Working Hard

Well, today we went to Artigas again. The district wanted to see what things were like there. It didn´t really catch anyone’s fancy but we took some pictures of things. We also took pictures of the Chapel there. I´ll see if I get a chance to send the pictures this week (it takes forever to load things here).
So my companion is a Brazilian named Elder Willion. Nothing out of the ordinary.  He´s a real kick and a nice, nice guy.   He´s also pretty short.  He also does an outstanding impression of the Mission President which even the married couple missionaries found funny.  Our District leader is an American who´s got about a year and seven months in the field and he´s training a Brazilian. The new Elder is a funny guy. Tomorrow we have zone conference and I´m real excited. On the fourteenth of July we have Beatriz´s baptism. Beatriz is really progressing! She reads everything we give her as an assignment. Sometimes she even reads it twice then in the lessons she explains everything to us. She accepted the word of wisdom and seemed to really understand it. The one thing is that everything seems to make sense to her from a logical stand point because we explain things and she´s keeping her commitments. I just don´t know if she´s REALLY prayed to have an answer but she´s progressing more and more. 
Everything is going well.  We had six teen-aged boys in sacrament meeting. We´ll try and teach their families. Then it appears that the married couple have a baptism (person they´ve been teaching) next week.  So my language skills are getting pretty stellar. More and more people here in Quarai compliment me on my accent or confuse me with a Brazilian. It´s really a blessing from Heavenly Father. The gift of tongues is real.
So I´ve had the chance to go and do a lot of visits with the missionary couple and with some of the leaders here in the district. The second councilor to the district president has a car and once aweek we go out and are able to teach a lot of lessons (these are mostly to in-actives) it´s inspiring because even though the number of in-active members here is startling and most of the active members don´t do home teaching, he goes out with a smile and always visits the most people possible.  I also found out that one of the well loved members from here in Quarai is serving as mission President in Rio.There´s a guy who owns a really awesome restaurant that really likes the missionaries. We keep trying to teach him. We´ll see what happens! So there was a newspaper article that said how Quarai´s entire population is 3.7% Mormon.  That´s a lot of members.  Now there´s one strong branch of ninety and the two weaker ones (which both have forty) that my companion and I are serving in. There´s alot of in-actives but the truth is, that a lot of the members just went to other places. There was a guy who got baptized here then moved away and then he released a song that´s pretty dang famous here (They even play it in the background of soap operas). It´s a one hit wonder though. The majority of the of the mayors (the current and the former) are in-active members.  I´ll try and send home a map that has all the LDS named streets. Zion street is where we have one of the chapels.  It´s hard because so many good people accept the visits of the missionaries but run in to a wall when they try and come back to the Church because they are embarrassed or some silly little thing like that.  We´re learning to just be patient and follow the spirit. We´re managing to reactivate some people and things are going well.
Love, Elder Hanson