This morning i went for the coup de grace [I think that’s how you say that] with our mouse problem. [woah, every once in a while I remember things that I had forgotten about completely. Just now, I got a Winged Migration flashback. That’s actually the second time today I’ve had weird deja vou] Today I cleaned the house and moved stuff around so that everything that is edible is out of reach, and scattered rat killing pellets around. So far the mice haven’t shown much interest in the poison, but I’ve hoping the lack of food and death in every corner will convince them that it’s time to move into a new house. It’s sort of sad, because everytime I do something in this house, it makes me a little bit more attached to it. Luckily last night there was a worm in our bathroom, so I haven’t yet lost my motivation. Motivation or not, 4 weeks from now we’re committed to leave, so it won’t make a huge difference, but I’d like to turn the house over to Dona mouse free. She worried about mice about as much as mom does.
P-day on Mondays is nice in some ways, but I hear a lot of cool Portuguese things are closed on Monday. We’ll see how that goes as time progresses.
This week is sort of intense. Today is P-day, tomorrow is Zone Conference, and the weekend is General Conference. I’m pretty excited about general conference. I’m not sure how we watch it, because it depends on if we go there with people we teach or just show up, but basically it’s like this. There’s a 7 hour difference from here to utah, so Saturday night at 6 o’clock, the Saturday morning session starts. If we want to watch the afternoon session live, we have to stay up till midnight, so we probably won’t. Sunday morning, is priesthood session, and then the Saturday evening rebroadcasts in the afternoon, than the Sunday sessions. The moral of all this is almost all of Sunday is watching conference, and we’ll probably catch the last bit on Monday. I’m hoping to watch it in English, because I get a lot more out of it, I have a hard time paying attention in Portuguese, because you can still sort of hear them speaking English. Anyway, I’m excited.
On the work front, things are going well. We were sort of bummed yesterday because no one came to church, (well, lots of people came to church, but no one we’re teaching) We did, however, have a great lesson with Jessica and her grandma, Mariazinha. They’re really nice and both are genuinely interested. Jessica has this wiliness to her (I’m not sure if wily is the right word, she’s just very sharp, and has a certain brightness in her eyes) and Maria is one of those nicest old ladies. She always invited us in, and, unlike a lot of the nice old ladies, she understands what we teach and is searching for something more in her life. We’re really excited because next lesson we’re going to talk about what happens when we die, since both jessica and her grandma have lots of questions about that.
Paula, Mario’s sister, is working her way slowly towards church. She has a certain hesitance to go to church, because she says she doesn’t like it, even though she’s never been. I’m not sure what people imagine our church is like, I imagine they base it on their experiences in other churches, but I don’t think Paula has really gone to church other than catholic church when she was little. Anyway, Mario’s being a great example for his family and friends, which is important. Aylton’s having a hard time because of his friends and family, so he needs some good support. Wildjoy seems to have lost a bit of hope with convincing his mom, but we’re still trying to work with him.
Most of last week was spent finding new people to teach, which can be slow goings, but we found some good people, including a Brazilian family that is a referral from a member here. They are the first Brazilians I’ve taught here in pontinha, since it seems there aren’t too many Brazilians here. I think Brazilians must be the nicest people in the world, it’s always just a little surprising. There’s no way to mess up a door approach with Brazilians, you just say “Hi, can we come in?” and they’ll invite you in, and ask you if you want food or Gauraná (a Brazilian soda that is pretty good). So that was fun. Other than that, we found lots of people with good potential, so we’ll be trying to get in touch with them this week.
I had and interesting conversation with an Elder in our ward, Elder Velasquez. He’s coming up to the end of his mission (he has another 3 or 4 months) and is working in the office. I was talking about how I was getting sort of stressed out with everything I had to do, and he told me that stress is connected to doubt, both in ourselves and in God. I realized that for the last couple of weeks I’ve been relying a lot on myself. I realized that I don’t have to worry so much, that I should do what I can, but then trust that God will do the rest, and rely on that. So this week, I’m going to be working on doing that, it will be less stressful, and it will probably be a lot more successful. Lets see, that’s more or less the news from over here. Our kitchen is way clean. I was thinking about putting flour around and then taking pictures of the mouse footprints, but then there’d be flour everywhere, and that sort of defeats the purpose.
This weekend was elections in Portugal, the socialists lost their majority, elections in Portugal are cool (because they seem to only take a few hours to determine the winner), and not nearly as newscrazy. You’ll all be happy to know that the news reporter in front of a giant screen is a world standard.
Have a great week, and enjoy conference. Watch out for Swine flu, bird flu, and other varieties. Thanks for the letters, support, and prayers.
Amo-vos,
Ammon
