Dear
family and friends,
Things have picked up the pace a bit this week. Elder Harker and I
have had a good time.
I failed to mention Diego in last week´s email. DIego is actually
doing really well. He had some trouble with family, so he moved out. Because of
this, he has been doing well in resisting his temptations with the word of
wisdom.
He´s renting a room in a little village outside of Faro now. It´s
an hour by foot and about 20m by bike. His bike recently broke, so this week to
meet up with us, after a long day´s work, he walked an hour to the chapel for
us to have a little lesson with him at about 930 a few nights this week. Diego
made it a week without smoking weed the week before this one. He had a fall on
sunday and didn´t make it to church (lots of drama and stuff at home, he had to
move too). However, this sunday he came. Diego works on a farm a ways out.
There he found a chameleon and kept it the night and brought it to church (he
walked to church, mind you, an hour)... he left it in the garden here, it was
pretty cool! Apparently chameleons are a normal animal to find around here. The
whole branch basically saw it, they were pretty impressed.
Diego was tired, but gave his best to pay attention. In gospel
principles, we talked about fasting. After the class he said to us that he
wanted to fast to help in resist temptation to be baptized this saturday. We
gladly obliged. We finished our fast today.
We will meet with Diego a few more times this week and then on
Saturday, if all goes well, he´ll be baptized.
César, our busy businessman made it to church and brought his
8-year old son, Tiago too. Every investigator is really quiet on the first day,
so it was hard to tell but I think that César enjoyed it. He already left for
Lisbon once again, so we will have to wait until next weekend to try to meet up
with him. Hopefully we´ll be able to get him to church again.
This last monday we had a family home evening with a member, Mamá.
I´ve mentioned her once before, basically everyone´s favorite african loving
grandma. We brought an investigator of ours, Susana, to the night. It ran well,
we gave a nice message and Mamá put out some good food. We found Susana in the
street a couple weeks back. She is a middle aged african woman who recently
moved to faro. She was taught by the missionaries in Olhão, a neighboring city.
She has already learned basically everything, and wants to go to church and be
baptized, but she has a lot of work, unfortunately on Sundays too. We will talk
with her more to see what we can work out.
This week we did some traveling and training with the assistants
to the President. We visited Portimão and gave a big training meeting there, it
was a good time and a great learning opportunity for me as well as the other
missionaries. We also visited with another district from Loulé. It´s been
really great working with the zone. I enjoy it a lot. Funny enough, in our zone
is a very "young" zone. We have 26 missionaries and not one has more
time than me in the mission. It´s awfully strange. I feel like I just got here.
After that meeting in Loulé, I passed a division with Elder Leal,
a brazilian missionary who is relatively new. He is working in the area where
Elder Jan and I used to work last winter. Things are going well there. It was a
good time, I got to know Elder Leal a bit and we also got to talk a lot about
the situation of the area, what he could do to continue the work most
effectively. We payed a visit to Emanuela. You may remember her from a while
back, she is doing very well and it was good to see her again. She has a 14
year old daughter, Melissa who is actually a very competitive swimmer (she´s
going to nationals this next week, very competitive). Melissa never got to know
the church, and has only seen the missionaries a few times. To save time, I
will say that it´s a very complicated situation right now. Emanuela is still
passing through some health recuperation, and she will also travel soon. Her
ex-husband doesn´t give any ground when it comes to religion, so to help
melissa be baptized will be a process.
We had a really cool lesson. We read the start of Enos. We chatted
a bit about the blessings that the gospel brings and we started to talk about
the Holy Ghost. I asked Melissa if she believed that which we were saying and
representing was true second to what she has felt when the missionaries visited
and she said "oh, I know it´s true"
It was a surprising response, I thought she was gonna say
"well I guess so" or something more wishy washy. But see continued
right after by saying "when I visit church with my dad I feel nothing, I
don´t feel anything close to what I´m feeling now."
The church is true, you just gotta pay attention.
Over the next few days in Faro, Elder Harker and I had some good
success. We taught a few new folks and had a good time. I would say more if I
had time about each one, but for now I will have to wrap it up.
Take
care everybody,
Elder
Ward
Sorry,
only a single photo this week... no, this isn´t the chameleon, but another
little guy I found behind the doorhinge before church started.
Ah,
Basílio is actually doing really well! He came out to a branch activity this
week, washed his shirt and all that good stuff. Ivanilson is still super busy,
but luckily made it to sacrament meeting at least this week.
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