"Não obstante, o Senhor julga conveniente a castigar seu povo; sim, ele prova sua paciência e sua fé."
Hey everybody, i finally have a computer with a SD slot, so i'm going to send a bunch of pictures to make up for the 3 months draught.
In other news, this week was tough, for various reasons, but we're going to call it a trial of our faith, because it ended very well, and João, the 8 year cousin of a family that got baptized a couple weeks ago got baptized. He's been going to church for a while and wanted to get baptized. It was interesting because it pretty much had nothing to do with us, but it was still fun to have a baptism and we've been teaching the rest of his family and they're doing well. This ward is really great. They're thinking about it spliting into a ward and a branch, so we're trying to find the people that are going to take the places of those that will go to the branch.
We get fed really well here. We have 3-4 meals in member's houses a week and on top of that they give us sacks of food for the days we don't have member meals. It's really nice actually, since getting here i haven't cooked once.
What else is up? Elder Mateer and I are getting along well. We've been reading and thinking a lot about the Sons of Mosiah in the book of Mormon, incidentally his first name is Aaron so that's cool. (other fun facts about elder mateer i don't think i've said yet: he's from scotland and was going to BYU before coming here, he's been in portugal for about a year.)
Hm, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else that's going on. This week we just worked really really hard, and sort of felt like we were beating our heads against the wall, now we're wanting to figure out how to work better with members so that we don't have to walk so much. Not that i don't like walking, but aside from the fact that we walked around 50 miles this week (that's a moderate estimate, eldermateer said it was more like 100. It felt like 100), it's just not very effective to spend all your time walking around. The culprit was not planning as well as we could have in our ginormous area, and a bigger problem, not having the phone numbers of people and being unable to confirm with people. Last night we visited Macsuel, this really really cool member from brasil. He and his wife are epic, and we talked about people he wanted to teach and bring to church and such. We're going to paint his mom's house in a couple weeks.
We also, on friday, went to visit the Gomes family. They were baptized about 7 months ago, and are incredible. They live way out in the middle of nowhere, but are one of the coolest little families i've ever met. I got a chance to show of some of the crazy magic skills i've been learning, they wrote the name of their card on the back of my hand and then i opened my hand up and it was written on the inside of my hand. Elder Mateer is a good guinae pig for magic, he's pretty sharp, and spots stuff when i do it well, although i got him this morning. Magic is fun.
Let me see, other than magic and missionary work, not too much is going on on this end. We ate lunch at the bishop's house on sunday. He's incredible, as is the ward mission leader, Otacílio, that was called on sunday. We're really excited to work here in alverca, and the wards about to explode. I'm going to try to learn a more effective way to do missionary work here, and we'll see how that goes in the next few weeks.
Thanks for the letters and everything else. My atm card does in fact expire in may, i'm glad the bank was on top of things because i definitely hadn't noticed. Will my pin stay the same or do i need to set up a new one or something? Anyway, we'll figure that out, have a great week.
Love,
Ammon
p.s. - That's a photo from Iliana's baptism, it's sort of an awkward picture, but what can you do?
