9/12/11 Letter

Famílio,

 

Change is always good!! WOW! Sounds like quite the craziness is going on back at home. Mesa South Stake will never die! Sounds really exciting though! It´ll be good to have some new people to get to know. That just made my day. I´m sure that the new change will be great!

Yeah, it was kind of sad remembering about the 9/11 attacks, but it´s good to know that the US is still going strong! Lots of people asked me if I was in the towers when they got attacked or if Arizona is in New York. Hahahaha. "Arizona is on the OTHER side of the country" I had to tell them. God bless the USA!

 

Things have been heating up here in Universitário! While it rained a few days last week (a MUCH needed rainfall because of all the dust in the air), we´ve been working like crazy. Our ward mission leader, Josimar, told us to expand our vision so that we could bring more people to Church, do family nights with the members and get references. That´s what we did! We are re-activating this family, and we marked a family night at another member´s house and they invited plenty of people! One of which is Irmã Demy´s 9 year-old nephew who has already been to Church many times. His mom wants him to keep coming to Church and we´ll be teaching him so that he can get baptized. Then, we´ve just found some elect people out of the blue and in all we brought 9 people to Church! Woo hoo. New record! Maria Celeste came with her son, Jair. She is really sweet and likes us a lot. I think that she has 7 kids that are all adults, and it´s apparent that they´ve had kind of a rough life. So, we´re helping them to keep the word of wisdom and such, so that they can get baptized.

 

While trying to find some ex-investigators, the address that we went to, turns out that nobody in the house has met the missionaries (I think the former missionaries wrote down the wrong address). The parents came to Church on Sunday and the dad is really liking it, because he apparently has never "stuck" with a religion. All of his daughters go to different Churches, one of which is dating a "pastor-to-be" from the Adventist church. He will give us some work. But Ivaldo and Ilza are elect because they gave us food!

 

Hmmm, we´ve also got some other people that we´re teaching that will hopefully keep interested. One of which is Dina, who has come to Church 3 times already, but insists on learning more and blah blah blah. We took her to a baptism last week, and she LOVED it. Now she needs to just get in the water and have her turn.

 

We had a meeting with President Oliveira this week, which was awesome. He is really enforcing that we be obedient missionaries that KEEP the rules and that we be instruments

in the hands of the Lord. Yes!

 

That´s it for now, folks. Don´t worry, be happy! Let me in on the new stake info! Send a picture of the stake and ward boundaries, if possible, because the names of the streets and whatnot doesn´t really help me out, since I´ve forgotten everything about Mesa. Thanks! Love ya lots.

 

Elder Carpenter

 

Brazilian Fact: Most Brazilians don´t like hot food! Hot sauce/ peppers = pimenta. Everyone tries to tell me that "Oh, that pimenta is really hot, be careful," but it turns out that it´s not really hot at all. Hopefully, I will be able to handle the Mexican hot sauce of Arizona!