Elder Brad in Brazil

since there was no picture attached this week, here's a blast from the past

Email received Decmber 8, 2008

2nd area: Cidade verde

3rd companion: Elder Gimenez



christmas time.....



i would first like to thank everyone for the letters and things i finally received this week, especially the sherwood family for the december package. amidst some hard times it really did make me very happy to open it and see the stuff and decorations the kids and everyone made. they are hanging in our house and i am excited to start the 12 days of christmas thing. speaking of christmas time i hope everyone at home has 99.9 set as their number 1 preset in the car. good times.



so i hate to say it but this week was pretty much just an exact repeat of last week. work real hard all week, have a ton of people promise to go to church and sunday morning comes and it´s always something. one big thing is cuz we´re on the coast, so the thing to do here is EVERYONE goes to the beach on sunday. so thats where most the people are, and even our investigators who i can tell are sincere and have a real desire to go to church, something always comes up. its hard but we are actually staying really positive and we are gonna have a better week, although we are gonna be cutting a lot of people out and just find a ton of new ones this week.



today was really awesome, it went down like this: so we had to get up really really early (at last minutes notice) to travel to a chapel in another city to have interviews with presidente this morning, and afterwards me and elder gimenez invited our whole zone over to our house to have a huge BBQ. so we got there and started preparing everything and it turns out presidente decided to come, and invited the entire other zone that was there at the interviews, and pres and the sister and their kids went and bought a TON of meat and showed up with it, seriously probably 200 reais worth of meat. so we had an enormous BBQ at our house with everyone and the food was amazing and it was a lot of fun. the only thing is since it was our house now we got a bunch of stuff left to clean at home.



also the mission financial secretary called us a few days ago and told us the cost of our apartment went up so we need to find a new house. so we are gonna be searching all around town the next few days for a cheap apartment to move into but i think we will be able to let it slide, cuz i really think and hope that pres will shut this area down either next transfer or the one after. cuz today he was talking with me a lot about how he knows this area is horrible and he hates the area. so we´ll see what happens.



we have a lot of people in our teaching group right now but the one i think we will have the most success with this week is a man named Sól, he is a very serious and intelligent man who is really interested in the church, but he is a very non-spiritually minded man, aka he has trouble accepting that the lord can answer your prayers thru the holy ghost, which is key to conversion so we will have to help him out a lot. i dont know i just wanna create a whole new group this week and go from there. the good news is that walking down the street here there are a ton of different types of trees growing different wild tropical fruits and we try a lot and there are many i have never tried and i am loving. that and coconut is everywhere, also mango. (not chris kattan)



até próxima segunda feira então

-elder sherwood