Maringa April 23, 2012

Hello mother!
Thank ya kindly for the letter! I always love to hear from you for sure.
I´m glad that Sharon is doing better from the surgery.  I pray for you often and that things will go well at home. Speaking of McDonalds, there is a McDonalds here in Maringá and we ate there the other day and I remembered how bad McDonalds is! It sounds like things are still roaring back in Provo. You should send me some pictures! 

So this week was pretty sweet. We worked pretty normal for most of the time but in the middle of the week it started raining tons. There was a huge tempest here in Maringá that tore up a whole bunch of trees and knocked out power and stuff. I always think that storms are kind of cool. The ward had a talent show on Friday that it didn’t go to, but I saw some videos and it was really, really funny! The ward is getting pretty excited and lots of people and starting to come back to church that haven’t been in a while. 

Saturday was Elder Van Orden’s birthday and we celebrated by buying him cake and pizza and then hiding in the dark and trying to scare the wits out of him when he entered in the house. It was pretty fun :) Another funny story is that the night of the huge storm our door broke and we couldn’t get it to open up. E. Van Orden and I got there first and we had to crawl in through the window and then E. Moroni got there and SWAT team kicked our door open. Opps. It was pretty funny though. 

Then we had the best part of the week. As you can see from the pictures Fernanda agreed to be baptized this week! Yeah! They are super crazy elects and they are sooo cool!!  We had their interview Saturday night and in the middle a tree fell and took out the power and so that was an adventure and we had to get candles to continue and it was pretty funny. Fernanda said she had been looking for something like this her whole life and felt that it was the right thing the first lesson that she heard. Fernando in preparing to be baptized this Sunday! They are totally going to go to the temple and get all sealed together! Yeah! Sooooo Cool!! On Sunday night they invited us over for dinner and we ate cow’s tail. I don’t know why everybody is giving us weird cow parts lately, but it was actually pretty darn good! Cow ankle marrow is not good. 

So, I´m not sure about transfers yet because we will all get transferred on Saturday at the apostle meeting, but maybe I will stay here. Probably will cuz Bishop made me get up and give my going away testimony in sacrament meeting, so that means I´ll probably stay here. haha!! So, that’s about it from this end. Any questions just write to my secretary, which is me. 

I know that the gospel saves lives. I know that families can be together forever. I know Christ lived and died and lived again just for us. I know we have a living prophet whom we can trust and follow. His truth is marching on! Glory, Glory Hallelujah!
-Elder Markham