Bauru March 28, 2011

Momma! Bom dia!

As always, thank you very much for your letters! I´ll write in English again this week cuz it’s a lot easier! So anyhow, thank you for all the updates and stuff. I´m glad you are staying busy and keeping happy and it sounds like things are going well! To answer a few questions, ´legal´ basically means cool. I don’t remember if that high school (Westlake) was built yet. Yeah, I heard about the colors festival thing. Basically you just get lots of chalk in your eyes. I´m glad Sharon had fun there!

Man, time is really flying here. I still feel super new in Bauru, but we only have 2 weeks left in this transfer! I´ll probably stay, but that still means I´ve been here a month! So, yeah we spend a lot of time in divisions because Elder Crosbie gets to go help out other missionaries. Usually 2 days a week I am with other Elders and also if they have an interview to do or something. It’s cool to change things up, but sometimes it’s a little hard to remember everything! Our zone here is having a little bit of troubles right now, but I´m sure things will pick up. I just wanted to share a cool story that happened the other day. I was feeling pretty bummed out and frustrated (it happens). You know how I can be pretty hard on myself sometimes, but anyways we went to district meeting and I got a letter from one of my friends and at the end it just had a random last paragraph that said, “don’t ever waste time thinking negatively about yourself”. I really made me feel better and I thought it was really cool that God really cares for us. He inspired this person probably like a month ago to write something nice in a letter that took forever to pass through the Brazilian mail system to arrive on the very day that I was feeling down. Coincidence? I think not!

So, this week was cool, primarily because we had a BAPTISM! Yeah! The picture I sent is of a girl named Maria Eduarda. She had already been to church a few times and she has relatives that are members. She was so ready and excited to live the commandments and it was super super cool. She was baptized by the bishop of our ward and it was super spiritual. There is another girl named Jessica that will probably be baptized this coming week. We are trying a lot to work with the members here in the ward because it is really a much more effective way to find people, but it can get kind of complicated as well. Working with members always goes a lot slower than ideal. Do you have any good ideas about how to help them?

This week we found a really cool guy named Ricardo. I was in a division with Elder Neal and we got lost and missed our appointment and we were both pretty grumpy, but then we knocked on this door and found Ricardo. He had a weird thing where one day he just woke up almost completely blind and the doctors don’t know why. Anyway we taught him and he loved it and went to church and really liked it and agreed to be baptized! Wahoo! Way to go spirit. That day was great. The Zone leaders had left us to go to a meeting and accidentally took both cell phones AND both sets of keys to the house! Then they were late getting back and Elder Neal and I were sitting out in front of our house until like 10:30. IT was pretty funny and it would have been a cool story if we´d had to sleep out on the street. Haha! The other good thing is that we are all waking up invigorated and alert in the mornings now. This is because our shower heater broke and we have to brave the Antarctic flows to not smell bad. The mission is seriously just awesome. I know that this really is the work of the Lord. Thank you for all of the love and support and prayers. I really appreciate it. Tell the home teachers thank you too. I am so glad you are being cared for. I know God lives and Jesus is the Christ. Just think! Next week we will get to hear the prophet of the Lord! Yeah!
Até logo!
-Elder Markham

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