Hey everybody, I'm writing once again from pontinha. My decision to find a new house last week was a little hasty, first because it's almost impossible to find housing, and second because our contract requires that we give our dona a months notice. But we did talk to her and one way or another we'll be moving out around the end of october. I spent several hours this week trying to find a house and didn't come up with anything, but i'm still hopeful. We need to find out from president torgan if it's worth looking, since it's possibly for the area to be combined or closed or moved or something, and it's no good to find a house and then have to move out.
Anyway, the week was good. Mario did get baptized, as planned, and as it turns out two of his friends are marked for this saturday. Unfortunately, the mom of one of them is catholic doesn't want her son to get baptized, which is frustrating. She's a nice person though, it's our fault for always teaching him at his friends house, so his mom had never even met us. But we're still hopeful, we talked to the mom and asked her to pray about it and hopefully we'll going to go back there tonight. One happier parental news, Mario's mom seems to be accepting the whole baptism thing a lot better. She's planning on going to the baptism Aylton and Wildjoy (mario's friends that we've been teaching) on saturday, and hopefully she'll go to church to. She's really nice, and doesn't really like the church she's going to, because they do some stuff that she doesn't agree with, so we're excited for the day when Mario can baptize his mom.
Our dona is sort of sad to see us go, and sort of frustrated because it means she has to deal with some things. She's pinning the flood on us, saying we're using too much toilet paper and it clogged the drain (i don't quite understand why that would cause a flood, but it sounds like the flood stopping system is really convoluted. She said the reason the pump wasn't going was because there wasn't enough water. I knew what she meant, but i almost laughed, it didn't flood enough, that was the problem!), and because she has to talk to the mission office to try to get them to pay for a bunch of things that were ruined in a previous flood. I'm sort of upset by our dona, especially because every time she talks to us she acts like i don't speak portuguese, and will repeat things in english sometime (which is also funny. She has a great portuguese accent). Elder Fernandes is a much better example of loving everyone and patience. Good mission experience though, it will make a great story.
The scripture treasure hunt went like this, i don't exactly remember the scriptures now, but it was basically like this:
They start in this room and we talk a little bit about the Liahona (they happen to have a model Liahona/Compass in the office) and explained how the scriptures are our compasses in life. We then explained the whole thing, established some rules (which they promptly forgot) and gave each team a set of scriptures. First they had to look up in John 5 where it says search the scriptures. And then they had to go find some scriptures. In them, they found a sticky note with a new scripture reference and so on. For example: they read Alma 7 which leads them to the Baptismal font, where they find john 4 which takes them to the sink, when the read luke 22 (i think) which confused a lot of people because the cup was not in the kitchen, then they read alma 32 and had to find a plant, and then read luke 24 and had to find a open tomb (that one was tricky because it was a painting) and then they read alma 38 which led them back to the liahona, where they found chocolate. Each team had a different course, but they all had the same items. It would be even better if they all had different items and a different course and different scriptures, but then it gets sort of tricky to keep finding good scripture clues, but if you worked you could pull it off.
So anyway, we heard transfer news yesterday. Elder Fernandes and I are staying together, which is fun. It's the first time in 3 transfers that i haven't switched companions. My district changed a bit though. Instead of having the Executive secretaries, i have the Zone leaders and the Irmãs, both of which are in lapa. So now i have to trek across lisbon every monday for district meeting, and my district isn't part of my ward. It's sort of confusing, i trust president torgan has a good reason for doing it, but i'm not quite sure what it is. But that's ok, because it makes my district a lot more fun, because the secretaries hardly ever get to work (although they also have a baptism this saturday) so doing divisions with them was always sort of weird.
In other news, Elder Oram is going home this friday, which is weirding me out. When i got here he was just hitting a year in the country. He's going down in a blaze of glory though, and hopefuly is going to work with me and Elder Fernandes on thursday while everyone else is dinking around in Lisbon buying stuff and such. I was lucky to have such a good trainer.
Lets see here. Happy birthday to Caitlin, if you guys are still reading this. I'm really hoping to get some stuff sent out today. I wrote some letters about a month ago and i haven't gotten around to getting them sent.
I'm about out of time, but i'll just close out by saying one more time how awesome Mario is. He got up and bore his testimony at the baptism, and is helping us teach all the time. He's going to the Nation (!) young single adult conference this weekend, so hopefully he'll get to know some of the other young single adults from Mafra and Monte da Caparica. He would like to serve a mission someday, and is just all around one of the most solid people i've ever seen baptized. It's good stuff.
Anyway, i'm out of time, so have a great week. We're hoping for sunny weather for the next six weeks, but we're pretty sure we know how to stop the flooding now (they're a big valve that we can shut. In theory we shouldn't have to mess with it, but in practice, it will keep water from coming in if it rains a whole lot again.) School has started up again, so suddenly a lot of the people we have been teaching are now busy during the day, so this week we're hoping to find lots of new investigators. People in portugal have really absurdly busy schedules.
So, boa semana, hopefully all is well with everybody, and hopefully english isn't too broken. There were several times during this letter when i didn't quite know how to say things. I'm worried that after another year here i'm going to make no sense at all, but we'll see how that goes.
Com Amor,
Ammon, The Unsinkable
