Querida Família,
Estou com saudades de vocês e a comida americana e alemã, mas vou comê-la logo. Aleluia senhor! Jenny has finally gotten her paws on a new car! Sweetness. Honda Civics are the way to go. I´ll have to buy a red one once I´m rich so that we can all combine together to make a patriotic haze of Honda Civics on the freeway! That´ll be the day. Best of luck to ClayEva on the car hunt. And thank you so much for feeding the sister missionaries! They need the food. Give them the leftovers and take them to wherever they need to go.
This has been yet another stressful week in the mission field. Gah! Do you guys remember Marcellus who came to Stake Conference with us? We have been teaching him all week and it´s been off the walls. First, we had to get the confidence of his parents. We came and taught with a deacon in the ward, came and did a family night with brownies, and many other things. But, the other side also did some crazy work. First off, we came to teach him and a lady from Marcellus´ mom´s church was there and stayed to hear our message. BUT, she started arguing about everything and we showed her scriptures in the Bible to back up what we said (but it wasn´t a Bible bash), and she insisted on flouting off her false doctrine. She left some scriptures for them to read in the Bible to show that we were servants of Satan (scriptures that have NOTHING to do with us, nor do they even apply to missionaries) and that the Book of Mormon was teaching a different gospel than the one that Christ taught. Agh! Then, the pastor said some not-so-nice things and we had to go and fix everything up. It was all good and the mom liked us (because we starting teaching her alcoholic son as well), and then the dad got mad because we had been teaching them every day. On Saturday, we took Marcellus to mutual at the Church and he said that he didn´t want to get baptized on Sunday. We shared a message with him and in the end he was wanting to get baptized the following day. That night, we taught the alcoholic brother again, and chatted with the mom and she said that Marcellus was the one who would decide and that she supported him. And on Sunday morning? Nobody´s home, not even the alcoholic. And nobody accepts our phone calls anymore. Ai ai ai. Then, nobody else came to Church that we had planned to take. There was a crazy lady that came to Church again, but she´s from another Church and another guy came, but has to do some more preparation before getting baptized.
The good news though is that the ward is awesome and gigantic! There were 190 people at Church, and they had to tell everyone that only the people on the stand would be able to bear testimonies because there were so many! I felt like I was at home, hahahaha. Everyone is so excited and happy to be a member of the Church! We´re working a lot with the members and teaching their friends and families, and soon enough we´ll get some results. But, basically that was our week: Running around trying to get Marcellus´ baptism to happen, but it wasn´t meant to be. But, we´ve got some good new ideas from the Mission Leader and we´re doing family nights with the members and having them invite their friends.
My companion Elder Stipanich is super funny as always. When I talked with him on the phone (since we were on a division) I thought that I was talking to a little kid. Campo Grande is the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul, and the 2nd most tree populated capital in Brazil. There are lots of trees here and even parrots flying around some times. My area has a few hills, which I´ve rarely seen during my mission, and everyone is really nice here. Wherever you go, people will be drinking tereré, which is the cup full of erva (which looks like lawn clippings) and you put ice cold water in and drink it. It´s amazing.
About the Paraguay trip! We went to this giant store in Paraguay and everything there was much cheaper and in guarani (which is the monetary system in Paraguay). 2000 guarani = 1 real = 0.60 dollar. Cheap cheap! The Shopping China was gigantic, too. Imagine an IKEA full of imported things from the U.S. and lots of people. It was sweet, but everything was pretty expensive. I bought some Pilot G-2 pens for $2 a piece. We ate at Burger King, too, but to be honest, I didn´t think that it was very good. I realized that I´m used to eating a lot more meat than back at home. Paraguay was pretty cool though. We hardly didn´t have time to do anything there, but we walked around a bit and I ate a churro! Everything´s a bit dirtier there and there are no traffic laws so everyone rides motorcycles without helmets and it´s kind of chaotic. And spanish is really fun to listen to, but a bit difficult to understand. I hope that I get to pass in Ponta Porã, because I need to learn Spanish.
This email has turned gigantic, so I´ll have to close it off. Love you family! Have an amazing Labor Day (even though you won´t pick apples). You are the best. Good luck with the Stake divisions (get the Kleenex ready).
-Elder Capeta
Brazilian Fact: Brazilians love Honda Civics just as much as our family! Although the most common type of car are the Gol and Fiat.
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