Tancredo Neves

Well, it´s been different. I´m serving in Tancredo Neves. (I´d misspelled the name of the town before) it´s part of Santa Maria or next to it and is part of the Santa Maria stake.   Everything is really developed here. Not everybody has a car here but there are always cars and motorcycles passing by and practically all the streets are asphalt. The houses are still all made of brick but a lot of them are a lot more high-end. They are still small but usually nicer than in the other areas I´ve served in and all the streets and things are cleaner. Today I went to the downtown area of Santa Maria. WOW. There´s a lot of stuff! It looks kind of like Seattle (of course it´s not as big). There was a lot of tall buildings and all kinds of stores and parks and things. It´s definitely the most developed part of my mission that I´ve seen so far. 

My companion is a nice cool guy. Our area really isn´t that big. Here in Santa Maria there´s seven wards and they will be building more chapels and things. Our ward shares a chapel with two other wards. The Chapel takes about a half hour to get to on foot (and a lot of people don´t have cars). They are going to build a chapel closer to us sometime. This is definitely the hardest area in terms of knocking doors. First day that I knocked doors here we knocked a hundred doors and two people let us in and three sort of let us leave a prayer at their front steps. The good news is that because of the work that was being done before I got transferred here, We already have a family (a mom and two girls), as well as a fifteen year old boy, and the girlfriend of a member on the horizon to be baptized. We´re working hard to knock doors to fill our time and we´re praying for results. We´re working with our ward to give us references and put a whole bunch of planning and effort in to missionary work. 

So we´re really working to make sure these baptisms work out and we need to get those references flowing so that by next month after baptisms we don´t end up out of luck for a long time. The sun is getting to a point where I feel like an ant under a magnifying glass. There´s all the organizations in our ward (it´s not that big of a ward).  It has primary teachers, youth and everything. There´s of course a lot of in-actives because of gossip or something. Lots of families who love the missionaries but won´t show up at Church.

I received a couple packages that you sent and I also got a few letters. My companion has the last name Santana but doesn´t play the guitar. He is, however, a relative to one of the early Brazilian converts who was featured in the recent Liahona. I know that in the Liahona here they take all the general stuff and then put specialized articles based on the country so it may not be a featured article in English. It´s cool because they started doing area authority messages that are especially for Brazilian in the Liahona as well.

Our apartment is an absolute pit. Thank goodness I´m out doing things most of the day.

Pray for me please. I know the Church is true and I will help the Lord bring to pass His work and His glory. Love you all. Good luck this week.