IT IS SO HOT!!!!!
It never rains anymore. I miss the rain so much. They told us that the weather man is saying that it´s 35 degress C, but that with the humdity factor, it´s 43 degrees C. I don´t what that means, but we´re talking a hot, sticky oven here. Even the fan doesn´t cut it at night. I just want to sit in the shower all day like everyone else...
But we don´t. We work! This week was awesome, super stressful, but awesome. Got to do a training in Zone Meeting, a bunch of family nights, had an AWESOME ward ´´integration?´´ activity on Friday, and Saturday our zone spent all night making contacts at one of the ´´praças´´ in Cidade Nova. The ´´praça´´ is where everyone goes at night to hang out- couples, teenagers, and especially FAMILIES. It was fun. We showed a lot of Mormon Messages and the Restoration video. It looked like no one was watching, but as we went around talking to people, turns out they were all listening and wanting to know more about this ´´vision of God´´. Bingo. Only two of our contacts were for our area, but it was cool to be with a ton of other missionaries talking to everyone about the gospel. I even saw an Adventist friend from Satélite there. Heavenly Father´s been putting a lot of 7th Day Adventists in my path recently. I don´t know what He´s trying to say, but I´m not a huge fan. I pretty much only teach from the Book of Mormon, and these Saturday worshipping friends really know their Bible. However, they´re all coming to church and reading the Book of Mormon. I´m not here to convince or convert, just to help them receive an answer.
Our ´´noite de integração´´ was awesome! We called it the´´Bolo Macho´´ or ´´Man Cake´´ because it was a competition between all the men in the ward to see who could bake the best cake. In Brazilian culture, it is very much the women who do all the cooking. Like, the men are seriously dependent on women here to help them survive........ so a lot of the cake attempts were pretty sad. But, there were two men, extremely competative that are also owners of bakeries that brought cakes. One was a vanilla cake filled with goiaba jelly and a photo of the Recife temple on top. It really was celestial. The other was another vanilla cake but filled with passion fruit cream and three mini cakes on top. They called it the ´´three kingdoms of glory´´. We played some games, spiritual message, but the best part was the huge amount of references and less actives that were there that we didn´t even invite! The members here are super good about bringing friends to activities. I will never skip a church activity again.. Everyone loved it, and I felt good about having shown the ward that we, as missionaries, are really cool, and they can give us references any time they want. I was in charge of the prizes, and I have to say, for our limited amount of resources here in Pará, I really outdid myself. We put our handy dandy nail painting skills to work and decorated three aprons for the most delicious, most creative, and most horrible cakes, and the most delicious also got ´´the golden spatula´´. I only realized much later that the golden idea I had of making a golden spatula came from Sponge Bob.. thanks Dad..
We also taught our Adventist family again on Saturday. This time, we brought our friend Bruno, relatively recently returned missionary turned ward mission leader, and guess who Giovani and Dirleni brought, Dirleni´s Adventist missionary sister... so burned, again. But, now we have three people reading the Book of Mormon and coming to church next week. Seriously, whoever translated the Portuguese Bible is hopefully repenting, because soooo many scriptures in Portuguese talk about Saturday being the sabbath day.. so frustrating! Next week, we´re bringing a high priest from the high council with us.
Other than that, transfers are next week.. I want my companion to stay, and I´m scared that one of the elders in our ward won´t leave.. but all according to Heavenly Father´s will.
I love you all! Pray for rain!
Tanto amor quanto calor,
Sister Barkdull
P.S. pictures next week. no time agora
No comments:
Post a Comment