Thank you so much for your letter! It was so great to hear how you are and also a little about my friends. I´m glad that they are all doing so super well. This letter will be short because the computer froze up really bad and now I´m running out of time to type a lot!
First, all your packages got here this week. Thank you so much they are SUPER! I hope mine gets to you guys eventually.
So to answer your questions: Elder Lee is an American from Sandy, UT. He was Elder De Souza´s old comp and now he took Elder De Souza’s place and LZ here. He thinks he is just following him! Elder De Souza is a Zone leader now. He has 6 in his family and he is really nice and we get along super good. It’s good to be able to understand each other again! Our Zone is pretty big. It covers what is Stake Tiradentes. Maybe you look that up on the church website. It takes in a lot of Londrina. Yes we have 4 sisters in our zone. There are actually like 120 missionaries in our entire mission. Everybody here definitely loves futeball and they play it all the time and everywhere.
So this week has been interesting. We have been working a lot with the ward and they have called a new Mission Leader which is cool. I really like the guy. Last Monday night we taught a girl (18 years old) named Stela and she accepted to be baptized and received an answer about the Book of Mormon and is way cool, only that her parents are kind of anti and she doesn’t want to betray their trust. We will teach her parents this week. Please pray for us and them so that they can let her be baptized. Cícero is having some problems too. He stopped smoking completely which is awesome, but he told us that he thinks he was healed by a TV pastor and wants to get baptized in that church instead. We are working with him and I have confidence he will be baptized, but it might be a little while. Lots of our other people are just not progressing and we need to move on and find new people.
Elder Lee and I set lots of new goals this week to find people. Our president also has asked us to receive 70 references per week which is very difficult, but we are going to do it. We are also going to try to teach 35 lessons this week and use the members a lot. This is going to be a super hard goal, but with faith, prayers and help from the Lord it is possible. Mostly I just want to baptize! It’s been a while now since we baptized anybody. I am determined to redouble my efforts and hope that is enough. I know that this church is so true. I know God lives and Jesus is the Christ. I hope that I am out here making a difference and helping people know this truth as well. We have a living prophet and the true priesthood and all the blessings God can give us as long as we are obedient. I am learning that the work of the Lord takes all that you can give. I want to be a great missionary and serve the Lord with all of my heart. Mom, I love you so much. We have been blessed with so much and the least we can do is give. I will be praying for you every night. Please give Sharon a hug for me. I miss her and you. Please pray for us that this week we can reach our goals and people here can be baptized. I love you so much!
-Elder Markham