Watch out for the fox!

Eia Tche. (This is bagual (Brazilian Redneck) for Hey Man.) Crazy week. So a lot of things have fallen through. Yesterday we had a baptism for a woman named Ondina who I taught with my companion. While we were teaching her, she moved to just out of our area and in to the area of a nearby set of missionaries. They baptized her but my companion and I should get some credit ha.  Also found a perfect family and started teaching them. And of course they just happened to be moving to just in to that set of missionaries territory. We´ve had a lot of people saying without acting and a lot of hard times. This is the hardest area my companion has been in. He had baptisms before in his other areas but here there hasn´t been a baptism for anyone in nearly a year. Well...before our new district got here. All the missionaries in my district have been having a lot of success here. But I started in one of the harder areas. So after all this ... the dust is settling and we have a baptism coming (!!!!) up for Guilermi, a fourteen year old boy. Hopefully his mom follows soon! Also a boy named Vini needs to come to church more but he´s actually had excuses for missing and hangs out with the church kids. He´s getting baptized soon. Hoping his father also gets baptised. 

This week was crazy. The lightning here is crazy. It can be mid day, barely raining at all, and the lightning will quickly flash and light up the whole sky. It´s beautiful and happens very frequently. We practically have to drop the one woman who won´t re baptize. She´s really hitting some walls. She still goes to her church along with ours and claims she knows that ours is true but if she knew that then she wouldn´t agree with this other church. It´s one of those "gift of tongues" churches. She also can´t pray without a veil. Her pastor had a revelation for her about it. He also very commonly has revelations in Japanese she says... and she has no ... suspicions about this...go figure. 

This week we had lunch with an older couple who are members. As the meal was being prepared, in walked a middle aged man (I think he was their son). They had a fox in their crawl space between the roof and the ceiling. So I saw him walk in to their bedroom then the old man walked in with trash bags, then the old woman came through the house dragging a large wooden club! She took it in to the bedroom and then we heard the middle aged man climbing around in the ceiling. We heard many thuds as he whacked all over the ceiling that was above our heads. We then heard him dragging the club around to sort of finish off the fox. Then I think I heard the fox´s bones break! The fox must have been sick because he was just killed but smelled long dead. After lunch we were given a dessert. They call desserts a "sobre mesa" meaning "over the table". I think that´s clever. So this nice old lady obeys the word of wisdom but apparently didn´t know she couldn´t flavor the cold dessert by dumping wine on it... so before we figured it out I had two hefty helpings. I lived and of course I didn´t know. Talked it over with the leaders. It´s okay ha. 

So the other set of Elders who live in our apartment with us made a contact the other day. The man said that he had been paying tithes to Heavenly Father all of his life but that he never saved him. He then said "I have a story you´ll never believe"... He was right about that. He said that he was in his living room reading the bible and someone mysteriously walked by and threw a bomb in to the room. Then, just as all hope was lost and the explosion was going to start... John the Beloved appeared in a column of fire and saved him...WHAT!? The elders then asked who he thought would have sent John to save him. To this he replied: "Well... I think it was ...probably God." Then they asked if he was baptized and studied the bible. To this he replied that he had been baptized catholic and emphatically stated he had studied the bible very well for seven years! He was asked if he knew anything about the baptism of Jesus Christ, to which he said "no." Silly rabbit. 

So please correct my spelling and grammer. I´m in a hurry. I also am losing the ability to spell in English. I´m nowhere near where I want to be with Portuguese but it´s so much easier to spell in. I´m trying to think in Portuguese as much as I can. The language is really doing better this week. So I´m sending more pictures. As for the pictures from last week, the older guys with different tags are institute instructors. The group photos are people from my CTM district and all the other elders  and sisters are missionaries who I became good friends with. There´s a picture of me with the CTM president and his wife. I´m sitting in the middle. My companion from the CTM is Elder Hollandsworth. the guy who looks like clark kent, not the Elder who looks like James Franco. Then there´s a couple pictures of me with my new companion. He´s the skinny guy with a couple pictures of us together at the house of the mission president.

Ooops. Can´t send pictures this week. There´s next week then.