This week was really good in our area, although as zone leaders it was a rough week in the zone. We going to have a meeting on wednesday with our zone to see what we can do. It's weird to be responsible not only for your area for for the areas of a bunch of other missionaries, but i really enjoy being zone leader, it's generally a lot of fun. Today, by the way i'm in yet another internet café, this one has loud brasilian music that's sort of distracting and obnoxious, and i still can't send pictures, one day i'll send some pictures, probably the week after i get transferred from here, but whatever.
So, this week was good for us. We marked this girl we found a little while ago, Flávia. As it turns out, she's close friends with one of the moças here in the ward, Raquel, so that was really cool. We brought her to seminary for the first time and when we opened the door, wondering who we were going to pick to be friends with Flávia, Raquel shouted, "Flávia!" So that was cool. This ward has a really legit youth group. Flávia's way cool, she's been reading and praying every day, already seems like she's known all the moças forever, is going to seminary (which is at night here, not at 6 in the morning), and is going to the youth activity on saturday that's going to be raising money for EFY in august, hopefully she'll get to go to.
We had a bunch of people in church on sunday, which is always nice. Isabel and Daniel (the kid we baptized around the time i got there, and his mom). We've been having a hard time getting them to church because Daniel's uncle (who is from another church and is not the biggest fan of us) has been inviting daniel to come to his house every weekend. Anyway, they came, pretty much on their own, and we went by their last night and taught them and some of their friends. I say we taught, really i talked about nothing too much, while Elder Nixon bonded with isabel's husband. Elder Nixon is a pretty die hard benfica fan, and even though we shouldn't really watch football games, but it was on in the background and elder nixon jumped up and cheered when benfica scored (Carlos, the husband, is a big benfica fan). Anyway, Carlos was really impressed, i really like carlos, he doesn't generally want to talk about Religion, but he's a really great person, and took isabel and Daniel and luis (the youngest son, who is the man) to church on sunday.
Ruben and his brother and his friend all came to church too. We picked them up at 9, and left at about 9:25, but luckily church started about 10 minutes late, so it was all cool. João and Debora were there too, we found out that Eugerindo, who i realized this week reminds me a lot of Terrence James, showed up, but got there late and we were in the middle of the class so he left, which was sad. Also Camila, this girl in the world, invited her friend Ghena to come and he came, we're trying to figure out how to teach him. I love jovens (youth) they are so perfect, but their hard to teach if their parents aren't down with it. We're trying to figure out what to do there.
I think my favorite part of the week is saturday, on saturday we do football (soccer). And by do football, i mean watch football and teach 5 lessons in the period of 3 hours. This time we had 5 new people show up to football, well, we had about 10 new people, but we only got around to teaching 5 of them. Some of them are punk kids that don't really want to hear anything, but a lot of them are really good guys that think about things like their purpose in life ad stuff like that. This saturday, after football, we're going have a movie night for the whole ward and all the jovens. The only hard part about all this is i have to watch a bunch of really cool portuguese kids play soccer and not play with them, it's funny because here football is like basketball in the states. All the young street kids get together on the concrete court and play street ball, with few rules, lots of curse words, and some crazy fouls that go uncalled because that's the way you play. I wonder if i had grown up in portugal if i would still like football...
It's been pretty nice here, we had a freak rainstorm after church on sunday, but we in a car on the way to a meal appointment. Lets see, any other news on this end? I did get my shoes, they're intense, they look like they could take two years of walked, but i'm going to try not to wear them too often, so that i can keep wearing them for the rest of my life, since it looks like they'd take it. The correios people didn't even accept my drivers license, which is dumb, but it's probably better to just send packages to the office from now on, since i need my passport to get packages and i need to go to the office to get my passport. I don't need too many more packages, but next time you send anything put some face soap in there, mine will probably run out in the next month or two (of the three you send, the taller ones were better, the little square one dries my skin out a bit).
In case you were wondering, Iliana, the girl that got baptized a month or so ago, is doing great. We helped her out studying for a math test friday morning, i miss math, it's good stuff, interesting, math is not nearly as universal as i though, aside from the obvious vocabulary differences, the signs are different, so the first time i looked at portuguese math homework i had no idea what it was talking about.
So, all in all, it was a good week, does it show in my letters that my english is sort of broken? I usually catch myself and correct it, but i definitely talk weird from time to time, even more than before the mission. we had zone conference this week too, that was cool, it was mostly just repeating the things we talked about in zone leader council, but it's always good. The amount of meetings missionaries have is really quite impressive, it works out to about 1 per week on top of church and such. Anyway, i'm rambling, that's basically my week, it was good. I really saw the Lord's hand in our work, which is always reassuring. Small and simple things, like Max, isabel's puppy, waking her up so that she would go to church. By small and simple things, great things come to pass. I hope you guys have a great week,
abraços
Elder Ammon
