Maringa January 23, 2012

Hello mother! Bom dia!

Once again I write you from Quente Maringá!

This week was pretty awesome. Actually I like it when it rains because it cools things down quite a bit. That is a really awesome story about the family history pages. I know that God really guides us to the people who need us, whether living or dead. Preach my Gospel talks a whole lot about family history, but until now Brazil hasn´t really grabbed the fire of the thing. Our Stake President gave a talk yesterday about helping everybody to start doing indexing and it was pretty cool.

So this week was crazy cool! We started out pretty normal, working hard and everything. On Thursday we had interviews with President Tavares that were prettycool. We went on divisions with a whole bunch of Brothers and taught a lot of people. We also had a ward activity. We did role playing about how to talk to your friends about the gospel and challenged everybody to start bringing their friends to church. Afterwards we playing a really funny game with ties called Gato e Rato. Everybody loved it and got really excited. Next week we will have another and it should be really swell! After the interviews Thursday we went to visit Michelle with Irmão Arthur and challenged her to be baptized. She accepted but still had a lot of fear. On Friday she went to her interview and had a miracle! Afterwards she told us that she was feeling really nervous and had decided that she did not want to get baptized any more. She told that to Elder Lee who was doing the interview. He told her, I will read a scripture about baptism from the Book of Mormon and if it is true you will feel it inside of you. He read it and she felt the spirit super strong and was baptized Saturday 7:00! Whoo hoo! Her 2 daughters will be baptized this week along with the brother and sister of Marco, who was baptized my first week here. Yeah baptism! Saturday was crazy because the baptism was for 7:00 but we had to journey to Cia Norte, a city about 2:30 hours away from Maringá at 2:00. It was raining a whole ton which slowed things down and we barely had time to get to the church and fill up the baptismal font with the church hose and buckets! I had been in a division the night before and we hadn´t eaten anything since Friday and so after the baptism Bishop saved our lives and made dinner for us. Our Bishop is super awesome. I love Bishop André! Yesterday we had a family night with a family that has about 100,000,000 rabbits. Also Alex went to church again and is getting really involved. He will certainly be baptized soon.

Our Zone took 3rd place in the mission Olympics this week which was pretty great! This last week we´re gunna win! Hahaha!
So basically things are super busy, but going great. Let’s convert this whole city!

Thanks for the updates about my friends. That’s crazy that people are starting to come home now. Ó loco! I am glad to have such great friends for examples. Thank you for the pictures too! The flower is really pretty and reminds me of Dad.

I love you so very much. Distance doesn’t mean anything! I am glad that I have such and excellent mom who loves me too! I know Christ overcame all of our pain. I know God lives and loves us. Our family will be together forever. Stay strong and don’t forget that I love you.
Love,
Elder Markham
P.S. Some news: Due to problems in the mission office, they asked that we no longer receive packages through the office address. I you want to send anything from here on it has to be directly to the address of our house. Annoying, but oh well. Thanks!