Cambe November 1, 2010

November 1, 2010
Ola! As always it is an immense please to hear from you! This week has been really good. Guilharme is doing well and we are now beginning to teach his parents. His Mom says she knows the church is true, she is just having difficulty leaving her old church, but I know that right will prevail! I'm not actually sure exactly how many missionaries are here in our stake, but all the members here are being asked to bring someone too. The church is providing these really nice remembrance packets for investigators who come with finding faith in Christ and pictures of the temple and stuff. It should be really awesome! Thank you for your recipes too! Yeah, I´ve already found out about the milk situation and all that and actually it’s pretty easy to get whatever kind of food we need here. It’s really not all that different than the USA as far as food goes. The only difference is that here we have rice and beans every meal. I’ve not had any health problems though! It’s fantastic. Elder De Souza is doing much better now, but this last week we had to stay in our house for 2 days while he got better. Afterwards we got out and trabalhamos ate o pó {worked to the dust} and we reached our lessons goal despite the difficulties! To answer some more of your questions: yes, we use ônibus {bus} all the time to get around! Our area and zone is pretty large and it is nice to have means of transport for district meetings and such. Our district is actually really small. Just Elder De Souza e Eu {and I} and a pair of Sisters. They are cool too. I´ll send pictures. This week is really exiting. We´ve had a lot of progress with a lot of people here in Cambé. Unfortunately, we didn’t baptize Renan this last week but only because of the fact that he had to go out of town this weekend. He will baptize this coming weekend along with another girl named Kareni. She comes from a part member family that we’ve been working a lot with and she had a lot of doubts about being baptized, but we had a great message about our faith and trust in Christ and also her brother who was on a mission already offered to baptize her and helped her out a lot and now she will be baptized this week! Whooo! Another Investigator completely had a miracle and stopped smoking cold in one week flat. We’ve been praying for her a lot and we are confident that she will be baptized soon. We found a bunch of new families to teach and we actually have good prospects of baptizing upwards of 8 or 9 more people this coming November. Please pray for us to reach our goal! The language is still a little hard, and I feel like my teaching is really bad because I don’t really know what I’m saying, but people are still progressing and I know it is the spirit helping out not us. Elder De Souza is way good also.
Our message is really powerful and brings miracles. I remember one lesson really well because we just barely found this new family and we were teaching, and their kids were really loud and crazy, but when we gave the first vision, everything became calm and it was way cool. This week we had a crazy storm! The sky was black as night and the lightning were nearly constant. The wind was clocked at 100 k/h and it actually blew off part of our roof! All is good though. It’s taken care of and it was actually pretty fun/exciting. (The sisters said they were scared silly! ha-ha)
The blog thing is pretty cool too! Thanks for keeping me all updated and stuff. You are a really great Momma you know that?
Other than that, we are just going to keep working hard to realize 2 baptisms this week. I know the spirit of the Lord is with us and I have seen many miracles here in Cambé. I love being here in Brazil and the people are really nice and todo é otimo!{all is great!} I testify that this church is true and that God loves each of us individually.
Thank you for all your prayers and support and love.
I love you Mom and I will pray for you every night. I’m glad Sharon is doing well and I really do love to hear how things are going. I miss you but this mission is great! How was Halloween? Anything exciting coming up soon? Say hi to everyone for me!
Love Elder Markham