Dear
family and friends,
Our second week in Costa da Caparica just passed. We have explored
and gotten to know our area much better. It´s been running well. I´m getting
along really well with Elder Vigne, we´re both getting a lot of work done here.
So we´ve been doing the bread and butter of missionary work
lately. We´ve been filtering through our anorexic area book to find direction
in what we´ll do and where we´ll go throughout the day, and when things fall
through, we improvise with street contacts, door knocking, etc. It has worked
well, fortunately, a handful of people this week that we found in the street or
by other methods let us in to share our message.
We visited Márcio once more this week, but he´s been awfully busy.
He works for a large broadcasting business in Brazil and received a big
project. He´s a fault-finder, basically. He observes for hours and hours the
same 30s commercial to make sure that there weren´t any CG errors... He
examines every shadow, frame, it´s really deep. So, he didn´t have time to have
us teach for very long, but he said that he´d surely try to come to church. He
still desires to be baptized. However, it looks like his week was just too
busy.. we havent heard from him and he didn´t make it to church.
But, like I said, we found some other cool people. For example, as
we were searching for an investigator from a few years back we simply started
to chat with this guy, bruno, +/-22, from Cabo Verde in the entrance of the
building. He lived right there and we marked to come back. He said that he had
been interested in finding a religion.
We came back the next day to teach and we had a really good
lesson. We taught him the restoration with really opened his eyes and helped
him understand what he could do to find the solution to his search. He came to
church (he lives a bit far away but he drove to church, which is rare!) and
really enjoyed it. We taught him the plan of salvation there and he soaked it
all up. He will travel to france for 2-3 weeks to visit his family, but we´ll pounce
again as soon as he gets back, we kept his email to stay in touch.
Like last week, we found a bunch of people from old records in our
area book, but due to the lack of missionaries here for a time they too lost
interest... but even so we´re manageing to find new people to teach.
I didn´t mention it last week, but last sunday I played the role
of translator! It´s been a while haha. A south african lady named Neo came to
church. I chatted with her a bit and learned a bit about her, but also learned
that she was passing through a tough time in her life, and that basically she
was trying to re-activate herself in the church. So, I took advantage of the
opportunity of translation to teach too haha. She had revealed some
necessities, and as people were giving their talks or teaching the lessons I
may have changed the subject a bit to help her understand which gospel
principles she could apply to confront her difficulties.
She said that she was living with some people who gave her a ride
to church so we invited her to bring those same people with her this week but
unfortunately she didn´t make it... but it was an interesting experience.
Speaking of english, in language study I´ve been teaching Elder
Vigne English. He´s certainly a beginner. As I teach him I realize more and
more just how ridiculous the english language is... summarizing, I would say
that english is a very disobedient language... It´s amusingly frustrating
sometimes because I have to explain to Elder Vigne that a sentance is
structured a certain way, but I sometimes genuinely don´t know why, its just
the way it is... I´m grateful that I learned english growing up, it´d be so
annoying to learn as a second language.
I
think that´s it for now. Sorry, not a lot of news. We´re working hard here and
we´re enjoying it. It´s great being able to focus in my area and my companion,
and most importantly my relationship with the savior, and nothing more. Please
take the time to forget the world and focus on what really keeps you living.
Tchauzinho,
vá,
Elder
Ward
I´ll
give you guys a treat. A series of phrases and expressions that Elder Vigne, a
true Gaúcho uses in his part of brazil- (I´ve got a list)
—"Tou
mais perdido que uma cebola numa salada de fruta"
"I´m
more lost than an onion in a fruit salad"
—"Este
é o pulo do gato"
"This
is the cat´s jump", meaning "this is the secret"
—"O
pato tá morto"
"The
duck is dead" meaning, "the job is done"
—"Porque
eu sou um bixo solto!"
"Because
I´m a loose critter!" aka because I´m unpredictable. He always says it
before doing something really out of the ordinary or funny.
A view from our area.
Elder Vigne doesn´t run much, especially during
our day to day work, but he ran to see the new sandwich in McDonalds.
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