No Electricity...

Dear Family,
This week has been another fun and inspiring week in the mission
field. We had a baptism yesterday of a girl named Heliza. She is 11
years old and wanted to get baptized before we even started teaching
her because she has a lot of family in the church. She was baptized
yesterday by a man in our ward named Iilton, I think they are related
but I´m not sure how. I also did a division this week where one of
the zone leaders came to Vila Galvão and worked with Elder Bangerter
while I got sent the nearby area of Gopouva. So I spent the day with
a Brazilian from Gopouva named Elder Soares de Souza and then at night
I slept in the Gopouva apartment with Soares and two other Brazilians.
It was an interesting transfer, I can´t say I learned a whole lot
about missionary work from those guys but I did learn some Portuguese.
When I got back to Vila Galvão there was no electricity in our
apartment. Aparently the missionaries before us didn´t pay the
electricity bill for like 4 months and so they cut our
electricity...It was cut on Wednesday and has been out ever since
haha. The mission secretaries said they would pay it but either they
still haven´t paid it or it takes the electrecity company a few days
to get it turned back on. However, in the meantime we are really
making good use of that flashlight that I packed haha. It´s not too
bad though. Also we have been finding a lot of new people to teach
lately. There were two new men that showed up to church yesterday
that we had never taught before. We taught both of them for the first
time and we marked a date for baptism with both of them.
Investigators here in Vila Galvão are coming out of the woodwork.
This area has a reputation in the mission as being really difficult
because none of the Elders here baptized for over 4.5 months. I think
it was because they were all huge slackers. But now we are working a
lot harder and are starting to have success. It is really exciting to
be here in this area right now because after having a lot of slackers
here in the past the members never passed any references. But now
that the members see that Elder Bangerter and I are working hard they
are all willing to give us references of friends and family.
The three families that we are teaching are doing alright.
Unfortunately one of them is kind of slipping aways from us. They
don´t really want to go to church on sunday or keep their commitments.
Also the daughter takes the things that we teach her and goes and
talks to pastors about it. Then when we come back she kind of tries
to argue with us about it. We are going to give them one more week
before we cut them though. But the other two families are progressing
so hopefully we can continue to work with them.