Really short week. In the beginning, we helped our branch president, President Macedo, move houses which ended up draining 2 days of our work week. A part of me never liked helping people move houses because I´m a thin guy who doesn´t have a lot of muscle and it makes it hard lifting heavy things like beds, refridgerators, and the like. and usually when I try and help, i´m more in the way than helping. But it was nice to help out. Our branch is so small that only us 4, President Macedo, and one guy from the ward were able to help and President only had 1 truck. It kind of frustrated Elder Laurindo that we had to spend 2 entire days helping him move, but I told him that there´s nobody else in the area to help out and he´s the only real strong priesthood holder in the area with a family, so we decided it was better than leaving him alone to go teach our investigators. It´s still disappointing to have to pass your weekly results to your district leader when a chunk of your week was spent not teaching, but hopefully we gained some more confidence from our branch president and maybe the work will accelerate a bit faster now.
This week, we´ll also be moving from our house where we´re currently located to the second story of where President Macedo now lives, which is a house much nicer and has a bit of a nice view. Unfortunately, we´ll have to do a bit more walking from the new house to our area of work, but it´ll be better and a lot safer where we are now.
Overall, the work is going fine. Our teaching group is small and not too strong, but Elder Laurindo and I are starting to find more and more people to teach. We usually start our day leaving from lunch to start talking with people on the streets and knocking doors in the blistering heat. Words can´t express the heat out here like I´ve said in the past. Right now, us 4 are once again in Feira de Santana because a local leader of the church, Elder Mazzagardi, is going to do a ´´mission tour´´ of sorts and we asked permission to spend our pday in Feira and once we got here, it was crazy how noticably different the climate is, being a bit cooler and lots of cloud coverage. The heat is really discouraging at times and it´s always the cause for praying that we can make another day of working, but it´s never completely stopped us and we´ve always pushed through hahaha. Barreiras is really dusty too. It´s almost no use in polishing up your shoes because the dirt here is finer than powder and it gets kicked up EVERYWHERE. The lunches are a bit different here as well. In my other areas, I was used to having a monthly schedule with a different name each month but now it´s a weekly schedule with the same people each week. Our favorite is on Friday with a sister in the branch called ´´Joanita´´ who´s our ´´mom´´ of the branch. She´s a sweet older lady who sells what´s called ´´laranjinha´´, which are little plastic bags of frozen juice that she sells for 50 cents. Basically a popsicle that we always end up buying 2-3 each time we have lunch there.
I suppose the best part of our week was when Elder Laurindo and I went to visit an older couple named ´´Pedro´´ and ´´Ana´´ who live in very modest living conditions and don´t know how to read very well. It was Elder Laurindo´s idea to buy Pedro a cake and some soda pop to surprise him the day after his birthday (because we were helping the move). He was pretty happy about it, normally being a very shy quiet guy and when we left, we asked him to say the prayer. He´s normally very reluctant about that as well, but we finally coaxed him to do it and he did. He thanked God for his friends remembering him and asked God to give him more faith, because he feels like he doesn´t have much faith in his life. It was a pretty neat experience.
All in all, I´m feeling pretty good about things. I still have a bad tendency about beating myself up for feeling like I could´ve worked harder. Like we could´ve talked with more people on the street, taught more lessons, left houses a litle earlier to find more people and such. every once in a while but experiences like helping Pedro and Ana make me feel better. Mission work is hard because you always feel like there´s more you could´ve done and sometimes I feel like we have letbacks and failures due to me not working harder. It´s just a natural tendency of mine but Elder Barroso, the other guy in our house who´s getting ready to return home, has helped me out a bunch with dealing with feelings of being inadequit (adequiet? I forget how it´s spelled).
Life´s good however! :) I´m starting to get scared with how fast the mission is going by. For real. I get so scared of coming home and looking back on my mission and realizing that there was so much more I could´ve done and I often forget the great things that I was able to do. What I need to do now is learn how to channel those feelings to motivate me to be a better servant of the Lord.
Thanks for reading, family and friends. Hope you guys all have a great week! (I will have all the photos from then until now next week. Today I don´t have my USB converter!)
-Elder Skinner
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