Teaching

Great to hear from you!  This week I taught Gospel Principals for the first time in Portuguese. It went well. My vocabulary is limited but I think I did an alright job. My companion and the other companionship that were in the class helped me with explaining some things. So we had our first baptism on Saturday! He was baptized by a friend of his that is in our ward. The next day I performed the confirmation and I was able to do so confidently and with a decent accent. The Lord is blessing me so much in the language and everything else. My companion and other Brazilian Elders are a big help with the language.
So much has happened this week. So we started teaching a family last week that I felt good about but now I feel amazing about them and feel really strongly that this family of four will be baptized as well as understand the full importance of things. There´s even potential that a few relatives of theirs could be baptized as well. Then there´s the family of Alan and Leila, they have four little girls and two of the girls are 8 and 9 years old. They will be baptized together as a family (They're already super active in the church) but they need to be married first. We paid for their license for marriage and it just needs to come in the mail. I´ll probably be transferred out of here before the ceremony that will be held in the chapel and before the baptism. Towards the beginning of my time in the field, my companion and I found someone named Ondina and she´s such a terrific person. We taught her the lessons and prepared her for baptism and then she moved just in to the neighboring area so she was baptized in to the other ward by other elders. Well now she moved back in to our area and ward. Heh, go figure.
People here are very straight with you and they are very spiritually hungry. I haven´t met an atheist yet. I love these people so much. I´m becoming a better missionary, teaching better and I´m trying to temper myself in patience and humility.
Oh, the other day we taught a 92! year old man and his 75 year old wife. They were both really with it and for ninety two he could really move. He had the biggest bombasha (pants that some of the southern Brazilians wear) that I´ve ever seen. They accepted baptism but they have the Divine problem of Brazil - that´s right - they aren´t really married. So we´ll see how everything works out.
This week a strange man came up to me, my companion and the other companionship that we live with. He ranted in Portuguese something about us not being able to enter japan then he tried his best English to say "WE NO WANT YOU" we laughed it off but it was just kind of ...interesting. We also contacted a young man who said he dreamed about the end of the world. We said something to the affect of "how special" then gave him a contact card.

The majority of these pictures are the property of a family in the ward. We have a picture with the family. The boy's 19, getting ready for a mission and his dad is 88. Go figure. The shorter Brazilian is my companion, Elder Andrade. The taller one lives in our apartment with his American companion, (the guy with blondish hair) Elder Anderson. There´s a couple pictures in front of the Chapel here in Ijui. There´s a picture of one of our members who takes pride in wearing the ...uhh native clothing around here. He´s a lot of fun and a very spiritual guy as well. There´s a few pictures from baptisms of the other elders and ... then there are just cows that some family has. I don´t think these cows are the kinds that anyone eats or milks around here. 
Love you.  Elder Hanson