how she was baptized. She was living in Barçelona, Spain for work and met the sisters. They started teaching her family and after a month, the mission president who was Shayne Bowen at the time (he gave the closing prayer in the last session of conference) invited her to be baptized. She was baptized and later moved back to Brazil. Her mom was living in Brazil and never had contact with the church. Throughout the years, she had always talked to her mom about the church but her mom never had a whole lot of interest. They are a very prominent family of lawyers in Natal. So we spent a couple of hours with her mom on thursday afternoon! I loved hearing some of her stories about how she studied in Rio de Janeiro, Portugal, France, Canada, and Maine. She helped a lot with women´s rights in Brazil in the 1960s. She is so nice and humble. She reminds me of Grandma Lowe because of her hair and blue eyes. She´s also very intelligent and healthy. I´ll take a picture with her some time. But we were able to teach her the message of the restauration and she commented after that she felt the spirit. We will keep working with her and plan on teaching the Plan of Salvation next. Her husband died 4 years ago. After the lesson she called her driver and had him pick us up and take us to our next appointment in another neighborhood. She treats us so well and the driver said that he really admires her and that she treats all of her employees really well.

Today we will spend the rest of the time preparing for our mission council tomorrow.
Have a great week! Love you all,

Elder Church