Dear
family and friends,
I said it´d be a bomb week, and it was. I wasn´t sick this week
which obviously helped a lot. We got right to work. We made a list of all the
people that we needed to visit that we were going to visit that last week.
We put the week off to a good start with our interviews with
president Tavares Tuesday morning. It ran well, it´s always nice to sit down
and chat with president for a bit. He congratulated our hard work in Costa da
Caparica, we´ve practically resurrected the area. I also chatted with Sister
Tavares for a bit, she told me that when she and her husband first saw me
arriving in the airport with my MTC group she commented to president "That
big readhead is going to be a lot of work or he´s going to be great." I
thought that was funny.
It was a bit of travelling though, we had catch a bus and a train
and another bus to get there.
Let´s
talk about the people that we worked with this week.
A couple weeks back in Costa we chatted with a 25ish yo woman from
Cabo Verde. Her name was a mouthful: Adalgiza (Ah-dal-JEE-zuh). She was a bit
sassy, said stuff like "oh, I already know who you guys are, nah, I
already know about your message" (90% of the time people actually don´t
know). So we kept her address and her number and we called her back later (this
last week). We marked for that afternoon, and funny enough, we got on the bus
to her town and she was already on the bus! So, we followed her to her house
and we met her better and her sister, Indira. We taught the restoration, and
Indira payed a lot of attention and understood well. However, each time
Adalgiza threw out a distracting comment or a doubt, Indira jumped on board.
Even so, we managed to give a good lesson, Indira accepted to read and pray, and
to come to church and prepare to be baptized.
Unfortunately, we didn´t manage to meet up with either of them for
the rest of the week... it happens a lot. Lots of work, unexpected stuff, and
yeah. I find it funny, people tell us in the lessons, "wow, this makes
sense. Yeah, I want to visit your church, that´d mean a lot if all this were
true!" and then they just manage to forget about it all in the unnecessary
business and distractions of life.
Nearly the same thing happened with three other ladies that we
taught the same night. They understood what we taught and everything but then
life just gets everything mixed up. Lot´s of people value our message but not
more that other day to day things.
It was also really funny, one of the ladies that we taught asked
Elder Vigne to marry her and take her to brazil afterwards.... I don´t think
she payed a lot of attention during the lesson haha. I bugged Elder Vigne all
week about it.
We were walking in the street and we saw this african man, about
50, walking down the street with light up shoes... like light up shoes for
adults... We just had to talk to him.
Elder Vigne stopped him and commented about his shoes, and we
started to chat. His name is Joãoa really calm guy, lives alone, from angola.
We told him that we had a message about Christ to share with him, and the next
day we headed over to his house, we were running a little late. We buzzed his
door, but he wasn´t home. A bit bummed, we looked around with that typical
"what now" face on. A little ways off we saw a figure with glowing
feet. We went running behind him and it was João! We explained to him our
tardiness and he had no problem in walking back home for a moment to hear our
message.
We didn´t have much time, but we talked about the Gospel of Jesus
Christ in a simple and short lesson. We invited him to continue meeting with us
to prepare to be baptized as Christ was one day. He accepted.
We came back and taught the restoration. He understood well, and
enjoyed it, he had already seen the effects of the Apostasy in his life. We
invited him to be baptized this next weekend and to come to church. He
accepted. Good.
We worked out a ride for him and he came to church! Turns out that
João is a popular guy! We went around the chapel stopping the members one by
one and pointing saying, "hey, that fella over there is João, he´s
visiting today. Would you mind going and saying hi to him? Thanks"
"oh, João? Heyy, I already know that guy, yeah, that´s João! I´ve seen him
around town a lot/I used to work with him/he knows my cousin/he lives on my
street, etc..." I thought each time "Why didn´t you introduce him to
the missionaries years ago?!" oh well...
João got to chat a bunch with a lot of members, he practically
hypnotized a few toddlers with his shoes. I chatted with him afterwards about
the goal he had made to be baptized as I showed him the baptismal font. He
seemed a bit uneasy, which made me uneasy. Later, I brought it up again and he
said "Elder, it´s not going to work out. I have to visit some relatives on
saturday, I´ll be out of town." "how about sunday" "oh, ok
that works. Yeah, let´s do that!"
We´ll be visiting with him a bunch this week to teach the rest. If
all goes well he´ll be baptized this sunday after church.
Lesson learned (for you guys too): You never know who is ready for
the gospel. It could be that guy you always ride the bus with, it could be your
barber, it could be that guy with light-up shoes that you always pass in the
street. Just thing of a way to bring up the gospel and just make a simple,
simple, invite. What´s the worst that could happen?
A couple weeks back we stopped a teenage girl in the street from
Angola named Carla. She was nice but really shy. She left us with her address,
and we passed by later to see what we could get out of it.
She answered the door and we actually got to teach her with no
problems. She was really nice, she used to go to another church a year or so
ago. She recognizes that she needs to better, to better her relationship with
God. We´ve got the stuff to fix that.
We taught a good lesson about the Plan of Salvation and the Gospel
of Jesus Christ and we showed her what she could do to grow closer to god. She
accepted baptism and to come to church.
We came back the next day, and she gave us some bad news... her
mother doesn´t like us. Wont let her be baptized nor come to church. Every
time.
We taught some more and we cleared up some of Carla´s doubts and
helped her with the steps for her to form a stronger testimony. She prayed in
the end of the lesson and said things like "I hope that these missionaries
can always come back and continue to help me/ Help me to prepare to be baptized
and get to church someday/ Help my mother understand" etc. She was really
open to the gospel, it´s really cool to teach her. We´ll visit on tuesday
(mom´s day off) to try to talk to her. We´re going to bring our secret weapon —
american cookies.
We have a really cool kid in our ward named Marcelo, 16, african.
He likes working with us, teaching with us, etc. So we walked with him for a
day of work, he helped out in the lessons with João and Carla. That night, he
said "hey Elders, you guys want to meet one of my frien—" "YEah,
where does he live?"
He took us to his friend´s house, Cândido, another african fellow,
18. He was a great guy, we taught the restoration and he took it well. Marcelo
bore his testimony. Everything ran well, he accepted to prepare for baptism,
but unfortunately had to babysit sunday, so didn´t make it to church. But even
so, it was a good start. We taught once more last night and worked out some
questions that he had. We´ll be continuing this week.
We stopped a portuguese man named José close to the train station
late one night, and he stopped to listen for us to a bit. I was really
surprised, he was dressed in a suit and briefcase and everything, he was
getting home from a day of work at the bank (you think that he might be rich?),
usually people like him don´t even look at us when we talk to them haha. We
taught him a brief lesson about the restoration, Elder Vigne let me teach
nearly the entire lesson. He commented afterwards "it´s a good thing you
tought most of it, I don´t know how to teach sophisticated people like him,
sometimes they don´t take me seriously because of my slang and my accent."
José enjoyed it. He was intrigued by our always unique news of a
modern prophet. We´ll try to meet up with him once more this week.
A couple weeks back a drunk guy named luís stopped us speaking
sloppy english. We dodged his distracting comments and ended up with his
address. We stopped by later to see if it was worth is and we found him sober
at home and it turns out that he has already investigated the church for a few
years. We had a decent lesson, we´ll give some, but not a lot of attention to
him.
Funny enough, this last week another guy stopped us in the street
and immediately said "elders, come to my house, let´s pray" I thought
"this guy´s gotta be Luís´s brother or something." Lo and behold, he
was! We gave a brief lesson, we´ll see if they follow through with the
"homework" that we left with them.
We found another fellow who lives in the middle of nowhere in our area
book named Carlos. A portuguese man, 50ish, already investigated the church for
a while last year. He wasn´t baptized due to the word of wisdom, but since then
he had stopped drinking, so now we´re working with him to stop smoking too.
He seems to have some potential, we´ll see what happens.
I´m going to wrap it up here. As you see, we had a busy week! I
didn´t even tell you all the details nor all the people that we taught! But we
have high hopes for João, Carla, and Cândido. We´re excited to put in another
week of hard work now.
Ciao,
Elder Ward
AH!
I don´t know if I mentioned this fine man in my emails from Setúbal, but I´ll
review anyways.
This
is Lourenço. He´s catholic, and knows the missionaries for almost 20 years. He
respects, but doesn´t want to join the church, even though he knows so much
about it. (I personally think that he knows that it´s true, he just has some
sort of hesitation... he didn´t let us teach him). Even so, he feeds the
missionaries nearly as much as they please, and enjoys having them over. In
setúbal I ate lunch with him probably about once a week (he fed us more that
the ward! shhh). In such time, we got to know each other. He always throws
little parties when missionaries have birthdays but I was transferred just
before my birthday. In spite of the transfer, he called me and came to Costa da
Caparica with a trunk fool of picnic stuff, food (lots of it) and a cake! He´s
a great guy haha.
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