June 18, 2012

My favorite memory of Sobral? One P-day after Sister Sena arrived we went to a members house in the ward Sorbral 1 and we spent the day making cake and all the Brazilians trying to teach the Americans how to samba.  Wow, it was hard, but we had a lot of fun.  The thing that I liked best was a member named Gleiciane.  She is basically the sweetest person in the world.  She always helped us with anything we needed and was a great friend to the sisters in general.  The thing I liked least was that the members in general never wanted to help us.  That was hard.

Wow, São Luís is AWESOME!!  I never want to leave! The ward here is great; Everyone loves the sisters and wants to help us.  We have already received lots of references and members are always ready and willing to go with us to investigators houses.  This is a very good thing because it is hard opening an area!  Especially when you don’t have a map.  Yup, we don’t have a map.  Every store that looks like they might sell maps we go in and look.  When they don’t have any, we ask where we could find them.  I really don’t think that São Luís has any at all.

Before us this area had elders.  A ton of members have already complained about what slackers they were.  Our neighbors have complained too.  They didn’t leave us a whole lot of investigators.  When we first arrived in our new house it was so gross.  We spent almost 3 days cleaning.  One the 2nd day we cleaned so much that we ran out of water.  That kind of stunk.  We had to take showers with buckets of water.  Haha.  What an adventure.  We have a huge water tank in our house that we use to haul water to the washing machine to wash our clothes. This is the water we used for our showers.  One thing that is especially cool about this area is that we have Guarana Jesus.  It is a special kind of Guarana that they only have in Maranhão.  It is pink and basically tastes like liquid bubble gum.  It sounds gross but it is so good!!  You can only have this type of guarana here because they don’t sell it anywhere else in the whole world! 

We have only met a couple of our investigators.  One of them is the girlfriend of a member.  Her name is Eleniza.  We visited her for the first time yesterday and taught the first lesson.  It was like giving a kid candy.  She was so eager to learn.  Unfortunately she is only home on Sundays so we have to wait a whole week until we can visit her again.  Anyway, I am loving São Luís (not San Luís)! So far it is basically a missionary’s heaven.  I hope everything is going well for everyone back in the US.  Love you