Happy New Years!!!

Dear Family,

It was great to be able to talk on skype this week.  Christmas was awesome!!  I don´t have a ton of time to write, but this past week was awesome.  Here in Brazil Christmas is celebrated mostly on Christmas Eve.  It is on the 24th that they open presents and it is tradition to have a really big meal on the night of the 24th.  We were invited to a members house so we participated in the meal there.  We also had a fun gift exchange.  The gift exchange that we did was a little bit different.  A couple days beforehand, each of us drew the name of a person and then we were responsible for buying a gift that this person would never want and then giving it to them.  It was called ´´secret enemy´´.  It was SUPER funny.  Then on wednesday we went to the bishop´s house and called home on skype.  It was great to be able to talk to the family again and I am grateful for the great family I have and for all of the support that they give me.  I hope that you are all well and thank you very much for the emails and suport.  I will include a part of my letter to President here about the week.

This weeks was truly one of the best weeks of my mission because this last week I saw one of the biggest miracles that has happened so far on my mission. This miracle was that this past week 15 people were baptized here in the zone Guaratinguetá!! For many people this number seems like an impossible number for this zone. In fact when I got here to the zone, I never thought that I would be able to see the zone baptize 15 in a week. However, through obedience, hard work, and a lot of help from the Lord we were able to have 15 QUALITY baptisms here in Guaratinguetá yesterday, finishing the month with 24 baptisms, 25% of the baptisms being men. I was talking to Elder Bangerter and he said that this month we, as a zone, baptized the most that this zone has baptized for at least a year and a half. This week was really a miracle and taught me a lot. 

 

Love,

Elder Caleb Anderson