6 March 2017 Viagens

Dear family and friends,

Well, I think it´s gonna be an email a bit shorter this week. Lot´s happened, but not a lot of cool stuff happened, if you get me.

So to work out the transfers, we just had to drive down to Faro with my stuff, drop me off with Elder Kampff, who had already arrived there by bus, and just go to our apartment there. It was pretty simple. Elder Jan picked up his new companion and a couple other missionaries who were arriving in our region and they went back up to Loulé.

I forgot to mention in the last email, but I will be serving as a Zone Leader here with Elder Kampff. We are responsible for helping all of the missionaries of the Algarve have success. We also help in some training meetings, we organize stuff, stuff like that. Because of this calling, we were invited to Mission council, so after arriving in Faro, we had to catch a bus the next day and travel 4 hours to Lisbon (the second time this week for Elder Kampff). We travelled at night and we spent the night there. We had a big meeting with all the other mission leaders and with President Tavares. It was a really good meeting, lots of stuff learned. We then had to stay there for another day waiting because Elder Kampff had to renew his residency... so as a result we lost a ton of time this week in travels, transfers, and meetings. Kinda annoying.

But rewinding a bit, we had a bus at 5pm for lisbon. We were in faro, and a guy who met the other Elders just a few days before wanted to meet up with us. The chapel literally is a stones throw from our apartment, so we obliged and headed down to meet up with him. His name is Stefan, and he´s romanian, but speaks portuguese very well, a nice man. We showed him the chapel and we started teaching the restoration. We were about to tell him about the first vision when I looked at my watch and saw 4:45pm and the bus station is 20 minutes by foot away. Darn.

I said to myself "this has gotta be quick" so I started explaining "so Heavenly father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith" and I showed him a photo. He then looked confused and we found out that due to orthodox background he doesn´t understand the 3 seperate beings part...

anyways we cut it short and ended up grabbing our suitcases and running to the nearest location to catch a taxi... we did so and caught the bus the moment it was leaving, late, at 5:08 haha.

Anyways this guy, Stefan, is actually pretty cool. He came to church this sunday and enjoyed it. We will be talking more with him this week. But the whole chaos part was kinda funny in retrospect.

Anyways it felt like our work didnt really start here in Faro until Saturday due to all the delays and travels... really annoying, we basically lost a week of work here.Anyways we got up on Saturday and we spent a few hours looking at maps, lists, the area book, trying to get our heads on strait to start off our transfer here in this whitewash. We got to know Faro a bit, visited some folks, lots of normal stuff.

Also, Elder Jan is a District Leader now, so I get to talk with him a lot to follow up with the progress of the areas there... good stuff, I like Elder Jan a lot and we still get to keep in good contact. We will likely pass our pdays together a lot. Ive heard that the area is going well there. Alice was sick again, so her baptism will be planned for a later date, but no big deal, she will be baptized anyways. Emanuela was sick too, so didnt make it to church, and Amadis and Alvaro were caught up in work... but that kinda stuff always happens. Certainly there will be quite a bit of success there soon.

But yeah, we went to church yesterday and it ran pretty well. The branch president here is pretty cool and seems to have a pretty good grip on things. There are quite a handfull of good strong members here, lots of youth too, so things should run well. We have a lot of plans to work with them a lot in our time here.

So, weve got a lot of work to do here in Faro. We still havent really planted our feet, but we shall see how it goes!

Tchauzinho,

Elder Ward