Among the Gaúchos: Baptism Party

Letter from 3/24/14

First off, my address here in Santa Maria is: Caixa Postal 0339 Centro-Santa Maria-RS 98900-970

I hope that’s all right with the spaces and all but that is all the right letters. (Question- do you need anything?) Stuff: deodorant, they don’t have just the normal deodorant here, like they do in the US, its super odd and I would rather just have good old US deodorant. Sunscreen, the sunscreen here in Brazil isn’t the same either it is like way oilier. I still have a good amount that I came out with but by the time you send it and it gets to me I just want to make sure I’ve got it. Also silver sharpies, the flag I have eats through the sharpie fast so a couple more would be great. Also the other elders tell me that you always mark the value of the package lower than it is or you get fined a good amount if it’s over 30 dollars with taxes or something.

Alright, so this week we got a bunch of rain. Like past Sunday night we got totally poured on, thank heavens we had our umbrellas! Then it was just totally overcast and rained on and off forever and we didn’t see the sun again until Thursday. So Wednesday we had lunch with this family and they have a little boy named Vítor who reminded me of a 6 year old Tanner, haha. It was funny we played with clay together and I made a little elefante (ele-fan-chee) and he kept trying to make it cocó (koh-kOH), oh little boy humor haha. So this week with our pesquisador (pes-key-suh-door) Mateus we were going to pass by his house and teach a lesson and invite him to be baptized on the 29th this upcoming Saturday but we got there and it looked like he had visitors and it was really late and we didn’t know if we should go home or what so I said lets say a prayer to know what to do. Not 10 seconds after the prayer we get a phone call from one of the mission secretaries who said (translated and shortened obviously) `yall have a pesquisador named Mateus who wants to be baptized right? Yea you guys should talk to him to set a date for baptism as soon as possible.´ and we were just like no way! So we went up to the house and as it turns out his house was the one behind the front house. weird thing here in RS is there are like 2 rows of houses everywhere and you have to walk in the gate of the first house then a path around or through it to get ot a totally different house behind weird. Anyway his house was behind and he didn’t have visitors so we were worried for nothing and more craziness, so he has friends at the other chapel where they hold institute so he has been going there to church and he already set up a date for baptism pretty much himself with the other bishop for the 22nd which was like 2 days away then, and so we were like AWESOME! Due to logistics though considering our bishop hadn’t met him yet we changed the date back to the 29th but its all good and he is super excited and came to church on Sunday and met our Bishop and everything is in place it is pretty cool. I feel like I’ve done nothing though haha because I feel like he was ready from the time we met him and he was already prepared but the other elders say that is way normal and its like that with a lot of investigators, cool.

But the other dupla (doo-pluh) still had a baptism this Saturday too! so on Friday we went to clean the baptismal font at the church and the power was out so we had to scoop it out by buckets and dump the water into toilets and of course I didn’t bring a change of clothes- fun- I have pictures. Then our lunch fell through so we went and got pizza which was great and the guy tossed it in front of us and every thing, and we got ice cream, so it was like a party for getting out baptisms, haha.

2 months this past week on the mission crazy! Happy Birthday to all the family back home, Uncle Patrick, Gitta, Cameron, Julie and Tanner! (sorry if I’m forgetting anyone) I’m going to skip ahead in pictures and send you this week then when I’ve got time go back send all the others.

Love you all so much!!! Thank you for all the emails and love and Ill try to get back to everyone just give it a week or 2... or 3 haha Love ya!