Build up the Ward!

March 9, 2015

Oi!

Oh can you send me the recipes for like tuna noodle casserole, funeral potatoes, and big recipes, we are going to hold an activity called Noite Americana. haha see if we can get the members to bring friends and build up our teaching pool. oh and pumpkin roll i want to see if we have the stuff to make that down here :)

This week has been good. We decided that we are going to build up the ward then the baptisms would come. Because there are over 600 members here only 65-90 attend each Sunday.  So we have been asking members for references of less active members that we could visit. We started visiting them and a lot came to church yesterday so i think this is our plan. Build up the ward, make it strong again and then we can bring in others to a strong ward where they will stay active. So our Lider de missao da ala (ward mission leader) was called as second councilor in the bishopric which will be a huge blessing for the ward because he is so good! Irmão Gestal is awesome. It made us sad so after church i went up to him and ask what was going to happen now and he told me he was never set apart as the WML but he did it anyway, it blew me away. He has been so helpful and meets with us all the time! and comes to our Inglês class on Tuesdays. oh i don~t know if i ever told you that but we teach English on Tuesdays. We have a consistent group they are fun. I don’t remember if i told you that Sis. Sunaga learned English for 7 years and then taught it for a year before her mission. haha so she usually teaches and i help with the pronunciation but lately i am finally teaching more because i am getting better at Portuguese, ummm anyways lost my train of thought. umm.

Oh so we have this deal, (Sis S. e eu) that every week we progressingly have days of all Portuguese. This week i will have three days. By the end of this transfer, all Portuguese. haha it is good. When talking to people here they ask how many months i~ve been here and then they find out almost two they are like what? you speak really good for that short of time. So it is such a blessing! There is no way i could learn this crazy language without help from the other side. No way, on like the scale of hardness a lot of people are saying Portuguese is up by Chinese ahah because everyone speaks differently here in Brazil sometimes i don~t understand people at all haha because of the accent and almost all words are irregular, which means they don’t conjugate like all the others haha.

We have baptismal dates but the more i learn about the people here the more i realize that Manaus is a hard mission in the city, out in the country areas it isn’t hard but here in the city it is very difficult. The more i realize the world has no idea a lot of the things i was taught growing up. Thank you so much for teaching me these things in our home! Sometimes it is easy to forget that these are not common placed ideas, but they are precious. We are very blessed to have the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ! Because a lot of people teach some very interesting things.. both Sister S. and i have been working hard.

 oh i don~t think i told you, but Sister S. was in the MTC the same time i was the first time. So she has been in the field for almost 6 months now. It is interesting to see that if i had not had surgery or any of that we would never have been companions, because we would have been greenies together but she reminds me a lot of you; patient does~t like contention, holds her tongue instead of causing an argument. She is very good, and a good example to me we work well together :)

We are finding families but everyone here is available at the same time. So it is crazy scheduling, but we found this guy named Jul... e he has a familie of three i think, but crazy story. He talked with sister missionaries in like 1994 ish and they gave him a Book of Mormon, but it had an error in it, so the sisters took it back promising to return but they didn~t. so it was crazy to hear that. oh and it was a sister from Sao Pãolo and an American. haha Sister S. is from São Paulo and I am American :P so we are teaching his family.

This time in the temple was much better than last time! Presidente Castro and Sister Castro were our couple there it was way cool! They are so sweet! Sister Castro would lean over to me (i was sitting by here) and just say “Linda”. haha which is like beautiful, but more. haha she is cute!

oh also i remembered, Elder Cook said that if you say that drinking coca cola is a sin, that is apostasy... because the caffeine is not the same as in coffee because of the processing. haha anyways it was a random though but cool.

Anyways, all is good! i love you! Hope all continues to be good with you!

Love,

 Sister Post

Pictures: Cool Building we see in our walking all the time.

This is our church

Out the back door of one of our investigators!