It was a week of success. The baptismal services were nearly perfect and church went very well. For starters, Saturday morning was the baptism of Dulce Gabrielle Romero de Sousa and Aline Melo Guimarães. They were part of a family we met by doing a simple street contact. They were always anxious to learn more, and once again, the hard thing for one of them was cutting her coffee intake. Through goals, cevada, and a lot of juice, she has succeeded in kicking the habit and has managed to integrate into the Young Women organization faster than I've ever seen before. She has a great friend, who is a member, which made the process much easier for her. It was a nice, little ceremony. The only flaw was the broken draining mechanism in the font. Two hours prior to the baptism we found out we would be using two week old water for the services. Fortunately, it appeared clean and all went as planned. It was good to see the members (especially the recent converts) accept them like family. We even had a returned sister missionary offer to do a special musical number on the spot both Saturday and Sunday.
Sunday morning, we woke up and coordinated with a high councilman to help us pick up investigators for church. The previous week wasn't much of a success, but things changed for us this week. After making several stops, we picked up a total of 15 people for church. It was definitely a great sight for the members since attendance is usually around 64 people, and through much hard work, there were 82 present on Sunday.
After being asked once again to direct the Gospel Principles class, the baptism took place for Viviane Azevedo da Siva. It was a full house...a ton of people stayed after church to participate. It was wonderful seeing all the support. Following the baptism, we dropped everyone back at their homes and headed off to lunch, which was at the house of Edigar, the Bolivian. Lunch was good, but the walk back was ridiculously hot.
This week we started the preparation for the new elders and sister that will be arriving here from the CTM (11 in total). For me, that means making sure all their health cards are ordered and their credit card accounts are active. Also, this week was pretty crazy because of the massive order of products needed for the various missionary apartments. Any day now, I'll be pulling an all-nighter with my fellow members of Staff, cruising around the city in a moving truck dropping off various household items.
Today, for the first time in a while, we went and played soccer on a P-day. It was cool, but we played on a little indoor-sized court, so it got pretty packed.
We are currently working with a few teenagers, who are the nephews of the Young Men counselor. It looks pretty promising, but the family situation is very complicated. Just the other night, we had someone walk up to us wanting to know more about the Church and asked to be taught. His name is Wellington and he's 18. Come to find out, he's already living with a lady and has 2 kids. It's going to make things a little more difficult but not impossible.
I think I've finally figured out a balanced diet and I'm starting to lose weight again (being up 5 pounds from what I consider normal). Thanks for all the postcards. I got them today. I don't want to disappoint the fans, but I'm not sure if my skimming skills will be up to par for the first part of the summer. Anyway, that's about it for now. Oh yeah, yesterday I hit a year and two months...pretty sweet!
Abraço,
Elder Taylor Mackay
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