Ola´ Momma!
As always, thank you very much for your letters. They are a highlight of my week because I love to hear how you are doing! Life for sure is crazy busy, but as long as we make time for the most important stuff first everything else usually falls into place. I´m really glad to hear that Sharon is doing better is school and activities and such! I bet she´ll do just great here is school. That’s so great that Larry’s job is going really well too! I´m glad that the Lord is blessing our family so much. Tell them hello for me! As far as my address here in the mission, I think it is best to just send everything to the mission office. The Assistants distribute all the mail about once a month, and it takes like 3 weeks to get here so it’s probably just better to do that so you don´t have to worry about transfers and stuff. I think that I´ll probably be here is Cambe´ for quite awhile though since it’s my first area and we are opening it up again. One thing I would actually really like is if you could e-mail me 3 or 4 recipes for cooking that are pretty easy to make. The meal schedule here is very different and I find myself rather hungry all the time. Here in Brazil lunch is the main huge meal and it we usually have like raman for breakfast and nothing for dinner. It’s just not important here... except to me haha! Anyhow that´d be great. So to answer all your questions (please keep asking them because it makes it easier to write about stuff):
This week in Cambe´ has been good but also really tough. We are having a real time finding new people to teach, but God has blessed us with some great families. Also, Poor Elder De Souza got really sick this week. He had a fever of 104 and we had to stay in the house for a little while. He is getting much better, but you could definitely pray for him. I´m sure he wouldn´t mind letters either :) (by the way I hope postage isn’t too expensive for you. Feel free to take it easy on sending stuff...) I actually am not feeling homesick at all other than I do miss you and Sharon. I am content to be here and having a good time. The only problem is that I really just don’t know what the heck is going on most of the time because of the whole Portuguese thing and I feel a little useless sometimes, but I keep praying that it will come. The hardest thing is street contacts because people all have different accents and talk about the most random stuff ever. From what I gather it is reasonably safe to send stuff to brazil, but there is still risk involved. I probably just wouldn’t send anything you would be sad about losing is all. And tell me if you do so will know if it comes. We have a fairly strong Ward here in Cambe´, but also lots of less-actives. This week we are going to work with teaching more of them. We are having a stake conference soon that we are trying to get 300 investigators to so I pray that all that will go well! Cambe pretty much is a suburb of Londrina. The people here are fairly middle class and very kind. The members feed us great Almoços {lunches}. Most people here seem to work some kind of retail or construction. Guilharme is doing fantastic! We had a huge fiasco organizing his baptism because Elder de Souza was sick and there was another meeting scheduled the same time and we almost had to cancel it, but he showed forth an amazing amount of faith and said that he wanted to be baptized regardless of the problems so we punched it back a little and he was baptized last Saturday! I had the honor of giving him the Holy Ghost which was absolutely terrifying in Portuguese, but everything worked out well and he was so happy afterwards. He is a great kid. We have possibly another baptism this Saturday with a boy named Renan, but we´ll see on that one. Other than that we have 3 more lined up for the middle of November. Two of them need to quit smoking, so it will be a journey, but I know with God’s help that anything is possible. The work is going great besides our difficulties! This week I have a feeling will be super great. We also walk a ton. I´ve got some pretty blisters on me toesies, but they are healing up just fine and pretty soon I´ll just have feet of iron. Summary: Brazil is great. a good story this week is that the boy Renan was having lots of doubts about being baptized because his parents aren´t married and he wanted to wait to be baptized with them, but we felt inspired to talk to him about the blessings of the Aaronic priesthood (he is 14) that he will receive and then to read Alma 18 with him about the desires of our hearts and being baptized. Now he is excited and he loves to ask me about American Movies and Video games and Yogi-Oh cards. Also It was funny at the baptism because before the service one of the leaders in our ward (like 35 yrs old) got on the organ and started playing all these heavy metal songs like Iron man and stuff. Nobody else even knows the songs and I just have to smile and laugh. Well I had better go. We use e-mail in an internet cafe and I´m tired of typing :)
Love Elder Markham
No comments:
Post a Comment