Lindsay, CJ

Quicker week and a shorter email today. The highlight by far was getting to see my new buddy Roberto (remember him?) not only bless the sacrament during our meeting yesterday, but also baptize two of his best friends: Guilherme and Vitor. He is officially the first recent convert here in the city to do both! Besides that, not a whole lot happened during this week. We did a lot of hard work, a Brazilian game against Serbia in the World Cup shut down our working time for two hours one day, and had a little Christmas "confraternization" dinner with the members on Saturday. As this past week we had Thanskgiving, just wanted to express my gratitude for all that I have been blessed with: my family, my gospel, my health, are just a few of the many things I have to be grateful for. Sure hope the holiday was great for you all and that this next week goes well!  Be sure to shoot me an email when you get a chance and I'll get a response back to ya! "Verily I say unto you my fri...

Bom dia meus queridos, What a quick, crazy, week down here in the MBT. By far one of the craziest, if not the craziest, that I've had as a missionary up to this point. Monday was normal; we taught the folks who had visited the church and made some contacts with other folks after our preparation day activities ("activities" is just a fancy way of saying buying groceries and laying around the house to rest). We also found out that as part of the Mission Tour that we would have with Élder Koch, all of the zone leaders would be going down to Teresina to participate in a leadership council with him on Wednesday.  Tuesday, Élder Cesar and I ended up having to leave our area right after lunch as it was a holiday and the bus hours were all wacky. That meant that we had to wait in São Luis from around 4:30 p.m. until our bus left at 11 for Teresina.  Wednesday we pulled into town around 6:00 a.m. and went to the "casa de apoio" to get showered up and primped for the meet...

Well hey there, Guess it's already been another week down here in the Itapecuru-Mirim, Maranhão group. We have a better idea of what in the world is going on here, so we're getting pretty excited about what the future will bring here.  Some of the folks that visited church last week wanted to follow Christ's example and be baptized, something that I thought pretty incredible as we just arrived in this area some ten days ago.  Last week our sacrament meeting only had some 18 people, 4 of whom were us missionaries and 9 the folks who came with us to visit the meeting. Yesterday, there were over 31 people who participated!  That was really something special as we had to change the location of the meeting at the last minute. We got a call Saturday morning... "Oh yeah, so there's going to be a test taking place in the schoolhouse so we're not going to be able to let you use it for your meeting tomorrow." So that basically meant we spent all of Saturday morning ...

Mornin' all, How are you doing!?! Just wanted to send you all a quick update to let you all know that I'm still alive and made it here in Itapecuru-Mirim do Maranhão! It was kind of a crazy week getting here, so I'll give yall a brief summary of how we managed to get down here. On Monday, I went from my area in Teresina to the mission office bright and early with all of my bags, said goodbye to Élder Hurst and Élder Oliveira, and participated in the leadership council meeting for the Zone Leaders. There I discovered that I would be coming here to Itapecuru and would be both trained by Élder Cesar (he was companions with my old comp Élder de Souza when they worked in the office) and we would both be training a new missionary.  On Tuesday, we picked up the first of these missionaries. His name is Élder Martinez and he is from Veracruz, Mexico. He had been serving in Mexico on a reassignment and had just gotten his visa to be able to come here to Teresina. He is now the only M...