Feb. 24th

My companions name is Sister Dias from São Paulo. She is 21 years old, and has been a member for 3 years. Her whole family converted when she was 18. She is super funny and outgoing, and is a hard worker. I like her a lot. We have been working super hard this past week, and have taught a ton of people. Unfortunately only one of our investigators, Joanna, came to church. Well not unfortunately because I'm super glad she went, but we had other people that we really thought would go and didn't so that was disappointing. Joanna is super cute though, she is in her 70's and so calm. She is super receptive, we are going to talk to her about baptism this next Sunday, so keep her in your prayers. We are also going to talk to another one of our investigators, Jonathan, about baptism as well. He is 17 and is working to be a politician, super intelligent. Sisters taught him 3 years ago and we tracted into him. He seems rally interested in coming back to church and having us teach him again.

Feb 17th

Well I told you how Rita and Ruan went to church. Well we were supposed to meet with them on Monday, but something came up so we met with them on Tuesday. We were reteaching Rita lesson one, & we asked what Christ did while he was here on Earth and she brought up how he was baptized. It was awesome because we could then talk about baptism with her. Well we did just that & she said that she wanted to be baptized and that she wanted Ruan to be baptized as well. So we set up her baptism for Saturday at three. Well when we left we remembered that we needed to talk to her about the man that stays at her house. We tried visiting her Wednesday and she said that she would call us and we could visit on Thursday, well she never called. We ended up trying to visit on Thursday with no success. It hit Friday, the day of the interview and we were really stressing. We dropped by & she was there so we brought up the guy, and taught the law of chastity again. She said that he only stays there one night a week, in a different bed to work. So we called our district leader to get permission, he made us call the assistants, they called president and president then had them tell us to get the opinion of our bishop, we got the opinion to go ahead and baptize her so we called the assistants and they called President, he gave permission. They called us and told us she could be baptized. This was a two hour process so we were super excited. We called our district leader to have him interview her, but he was being super difficult and was going to have us push back the baptism. Well we finally worked it out with him. We were so excited Saturday morning to baptize Ruan and Rita. We walked to their house like thirty minutes before the interview to remind them to bring towels and what not, only for Ruan to answer the door and say his mom was sick and wanted to be baptized Sunday. He wouldn't let us in to talk to her, & eventually just shut the door on us. We tried calling her only for some one else to answer her phone and say that she wasn't even home she was at the store, it was all super confusing and super sketchy. We waited at her house for a while, but she never showed up. We tried visiting again later on in the day but no one answered. We tried calling, nothing. She seriously just disappeared. We had to cancel the baptism. She never came to church on Sunday, so needless to say she wasn't baptized. I don't know what happened. Friday she was soo excited and so was Ruan, and then Saturday came and she disappeared. It was really sad, I'm still sad about it but she has her agency so if she doesn't want it we can't force it. It just shows how hard Satan works on people especially when they are about to do something good. It's sad that Rita disappeared, but I hope she takes the things she learned when we taught her and always remembers them & how she felt when she learned them. 

Well we got transfer calls yesterday. My companion and Sister Bell are being transferred to Curitiba. Sister Espinoza is going to another ward in our stake to finish training another sister, and I'm staying here.. I get my new companion Sister Dias on Tuesday. She's Brazilian and so are the two other sisters that are transferring to my ward. So I'm going to be living with three Brazilians for the next six weeks. I think it's a sign that Heavenly Father really wants me to learn this language. I'm grateful for this opportunity and hope that I can really become fluent. I'm sad to see Sister Garnica go, because I really loved her and loved working with her but I'm excited to have an opportunity to work with Sister Dias. 

Pics

My Companion Sister Garnica

Jeane who has ben going on splits with us everyday to prepare for her mission

Palateca, a Mexican popsicle shop :)

Random pet goose??

My District

My Zone

Feb 10th

Things are going well here. Like I said before we worked on being exactly obedient this week. Because of it we taught a ton of lessons this week, and my portuguese has been getting better. Unfortunately a lot of people dropped us this week as well which was hard. We went to visit Vera and Antonio, I was super excited only to be handed a packet of papers from their grandson that talked about how everyone can be prophets through family and work, and it talked about converting to Catholocism. Needless to say Antonio wasn't interested, I was pretty sad about it because Vera was doing so well but I just tried to forget about it. We planted a seed and hopefully someday some other set of missionaries can harvest it. We tried visiting Mirian this week only for her to tell us that her husband doesn't want her going to church or us coming over. Again I was super upset because, she was super awesome and was probably going to get baptized. We visited a man named Rowley who we have been working with. The first time we met him I explained how this gospel can make him happy, he speaks english which is awesome, but he told my companion he was happy but I could tell he wasn't so I talked to him about how before I went to church I thought I was happy but when I was alone at night I realized I wasn't happy and always felt like I had no one. I explained that this Gospel truly makes me happy and now when I'm alone I don't feel alone because I know that Christ is always there with me. He agreed to start taking lessons. Well anyways this week we visited him only for his son to tell us that Rowley isn't interested in attending church or being baptized he just wants to bible bash with us. We then tried visiting our investigators Ana and Donni, and they ignored us and all our calls so they aren't interested either. This past week just seemed like all of our "elect" investigators weren't really elect. It eventually got to me and I was having a pretty hard time with it. I was just feeling like we were working so hard and not seeing any results. I realized though that we were seeing results, I was just letting everything else get in the way of that. Because Vera didn't want to meet with us we visited her next door neighbors, Val and Vilmar. We taught them the first lesson, and Vilmar said that he has always wondered why there were so many churches and which one out of all of them was true, he then said he wanted to go to church. It really was a miracle lesson. We also taught a man named Sebastiou. At first he didn't seem too interested, but by the end of the lesson it really seemed to click with him, and he said he wanted to learn more. We taught a lady named Marley and almost commited her to be baptized, we're hoping to get her to church this next week. &&&& we found Rita and Ruan :) The day I ended up in the hospital we were supposed to meet with Rita, which obviously didn't happen. Well I was in bed the rest of the week, and when we tried contacting her the next week she was no where to be found. We have tried for two weeks with no success. Well we decided to stop by really quickly on Saturday and she was there. Apparently she's been working so she hasn't been home. She agreed to go to church & did. It was awesome, that was probably our big miracle this week. We are teaching them today, and will talk to them about baptism. So hopefully that goes well. Over all this week was really good, we did see results for being exactly obedient. & I've  just learned that even though people drop us they still need to be given the opportunity to learn about the Gospel, and that one day they will hopefully remember how they felt when we taught them and will want that in their lives.