Big news! Recently, the church, probably after much study, pondering, and prayer, converted to google, which means two things:
1. I have a new email address (as you noticed)
2. I get to use email based on gmail complete with highlighting, color text, emoticons ![]()
, font change!, and a whole 7 gigabytes of space (instead of the 60 megabytes that filled up every other week)
All this is very exciting, and it's probably the best thing to happen to my email time in the past year. This also means that you guys have no excuse not to send me a billion pictures, because now i have room for them all. Those of you (all of you) who have never used the old school email browser won't apreciate how poorly designed it was, and therefore probably don't care about the majority of what i'm saying. So, on to interesting things:
this week was great, we did infact have interviews, which were nice. Interviews as Zone Leader are different, because we have to do a training, and president talks to us about as much about other people as he does about us. The package hadn't gotten there, so it'll have to wait a bit, sorry it took so long to get my address to you, but whatever, i'll be ok. Today we ate my birthday lunch at a sushi restaurant. We tried last week but it was closed for carnival (i don't think it makes sense to close restaurants on holidays, but that's their call). It was good, although they didn't have the awesome conveyer belt. We tried to get email done earlier, but there were no open spots. This morning we played settlers of catan again, i got owned, it was probably the worst i've lost at settlers of catan. Ever. It was really dissapointing actually. It felt a lot like losing in monopoly. I also got myself a sweet birthday present. I found a fossil watch that some elder had left behind that wasn't working. We took it to the watch store today and for £2.50 they took care of it, making the least expensive watch i've ever gotten (other than that watch i got for free from Hunter once.) I'm going to work hard not to lose it, which will probably include not wearing it most days.
This week went by really fast, we had a division in Cascais and a baptismal interview for them on friday. Iliana got interviewed on saturday and she's doing great. We had a little scare when out of no where her mom decided that iliana couldn't get baptized (from the beginning her mom has been very nice and was totally cool with her going to church and getting baptized, so it caught us off gaurd) but iliana talked to her mom and now she's going to let her be baptized. Iliana's great and way excited. She's really solid, has lots of friends in the ward, and the bishop's going to perform the baptism. So it's exciting. We'll take pictures, but once again i'm at a new email place. This place is way nicer than the others, with quick computers, nice keyboards, and cozy chairs, but still no usb spot, so still no photos. I'm pretty sure priscila is coming though, so she can send pictures.
We had 8 people come to church this week (i.e. people we're teaching, counting members of the church there were a lot more), and all of them are really solid. We actually got to church about half an hour late because we were waiting with Reuben and Danielson. They're new this week, we found him a week or so ago, and he's awesome. He was another we were worried about the mom not being cool with him going to church, but we met the mom on saturday and she loves it. She actually woke them up sunday morning got them out of bed and pushed them into the shower to get ready. When we told her that we help with english she got even more excited. She told us that if we teach her sons english they'll all join our church. That's not really a good motivation for baptism, but it's a start.
We had another new person in church, Nelson Pancas. He's a reference from Fatima Esteves in Mafra. He too is awesome and loved church and we're going to teach him tomorrow morning before district meeting. We also had João, who is a brasilian member's boyfriend. He came last week too. It seems like he just came because his girlfriend forced him too, but this week he liked it a lot more, and he's hearing the lessons and everything. Marcos also came, who we found on saturday. He, as it turns out, is best friends with Elder Fernandes (who i trained about 6 months ago), he liked church a lot, and we're going to teach him again tonight. That was all really exciting, and this week we're hoping to teach these people and get them moving towards baptism. The coolest thing is that all of those people were found through others. Two were references from members, and three from other people we're teaching. All in all the week was really good, and we're excited for the future here in cacém.
Speaking off member references (or referrels as they're called in english) we visited the Nogueiro family last night to talk about people they new that we could teach. Some time ago, their son (who's about 6 years old) invited a bunch of his friends to come to church (pretty much all off them). A bunch came, and so we're trying to work with some of their parents. We're going to have a family night on friday and a "family afternoon" on saturday. This is all, by far, the most success i've ever had on my mission with working with the members of the church to find people. Members here are pretty spectacular, and it's making everything go a lot more smoothely.
This week is going to be really busy, our zone has 8 people marked for baptism this week, 4 of which are taught by district leaders, which means we're going to have to be jumping around interviewing people all week, but it's exciting, our zone, in general, is doing great. It's weird to be proud of how my zones doing, that's a new sort of joy in missionary work.
Oh! before i forget, don't forget to get new shoes from mr. mac. Even if you don't send them here, my ecco's are not fulfilling their end of the two year warrantee-bargain, and if i'm going to be walking around with holes in my shoes for the rest of my mission, i atleast want a sweet new pair of eccos waiting for me. Maybe that's selfish, but it seems just.
Anyway, that's about all the news and the time i have for this week, have an excellent week, The transfer ends next monday, so it's possible something will happen their, but i would be shocked if anything changed. Time is going absurdly fast. But i guess that's to be expected. Enjoy the last bit of february, and hopefully things warm up a bit.
Tchau tchau
Elder ammon
p.s. make sure you send new mail to this email address, because i won't get it at my old one.
beixinhos
