email 10/27/08

Email received October 27, 2008
2nd area: Cidade verde
2nd Companion: Elder Firmo

hello everyone,

congrats to my man eric j. udall on the call to korea. that is awesome. in other international news, i hope everyone has a great halloween this week! speaking of halloween, i hung up the decorations that mom sent in our apartment but they all melted to the wall. yes, its that hot here-they literally melted into the wall and now our apartment is polka-dotted with globs of goo.

if the picture is not self-explanatory, we received a WASHING MACHINE this week!!!!!! it was the happiest day ever. they are putting them in some houses in the mission now. we didnt get a dryer and its not nearly the quality of an american machine but still its way better than washing all your clothes by hand. transfers are in a couple weeks so i am gonna enjoy it til then and i will probably get transferred to a place that doesn't have one. can you believe it? you put your clothes in the machine and push a few buttons and it washes your clothes FOR you! amazing, isnt it?

so we have been blessed with a ton of new people in our teaching group this week. i don't have time to talk about all of them but some of the ones closest to baptism include a woman Aparecida, and her daughter, that hopefully we can baptize sunday, and we are trying to find out the deal with the dad to see if we can teach him too. i had high hopes for gabriel and mariah but they didnt come to church yesterday. which is too bad cuz i am pretty sure they both have testimonies. a lot of people need to learn that faith without works is DEAD. but we did have investigators at church yesterday and also we are teaching a man paulo and his wife, i wanna list all the people but theres no time so we will see who we can progress with this week.

heres a little something that happened friday night.... so for finding people we usually don't do too much knocking on doors, (actually here its clapping doors) but we live in an apartment building so friday night we decided to start at the top floor and get every door and work our way down. so we started the first few floors and got some good, bad, and rejection (the usual). then we reached this one door and this lady came out and we started talking to her and it was probably the creepiest old lady of all time. i could have sworn she was practicing witch craft or something i dont know but anyway she started kissing our hands and stroking our arms and stuff and it was so weird but there were tears in my eyes cuz i was laughing so hard and trying to hold it in, my comp was doing the same. but then it just started to get creepy cuz she was like, "this american boy has the most beautiful eyes i have ever seen" and "i am so attracted to this boy" and all this weird crap. so i was like "lets go." she followed us for a while hitting on me and doing weird things until we finally got away from her. but then, a little while later that night, we were sitting at the bottom of the building on a bench next to the pay phone cuz we were waiting for a call then i heard "there he is!"..... yeah she found me. she came and sat down by me on the bench and kept saying stuff like "this boy has the prettiest eyes" and "i am gonna marry this american" and started like making out with my hand. so thats when i was like "i am getting out of here!" and i got up and started to run away and my companion was just laughing and laughing (but i didnt think it was too funny). we finally escaped again but i had trouble sleeping that night fearing she was gonna find me.

anyway i am excited cuz we are gonna work really hard and teach a ton this week and hopefully i can report next week on some of the beautiful fruits of our labors.

-elder sherwood